Unsupervised 3D object detection leverages heuristic algorithms to discover potential objects, offering a promising route to reduce annotation costs in autonomous driving. Existing approaches mainly generate pseudo labels and refine them through self-training iterations. However, these pseudo-labels are often incorrect at the beginning of training, resulting in misleading the optimization process. Moreover, effectively filtering and refining them remains a critical challenge. In this paper, we propose $\textbf{OWL}$ for unsupervised 3D object detection by occupancy guided warm-up and large-model priors reasoning. OWL first employs an Occupancy Guided Warm-up (OGW) strategy to initialize the backbone weight with spatial perception capabilities, mitigating the interference of incorrect pseudo-labels on network convergence. Furthermore, OWL introduces an Instance-Cued Reasoning (ICR) module that leverages the prior knowledge of large models to assess pseudo-label quality, enabling precise filtering and refinement. Finally, we design a WAS (Weight-adapted Self-training) strategy to dynamically re-weight pseudo-labels, improving the performance through self-training. Extensive experiments on Waymo Open Dataset (WOD) and KITTI demonstrate that OWL outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised methods by over 15.0\% mAP, revealing the effectiveness of our method.

Enhancing perception performance via multi-agent collaboration has gained increasing attention in the field of autonomous driving. However, as the number of agents grows, the manual annotation required for training collaborative detectors increases significantly. To tackle this problem, we introduce an unsupervised method that learns to Detect Objects from Multi-Agent LiDAR scans, named DOtA, without using labels from external. DOtA first generates preliminary labels by an initial detector, which is trained by internally shared information of collaborative agents. DOtA then optimizes these preliminary labels by utilizing the physical rule constraints derived from the surrounding area of the object. Building on DOtA, we further propose DOtA++, an enhanced version that improves performance by leveraging composite prior constraints. Beyond physical rule constraints, DOtA++ further uses image data as an auxiliary modality to introduce multi-agent observation consistency constraints, boosting object classification, while also incorporating point cloud geometric distribution constraints to improve structural description. Extensive experiments on widely-used benchmarks demonstrate that DOtA and DOtA++ effectively perceive potential objects in the scene without manual annotations. In particular, DOtA++ shows 10.7% mAP improvement over traditional unsupervised methods on V2X-R dataset.

Recently, Visual Foundation Models (VFMs) have shown a remarkable generalization performance in 3D perception tasks. However, their effectiveness in large-scale outdoor datasets remains constrained by the scarcity of accurate supervision signals, the extensive noise caused by variable outdoor conditions, and the abundance of unknown objects. In this work, we propose a novel label-free learning method, Adaptive Label Correction (AdaCo), for 3D semantic segmentation. AdaCo first introduces the Cross-modal Label Generation Module (CLGM), providing cross-modal supervision with the formidable interpretive capabilities of the VFMs. Subsequently, AdaCo incorporates the Adaptive Noise Corrector (ANC), updating and adjusting the noisy samples within this supervision iteratively during training. Moreover, we develop an Adaptive Robust Loss (ARL) function to modulate each sample's sensitivity to noisy supervision, preventing potential underfitting issues associated with robust loss. Our proposed AdaCo can effectively mitigate the performance limitations of label-free learning networks in 3D semantic segmentation tasks. Extensive experiments on two outdoor benchmark datasets highlight the superior performance of our method.

Recently, sparsely-supervised 3D object detection has gained great attention, achieving performance close to fully-supervised 3D detectors while requiring only a few annotated instances. Nevertheless, these methods suffer challenges when accurate labels are extremely absent. In this paper, we propose a boosting strategy, termed SP3D, explicitly utilizing the cross-modal semantic prompts generated from Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) to boost the 3D detector with robust feature discrimination capability under sparse annotation settings. Specifically, we first develop a Confident Points Semantic Transfer (CPST) module that generates accurate cross-modal semantic prompts through boundary-constrained center cluster selection. Based on these accurate semantic prompts, which we treat as seed points, we introduce a Dynamic Cluster Pseudo-label Generation (DCPG) module to yield pseudo-supervision signals from the geometry shape of multi-scale neighbor points. Additionally, we design a Distribution Shape score (DS score) that chooses high-quality supervision signals for the initial training of the 3D detector. Experiments on the KITTI dataset and Waymo Open Dataset (WOD) have validated that SP3D can enhance the performance of sparsely supervised detectors by a large margin under meager labeling conditions. Moreover, we verified SP3D in the zero-shot setting, where its performance exceeded that of the state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/xmuqimingxia/SP3D.

