Can we Trust Unreliable Voxels? Exploring 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction under Label Noise
Authors: Wenxin Li, Kunyu Peng, Di Wen, Junwei Zheng, Jiale Wei, Mengfei Duan, Yuheng Zhang, Rui Fan, +1 more
Abstract
3D semantic occupancy prediction is a cornerstone of robotic perception, yet real-world voxel annotations are inherently corrupted by structural artifacts and dynamic trailing effects. This raises a critical but underexplored question: can autonomous systems safely rely on such unreliable occupancy supervision? To systematically investigate this issue, we establish OccNL, the first benchmark dedicated to 3D occupancy under occupancy-asymmetric and dynamic trailing noise. Our analysis reveals a fundamental domain gap: state-of-the-art 2D label noise learning strategies collapse catastrophically in sparse 3D voxel spaces, exposing a critical vulnerability in existing paradigms. To address this challenge, we propose DPR-Occ, a principled label-noise-robust framework that constructs reliable supervision through dual-source partial label reasoning. By synergizing temporal model memory with representation-level structural affinity, DPR-Occ dynamically expands and prunes candidate label sets to preserve true semantics while suppressing noise propagation. Extensive experiments on SemanticKITTI demonstrate that DPR-Occ prevents geometric and semantic collapse under extreme corruption. Notably, even at 90% label noise, our method achieves significant performance gains (up to 2.57% mIoU and 13.91% IoU) over existing label noise learning baselines adapted to the 3D occupancy prediction task. By bridging label noise learning and 3D perception, OccNL and DPR-Occ provide a reliable foundation for safety-critical robotic perception in dynamic environments. The benchmark and source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/mylwx/OccNL.
Weakly supervised 3D occupancy prediction reduces the reliance on costly 3D annotations by learning from 2D pseudo-labels generated by vision foundation models. However, existing methods typically use these imperfect pseudo-labels directly as supervision, making occupancy learning vulnerable to erroneous geometric and semantic targets. We observe that agreement across repeated observations provides an inexpensive and reliable cue for assessing pseudo-label reliability. Based on this observation, we propose \textbf{LetOccVote}, a weakly supervised Gaussian-based occupancy framework that leverages cross-frame voting to improve both geometric and semantic supervision. For geometry, Depth Vote exploits cross-frame geometric agreement to refine supported pseudo depth and reject contradictory estimates before volumetric lifting and depth supervision. For semantics, Semantic Vote aggregates pseudo-semantic observations in a shared 3D space to identify reliable and contested evidence, strengthening reliable semantic supervision while filtering unreliable pseudo-label segments. The entire framework is trained solely with 2D pseudo-label supervision without requiring 3D occupancy annotations. On Occ3D-nuScenes, LetOccVote achieves 53.27 IoU and 20.39 mIoU, establishing state-of-the-art performance among methods with 2D pseudo-label supervision.
Unstructured scenes present unique challenges for autonomous driving, as irregular obstacles and sparse scene layouts undermine the effectiveness of traditional perception methods such as 3D object detection. 3D semantic occupancy prediction has emerged as a prominent focus due to its ability to provide dense spatial representations by assigning semantic labels to individual voxels in 3D space. However, directly applying 3D semantic occupancy prediction to unstructured scenes remains challenging because scene sparsity hinders effective cross-modal fusion and the more severe long-tail distribution in these scenarios further degrades prediction performance. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, we construct a dedicated dataset of unstructured scenes collected from open-pit mines. Based on this, we propose UnsOcc, a multi-modal 3D semantic occupancy prediction framework that improves robustness in unstructured environments. At its core, we introduce a rendering-based fusion module, RenderFusion, which enhances cross-modal feature alignment through bidirectional rendering supervision. Furthermore, we propose GSRefinement, a detail-aware auxiliary supervision method based on Gaussian Splatting that projects sparse 3D occupancy predictions into dense 2D semantic segmentation maps, enabling effective supervision for long-tail categories. Extensive experiments on both the open-pit mine dataset and the nuScenes dataset demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches.
Vision-based 3D semantic occupancy prediction is essential for autonomous driving, yet dense voxel representations waste computation on largely empty space, while BEV and TPV projections compromise fine-grained 3D structure. Fully sparse representations offer an attractive alternative, but existing methods, including SparseOcc, entangle scene completion with semantic prediction by indiscriminately propagating high-dimensional features into empty regions and applying voxel-wise classification. This creates excessive activations, computational overhead, and geometric ambiguity. We present SparseOcc++, a geometry-aware sparse framework that explicitly decouples scene completion from semantic segmentation. SparseOcc++ reformulates completion as signed-distance regression on sparse anchor voxels through a scene completion field (SCF). To model complex outdoor geometry robustly, it combines orthogonal decomposition with discretized distance learning. A geometry-guided propagation module then converts the SCF into a complete volumetric scene and restricts semantic segmentation to geometrically verified regions. Experiments establish new state of the art: SparseOcc++ improves IoU by 2.3 points and is 3.9x faster than SparseOcc on nuScenes, while achieving a 5.9x speedup over OccFormer on SemanticKITTI.