DOS: Distilling Observable Softmaps of Zipfian Prototypes for Self-Supervised Point Representation

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Abdelsamad, Mohamed, Ulrich, Michael, Yang, Bin, Zhang, Miao, Miron, Yakov, Valada, Abhinav
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866914197489582080
author Abdelsamad, Mohamed
Ulrich, Michael
Yang, Bin
Zhang, Miao
Miron, Yakov
Valada, Abhinav
author_facet Abdelsamad, Mohamed
Ulrich, Michael
Yang, Bin
Zhang, Miao
Miron, Yakov
Valada, Abhinav
contents Recent advances in self-supervised learning (SSL) have shown tremendous potential for learning 3D point cloud representations without human annotations. However, SSL for 3D point clouds still faces critical challenges due to irregular geometry, shortcut-prone reconstruction, and unbalanced semantics distribution. In this work, we propose DOS (Distilling Observable Softmaps), a novel SSL framework that self-distills semantic relevance softmaps only at observable (unmasked) points. This strategy prevents information leakage from masked regions and provides richer supervision than discrete token-to-prototype assignments. To address the challenge of unbalanced semantics in an unsupervised setting, we introduce Zipfian prototypes and incorporate them using a modified Sinkhorn-Knopp algorithm, Zipf-Sinkhorn, which enforces a power-law prior over prototype usage and modulates the sharpness of the target softmap during training. DOS outperforms current state-of-the-art methods on semantic segmentation and 3D object detection across multiple benchmarks, including nuScenes, Waymo, SemanticKITTI, ScanNet, and ScanNet200, without relying on extra data or annotations. Our results demonstrate that observable-point softmaps distillation offers a scalable and effective paradigm for learning robust 3D representations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_11465
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DOS: Distilling Observable Softmaps of Zipfian Prototypes for Self-Supervised Point Representation
Abdelsamad, Mohamed
Ulrich, Michael
Yang, Bin
Zhang, Miao
Miron, Yakov
Valada, Abhinav
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Recent advances in self-supervised learning (SSL) have shown tremendous potential for learning 3D point cloud representations without human annotations. However, SSL for 3D point clouds still faces critical challenges due to irregular geometry, shortcut-prone reconstruction, and unbalanced semantics distribution. In this work, we propose DOS (Distilling Observable Softmaps), a novel SSL framework that self-distills semantic relevance softmaps only at observable (unmasked) points. This strategy prevents information leakage from masked regions and provides richer supervision than discrete token-to-prototype assignments. To address the challenge of unbalanced semantics in an unsupervised setting, we introduce Zipfian prototypes and incorporate them using a modified Sinkhorn-Knopp algorithm, Zipf-Sinkhorn, which enforces a power-law prior over prototype usage and modulates the sharpness of the target softmap during training. DOS outperforms current state-of-the-art methods on semantic segmentation and 3D object detection across multiple benchmarks, including nuScenes, Waymo, SemanticKITTI, ScanNet, and ScanNet200, without relying on extra data or annotations. Our results demonstrate that observable-point softmaps distillation offers a scalable and effective paradigm for learning robust 3D representations.
title DOS: Distilling Observable Softmaps of Zipfian Prototypes for Self-Supervised Point Representation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.11465