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Novel class discovery (NCD) for semantic segmentation is the task of learning a model that can segment unlabelled (novel) classes using only the supervision from labelled (base) classes. This problem has recently been pioneered for 2D image data, but no work exists for 3D point cloud data. In fact, the assumptions made for 2D are loosely applicable to 3D in this case. This paper is presented to advance the state of the art on point cloud data analysis in four directions. Firstly, we address the new problem of NCD for point cloud semantic segmentation. Secondly, we show that the transposition of the only existing NCD method for 2D semantic segmentation to 3D data is suboptimal. Thirdly, we present a new method for NCD based on online clustering that exploits uncertainty quantification to produce prototypes for pseudo-labelling the points of the novel classes. Lastly, we introduce a new evaluation protocol to assess the performance of NCD for point cloud semantic segmentation. We thoroughly evaluate our method on SemanticKITTI and SemanticPOSS datasets, showing that it can significantly outperform the baseline. Project page at this link: https://github.com/LuigiRiz/NOPS., Comment: Paper accepted at CVPR 2023

The ability to deploy robots that can operate safely in diverse environments is crucial for developing embodied intelligent agents. As a community, we have made tremendous progress in within-domain LiDAR semantic segmentation. However, do these methods generalize across domains? To answer this question, we design the first experimental setup for studying domain generalization (DG) for LiDAR semantic segmentation (DG-LSS). Our results confirm a significant gap between methods, evaluated in a cross-domain setting: for example, a model trained on the source dataset (SemanticKITTI) obtains $26.53$ mIoU on the target data, compared to $48.49$ mIoU obtained by the model trained on the target domain (nuScenes). To tackle this gap, we propose the first method specifically designed for DG-LSS, which obtains $34.88$ mIoU on the target domain, outperforming all baselines. Our method augments a sparse-convolutional encoder-decoder 3D segmentation network with an additional, dense 2D convolutional decoder that learns to classify a birds-eye view of the point cloud. This simple auxiliary task encourages the 3D network to learn features that are robust to sensor placement shifts and resolution, and are transferable across domains. With this work, we aim to inspire the community to develop and evaluate future models in such cross-domain conditions.

3D LiDAR semantic segmentation is fundamental for autonomous driving. Several Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) methods for point cloud data have been recently proposed to improve model generalization for different sensors and environments. Researchers working on UDA problems in the image domain have shown that sample mixing can mitigate domain shift. We propose a new approach of sample mixing for point cloud UDA, namely Compositional Semantic Mix (CoSMix), the first UDA approach for point cloud segmentation based on sample mixing. CoSMix consists of a two-branch symmetric network that can process labelled synthetic data (source) and real-world unlabelled point clouds (target) concurrently. Each branch operates on one domain by mixing selected pieces of data from the other one, and by using the semantic information derived from source labels and target pseudo-labels. We evaluate CoSMix on two large-scale datasets, showing that it outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. Our code is available at https://github.com/saltoricristiano/cosmix-uda., Comment: Accepted at ECCV 2022

Designing neural networks for object recognition requires considerable architecture engineering. As a remedy, neuro-evolutionary network architecture search, which automatically searches for optimal network architectures using evolutionary algorithms, has recently become very popular. Although very effective, evolutionary algorithms rely heavily on having a large population of individuals (i.e., network architectures) and is therefore memory expensive. In this work, we propose a Regularized Evolutionary Algorithm with low memory footprint to evolve a dynamic image classifier. In details, we introduce novel custom operators that regularize the evolutionary process of a micro-population of 10 individuals. We conduct experiments on three different digits datasets (MNIST, USPS, SVHN) and show that our evolutionary method obtains competitive results with the current state-of-the-art.