LiDAR odometry is a critical component of SLAM in autonomous driving and robotics. Learning-based methods have shown remarkable performance by regressing relative poses in an end-to-end manner. However, when applying these trained models, originally developed on the widely used KITTI dataset, to other scenes, performance often drops significantly. In other words, existing methods struggle to generalize well to new environments. To address this challenge, we propose RCP-LO, a simple yet effective LiDAR odometry framework. We introduce a novel representation for relative poses, reformulating them as relative coordinates, which can then be solved using geometrical verification. This approach avoids overly simplified pose representations and makes better use of scene geometry, thereby improving generalization. Moreover, to capture the inherent uncertainties in relative pose estimation from occluded LiDAR point clouds from dynamic environments, we adapt our framework to learn a denoising diffusion model, allowing for sampling plausible relative coordinates while improving robustness. We also introduce a differentiable geometric weighted singular value decomposition module, enabling efficient pose estimation through a single forward pass. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RCP-LO, trained exclusively on the KITTI dataset, achieves competitive performance compared to SOTA learning-based methods and generalizes effectively to the KITTI-360, Ford, and Oxford datasets.

Language-based localization is a crucial task in robotics and computer vision, enabling robots to understand spatial positions through language. Recent methods rely on contrastive learning to establish correspondences between global features of texts and point clouds. However, the inherent ambiguity of textual descriptions makes it difficult to convey geometric information accurately, forcing alignment of them in the feature space may compromise the expressiveness of the point clouds. Unlike previous methods, this paper proposes using language as a filter to distinguish dissimilar locations. To this end, we propose a robust framework of multi-level negative contrastive learning for language-based localization, fully leveraging the descriptive power of language for spatial localization. Our method learns multiple mismatched factors by minimizing the similarity of different locations at different levels, including global-level, instance-level and relationlevel, respectively. Extensive experiments conducted on the KITTI360Pose benchmark demonstrate that our method outperforms better that the state-of-the-art methods. Specifically, we achieve a 56.3% improvement in Top-1 retrieval recall and a 45.9% improvement in 5m localization recall.

Scene coordinate regression achieves impressive results in outdoor LiDAR localization but requires days of training. Since training needs to be repeated for each new scene, long training times make these impractical for applications requiring time-sensitive system upgrades, such as autonomous driving, drones, robotics, etc. We identify large coverage areas and vast amounts of data in large-scale outdoor scenes as key challenges that limit fast training. In this paper, we propose LightLoc, the first method capable of efficiently learning localization in a new scene at light speed. Beyond freezing the scene-agnostic feature backbone and training only the scene-specific prediction heads, we introduce two novel techniques to address these challenges. First, we introduce sample classification guidance to assist regression learning, reducing ambiguity from similar samples and improving training efficiency. Second, we propose redundant sample downsampling to remove well-learned frames during training, reducing training time without compromising accuracy. In addition, the fast training and confidence estimation characteristics of sample classification enable its integration into SLAM, effectively eliminating error accumulation. Extensive experiments on large-scale outdoor datasets demonstrate that LightLoc achieves state-of-the-art performance with just 1 hour of training—50× faster than existing methods. Our Code is available at https://github.com/liw95/LightLoc.

Multi-view clustering has attracted more attention recently since many real-world data are comprised of different representations or views. Recent multi-view clustering works mainly exploit the instance consistency to obtain the shared representations across different views, and apply a single-view clustering method to perform data partitions. However, these existing methods often ignore the inconsistency of instance associations within the views, which may enlarge the intra-class diversity among the views and therefore degrade the clustering performance. To address this issue, this paper proposes an efficient mutual contrastive teacher-student leaning (MC-TSL) model to enhance the multi-view clustering, which is the first attempt to study the inconsistency distillation for consistency learning. First, the proposed MC-TSL approach exploits a view-specific encoder with two heads, an instance encoding head and a semantic distillation head, respectively, for capturing the consistent and discriminative feature representations. To be specific, the former head exploits a cross-view contrastive learning method to obtain a redundancy-free consistent representation at the instance level, while the latter head designs a mutual teacher-student learning module to capture the intra-view information at semantic level. By training these two heads in an end-to-end manner, the discriminative multi-view embeddings are efficiently obtained and refined by minimizing the weighted sum of the reconstruction loss, contrastive loss and contrast distillation loss. Extensive experiments verify the superiorities of the proposed MC-TSL framework and show its competitive clustering performances.