Generalized Label-Efficient 3D Scene Parsing via Hierarchical Feature Aligned Pre-Training and Region-Aware Fine-tuning

Deep neural network models have achieved remarkable progress in 3D scene understanding while trained in the closed-set setting and with full labels. However, the major bottleneck for current 3D recognition approaches is that they do not have the capacity to recognize any unseen novel classes beyond the training categories in diverse kinds of real-world applications. In the meantime, current state-of-the-art 3D scene understanding approaches primarily require high-quality labels to train neural networks, which merely perform well in a fully supervised manner. This work presents a generalized and simple framework for dealing with 3D scene understanding when the labeled scenes are quite limited. To extract knowledge for novel categories from the pre-trained vision-language models, we propose a hierarchical feature-aligned pre-training and knowledge distillation strategy to extract and distill meaningful information from large-scale vision-language models, which helps benefit the open-vocabulary scene understanding tasks. To leverage the boundary information, we propose a novel energy-based loss with boundary awareness benefiting from the region-level boundary predictions. To encourage latent instance discrimination and to guarantee efficiency, we propose the unsupervised region-level semantic contrastive learning scheme for point clouds, using confident predictions of the neural network to discriminate the intermediate feature embeddings at multiple stages. Extensive experiments with both indoor and outdoor scenes demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach in both data-efficient learning and open-world few-shot learning. All codes, models, and data are made publicly available at: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1M58V-PtR8DBEwD296zJkNg_m2qq-MTAP?usp=sharing.