# WILD SAM: A Simulated-and-Real Data Augmentation for Autonomous Driving Perception under Challenging Weather

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01081 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01081/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.06576/) (2015)
- [Domain Adaptive Faster R-CNN for Object Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03243/) (2018)
- [Voxel R-CNN: Towards High Performance Voxel-based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15712/) (2020)
- [PV-RCNN++: Point-Voxel Feature Set Abstraction With Local Vector Representation for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00463/) (2021)
- [ST3D: Self-training for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation on 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05346/) (2021)
- [Train in Germany, Test in The USA: Making 3D Object Detectors Generalize](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08139/) (2020)
- [Fog Simulation on Real LiDAR Point Clouds for 3D Object Detection in Adverse Weather](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05249/) (2021)
- [LiDAR Snowfall Simulation for Robust 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15118/) (2022)
- [ST3D++: Denoised Self-training for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation on 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06682/) (2021)
- [Lidar Light Scattering Augmentation (LISA): Physics-based Simulation of Adverse Weather Conditions for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07004/) (2021)
- [L4DR: LiDAR-4DRadar Fusion for Weather-Robust 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03677/) (2024)
- [Density-Insensitive Unsupervised Domain Adaption on 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09446/) (2023)
- [Integrated Multiscale Domain Adaptive YOLO](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03527/) (2022)
- [Robust 3D Object Detection in Cold Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11925/) (2022)
- [DALI: Domain Adaptive LiDAR Object Detection via Distribution-level and Instance-level Pseudo Label Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08806/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The performance of state-of-the-art object detectors degrades significantly under adverse weather, causing a safety-critical domain shift problem for autonomous vehicles. Recent efforts address this problem by relying on synthetic data to train the object detectors, which limits their real-world applicability. Meanwhile, pseudo-labeling is widely used for cross-dataset domain adaptation problems. However, these methods have not been exploited by weather-based domain adaptation approaches due to the noisy nature of such labels generated under harsh weather conditions. In this paper, we propose two new approaches to mitigate this weather-induced domain shift. First, we propose a Weather-Induced pseudo Label Denoising (WILD) framework that filters noisy pseudo labels generated by real data captured under adverse weather conditions. Second, we develop a novel hybrid training methodology, WILD SAM, that exploits both pseudo-label denoising and simulation-based training solutions while using real-data from the target harsh-weather domain. We validate both proposed approaches, WILD and WILD SAM, on the recently released Four Seasons dataset across rainy and snowy scenarios. Experiments show that the proposed frameworks improve Average Precision (AP) up to 13% and significantly reduce the weather-induced performance gap relative to the baseline. The code is available at: https://github.com/Kh-Hamed/WILD-SAM
