While recent advancements in camera-based 3D object detection demonstrate remarkable performance, they require thousands or even millions of human-annotated frames. This requirement significantly inhibits their deployment in various locations and sensor configurations. To address this gap, we propose a performant semi-supervised framework that leverages unlabeled RGB-only driving sequences - data easily collected with cost-effective RGB cameras - to significantly improve temporal, camera-only 3D detectors. We observe that the standard semi-supervised pseudo-labeling paradigm underperforms in this temporal, camera-only setting due to poor 3D localization of pseudo-labels. To address this, we train a single 3D detector to handle RGB sequences both forward and backward in time, then ensemble both its forwards and backwards pseudo-labels for semi-supervised learning. We further improve the pseudo-label quality by leveraging 3D object tracking to infill missing detections and by eschewing simple confidence thresholding in favor of using the auxiliary 2D detection head to filter 3D predictions. Finally, to enable the backbone to learn directly from the unlabeled data itself, we introduce an object-query conditioned masked reconstruction objective. Our framework demonstrates remarkable performance improvement on large-scale autonomous driving datasets nuScenes and nuPlan.

Various methods for solving the inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problem have been developed independently in machine learning and economics. In particular, the method of Maximum Causal Entropy IRL is based on the perspective of entropy maximization, while related advances in the field of economics instead assume the existence of unobserved action shocks to explain expert behavior (Nested Fixed Point Algorithm, Conditional Choice Probability method, Nested Pseudo-Likelihood Algorithm). In this work, we make previously unknown connections between these related methods from both fields. We achieve this by showing that they all belong to a class of optimization problems, characterized by a common form of the objective, the associated policy and the objective gradient. We demonstrate key computational and algorithmic differences which arise between the methods due to an approximation of the optimal soft value function, and describe how this leads to more efficient algorithms. Using insights which emerge from our study of this class of optimization problems, we identify various problem scenarios and investigate each method's suitability for these problems.