Adaptive Augmentation-Aware Latent Learning for Robust LiDAR Semantic Segmentation

TL;DR

This paper introduces A3Point, an adaptive latent learning framework that improves LiDAR semantic segmentation robustness under adverse weather by effectively utilizing diverse augmentations and mitigating semantic shifts.

Contribution

A3Point is a novel framework that leverages semantic confusion prior and semantic shift localization to adaptively optimize augmentation effects, enhancing robustness in LiDAR segmentation.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple benchmarks.

Effectively mitigates semantic shift caused by weather-related augmentations.

Demonstrates robustness improvements under adverse weather conditions.

Abstract

Adverse weather conditions significantly degrade the performance of LiDAR point cloud semantic segmentation networks by introducing large distribution shifts. Existing augmentation-based methods attempt to enhance robustness by simulating weather interference during training. However, they struggle to fully exploit the potential of augmentations due to the trade-off between minor and aggressive augmentations. To address this, we propose A3Point, an adaptive augmentation-aware latent learning framework that effectively utilizes a diverse range of augmentations while mitigating the semantic shift, which refers to the change in the semantic meaning caused by augmentations. A3Point consists of two key components: semantic confusion prior (SCP) latent learning, which captures the model's inherent semantic confusion information, and semantic shift region (SSR) localization, which decouples semantic confusion and semantic shift, enabling adaptive optimization strategies for different disturbance levels. Extensive experiments on multiple standard generalized LiDAR segmentation benchmarks under adverse weather demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, setting new state-of-the-art results.