Traditional 3D object detectors, whether fully-, semi-, or weakly-supervised, rely heavily on extensive human annotations. In contrast, this paper introduces an unsupervised 3D object detector that automatically discerns object patterns without such annotations. To achieve this, we propose a Commonsense Prototype-based Detector (CPD) for unsupervised 3D object detection. CPD first constructs Commonsense Prototypes (CProto) to represent the geometric center and size of objects. It then generates high-quality pseudo-labels and guides detector convergence using size and geometry priors from CProto. Building on CPD, we further introduce CPD++, an enhanced version that improves performance by leveraging motion cues. CPD++ learns localization from stationary objects and recognition from moving objects, facilitating the mutual transfer of localization and recognition knowledge between these two object types. Both CPD and CPD++ outperform existing state-of-the-art unsupervised 3D detectors. Furthermore, when trained on Waymo Open Dataset (WOD) and tested on KITTI, CPD++ achieves 89.25% 3D Average Precision (AP) on the moderate car class at a 0.5 IoU threshold, reaching 95.3% of the performance attained by fully supervised counterparts. These results underscore the significant advancements brought by our method.

The prevalent approaches of unsupervised 3D object de-tection follow cluster-based pseudo-label generation and iterative self-training processes. However, the challenge arises due to the sparsity of LiDAR scans, which leads to pseudo-labels with erroneous size and position, resulting in subpar detection performance. To tackle this problem, this paper introduces a Commonsense Prototype-based Detector, termed CPD, for unsupervised 3D object de-tection. CPD first constructs Commonsense Prototype (CProto) characterized by high-quality bounding box and dense points, based on commonsense intuition. Subse-quently, CPD refines the low-quality pseudo-labels by lever-aging the size prior from CProto. Furthermore, CPD en-hances the detection accuracy of sparsely scanned objects by the geometric knowledge from CProto. CPD outper-forms state-of-the-art unsupervised 3D detectors on Waymo Open Dataset (WOD), PandaSet, and KITTI datasets by a large margin. Besides, by training CPD on WOD and testing on KITTI, CPD attains 90.85% and 81.01% 3D Aver-age Precision on easy and moderate car classes, respectively. These achievements position CPD in close prox-imity to fully supervised detectors, highlighting the sig-nificance of our method. The code will be available at https://github.com/hailanyi/CPD.

Current sparsely-supervised object detection methods largely depend on high threshold settings to derive high-quality pseudo labels from detector predictions. However, hard instances within point clouds frequently display incomplete structures, causing decreased confidence scores in their assigned pseudo-labels. Previous methods inevitably result in inadequate positive supervision for these instances. To address this problem, we propose a novel Hard INsTance Enhanced Detector (HINTED), for sparsely-supervised 3D object detection. Firstly, we design a self-boosting teacher (SBT) model to generate more potential pseudo-labels, enhancing the effectiveness of information transfer. Then, we introduce a mixed-density student (MDS) model to concentrate on hard instances during the training phase, thereby improving detection accuracy. Our extensive experiments on the KITTI dataset validate our method's superior performance. Compared with leading sparsely-supervised methods, HINTED significantly improves the detection performance on hard instances, no-tably outperforming fully-supervised methods in detecting challenging categories like cyclists. HINTED also significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art semi-supervised method on challenging categories. The code is available at https://github.com/xmuqimingxia/HINTED.

Photovoltaic (PV) systems play a critical role in renewable energy resource grid integration, and levelized cost of energy (LCOE) is commonly used to evaluate PV system feasibility in modern power grids. In this work, a revised PV system LCOE calculation model is derived to quantify the potential of LCOE reduction. Particularly, the grid support functions are valuated to offset the investment and operation costs of PV systems, which thereby reduces the LCOE. Meanwhile, PV system service lifetime is also estimated with the derived PV inverter reliability model, considering the critical components (i.e., semiconductor devices and capacitors). The case studies with field datasets are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the developed LCOE calculation model.

Pedicle drilling is a crucial and high-risk process in spinal surgery. Due to the respiration and cardiac cycle, the position of spine would fluctuate during operations, which result in an increase of the difficulty in state recognition of pedicle drilling. To guarantee the safety and validity, a model-based compensation method is proposed in this paper. To build the empirical model of vertebral motion, vertebral displacement and tidal volume (Tv) signals are collected from volunteers. To rule out disturbances in original signal, FFT and wavelet transform (DWT) are used to process the experimental signals. In order to select the apt basis for different signals, the root mean square error decision-making method (RMSE-DMM) is introduced. When the filtered vertebral displacement signal is obtained, the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is used to figure out the empirical model. The robot assisted systems (RAS) can easily compensate vertebral fluctuation based on the empirical model. Due to the goal of pedicle drilling is to drill a hole from surface of first cortical layer to the interior of second cortical layer, a new key point recognition algorithm, based on force, proposed in this paper. To verify the effectiveness of compensation and the recognition algorithm, 3 sets of comparison experiments are carried out. And the results of experiment show the compensation method and new key point recognition algorithm perform effectively.