UniFlow: Zero-Shot LiDAR Scene Flow for Autonomous Vehicles

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Li, Siyi, Zhang, Qingwen, Khatri, Ishan, Vedder, Kyle, Eaton, Eric, Ramanan, Deva, Peri, Neehar
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Li, Siyi
Zhang, Qingwen
Khatri, Ishan
Vedder, Kyle
Eaton, Eric
Ramanan, Deva
Peri, Neehar
author_facet Li, Siyi
Zhang, Qingwen
Khatri, Ishan
Vedder, Kyle
Eaton, Eric
Ramanan, Deva
Peri, Neehar
contents LiDAR scene flow is the task of estimating per-point 3D motion between consecutive point clouds. Recent methods achieve centimeter-level accuracy on popular autonomous vehicle (AV) datasets, but are typically only trained and evaluated on a single sensor. In this paper, we aim to learn general motion priors that transfer to diverse and unseen LiDAR sensors. However, prior work in LiDAR semantic segmentation and 3D object detection demonstrate that naively training on multiple datasets yields worse performance than single dataset models. Interestingly, we find that this conventional wisdom does not hold for motion estimation, and that state-of-the-art scene flow methods greatly benefit from cross-dataset training without architectural modification. We posit that low-level tasks such as motion estimation may be less sensitive to sensor configuration; indeed, our analysis shows that models trained on fast-moving objects (e.g., from highway datasets) perform well on fast-moving objects, even across different datasets. Informed by our analysis, we propose UniFlow, a feedforward model that unifies and trains on multiple large-scale LiDAR scene flow datasets with diverse sensor placements and point cloud densities. Our frustratingly simple solution establishes a new state-of-the-art on Waymo and nuScenes, improving over prior work by 5.1% and 35.2% respectively. Moreover, UniFlow achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on unseen datasets like TruckScenes and AEVAScenes, outperforming prior dataset-specific models by 30.1% and 22.5% respectively.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_18254
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle UniFlow: Zero-Shot LiDAR Scene Flow for Autonomous Vehicles
Li, Siyi
Zhang, Qingwen
Khatri, Ishan
Vedder, Kyle
Eaton, Eric
Ramanan, Deva
Peri, Neehar
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
LiDAR scene flow is the task of estimating per-point 3D motion between consecutive point clouds. Recent methods achieve centimeter-level accuracy on popular autonomous vehicle (AV) datasets, but are typically only trained and evaluated on a single sensor. In this paper, we aim to learn general motion priors that transfer to diverse and unseen LiDAR sensors. However, prior work in LiDAR semantic segmentation and 3D object detection demonstrate that naively training on multiple datasets yields worse performance than single dataset models. Interestingly, we find that this conventional wisdom does not hold for motion estimation, and that state-of-the-art scene flow methods greatly benefit from cross-dataset training without architectural modification. We posit that low-level tasks such as motion estimation may be less sensitive to sensor configuration; indeed, our analysis shows that models trained on fast-moving objects (e.g., from highway datasets) perform well on fast-moving objects, even across different datasets. Informed by our analysis, we propose UniFlow, a feedforward model that unifies and trains on multiple large-scale LiDAR scene flow datasets with diverse sensor placements and point cloud densities. Our frustratingly simple solution establishes a new state-of-the-art on Waymo and nuScenes, improving over prior work by 5.1% and 35.2% respectively. Moreover, UniFlow achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on unseen datasets like TruckScenes and AEVAScenes, outperforming prior dataset-specific models by 30.1% and 22.5% respectively.
title UniFlow: Zero-Shot LiDAR Scene Flow for Autonomous Vehicles
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18254