Relative Energy Learning for LiDAR Out-of-Distribution Detection

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Li, Zizhao, Xiang, Zhengkang, Ao, Jiayang, West, Joseph, Khoshelham, Kourosh
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Li, Zizhao
Xiang, Zhengkang
Ao, Jiayang
West, Joseph
Khoshelham, Kourosh
author_facet Li, Zizhao
Xiang, Zhengkang
Ao, Jiayang
West, Joseph
Khoshelham, Kourosh
contents Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is a critical requirement for reliable autonomous driving, where safety depends on recognizing road obstacles and unexpected objects beyond the training distribution. Despite extensive research on OOD detection in 2D images, direct transfer to 3D LiDAR point clouds has been proven ineffective. Current LiDAR OOD methods struggle to distinguish rare anomalies from common classes, leading to high false-positive rates and overconfident errors in safety-critical settings. We propose Relative Energy Learning (REL), a simple yet effective framework for OOD detection in LiDAR point clouds. REL leverages the energy gap between positive (in-distribution) and negative logits as a relative scoring function, mitigating calibration issues in raw energy values and improving robustness across various scenes. To address the absence of OOD samples during training, we propose a lightweight data synthesis strategy called Point Raise, which perturbs existing point clouds to generate auxiliary anomalies without altering the inlier semantics. Evaluated on SemanticKITTI and the Spotting the Unexpected (STU) benchmark, REL consistently outperforms existing methods by a large margin. Our results highlight that modeling relative energy, combined with simple synthetic outliers, provides a principled and scalable solution for reliable OOD detection in open-world autonomous driving.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_06720
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Relative Energy Learning for LiDAR Out-of-Distribution Detection
Li, Zizhao
Xiang, Zhengkang
Ao, Jiayang
West, Joseph
Khoshelham, Kourosh
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is a critical requirement for reliable autonomous driving, where safety depends on recognizing road obstacles and unexpected objects beyond the training distribution. Despite extensive research on OOD detection in 2D images, direct transfer to 3D LiDAR point clouds has been proven ineffective. Current LiDAR OOD methods struggle to distinguish rare anomalies from common classes, leading to high false-positive rates and overconfident errors in safety-critical settings. We propose Relative Energy Learning (REL), a simple yet effective framework for OOD detection in LiDAR point clouds. REL leverages the energy gap between positive (in-distribution) and negative logits as a relative scoring function, mitigating calibration issues in raw energy values and improving robustness across various scenes. To address the absence of OOD samples during training, we propose a lightweight data synthesis strategy called Point Raise, which perturbs existing point clouds to generate auxiliary anomalies without altering the inlier semantics. Evaluated on SemanticKITTI and the Spotting the Unexpected (STU) benchmark, REL consistently outperforms existing methods by a large margin. Our results highlight that modeling relative energy, combined with simple synthetic outliers, provides a principled and scalable solution for reliable OOD detection in open-world autonomous driving.
title Relative Energy Learning for LiDAR Out-of-Distribution Detection
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.06720