English

CVKD-UDA: Cross-View Knowledge Distillation for 3D Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Segmentation

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-07-11 v1

Abstract

3D unsupervised domain adaptive (UDA) segmentation mitigates the high cost of manual annotations of the new domain data. Self-training has emerged as the dominant approach in this area, where its success heavily depends on a well-initialized warm-up model to generate reliable pseudo labels. However, existing methods often depend on source supervision or output-level adversarial alignment to obtain the warm-up model, which suffer from limited generalization and training instability due to the large domain gap between domains. Constructing domain-similar representations is an effective way to bridge this gap. In this work, we propose CVKD-UDA, which revisits voxel size as a core design factor to construct domain-similar representations and leverages cross-view complementary cues to balance transferability and discriminability of the warm-up model. First, we generate two complementary views by varying voxel sizes and introduce a cross-view knowledge distillation (CVKD) to enhance generalization and target perception of the model. Second, to balance transferability and discriminability, we design a lightweight Decouple-Adapter and an auxiliary imitation classifier to decouple cross-view knowledge transfer. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks demonstrate that CVKD-UDA effectively improves the performance of self-training methods and provides a new perspective for 3D UDA segmentation. Our code will be available at GitHub.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.10087,
  title  = {CVKD-UDA: Cross-View Knowledge Distillation for 3D Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Segmentation},
  author = {Zhimin Yuan and Ming Cheng and Shangshu Yu and Wen Li and Dunqiang Liu and Xin Huang and Cheng Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.10087},
  year   = {2026}
}