Novel class discovery in point cloud segmentation aims to transfer knowledge from known classes to automatically identify and segment unlabeled novel classes in point clouds. Existing methods mainly rely on pairwise associations for class assignment and novel class reasoning, which limits their ability to capture complex relationships among known and novel classes and may lead to inaccurate semantic segmentation. To address this issue, we introduce a hypergraph-based framework that models high-order associations among classes and enables collaborative reasoning from known classes to novel classes beyond traditional pairwise relations. Moreover, existing methods tend to focus on semantic feature extraction while paying insufficient attention to geometric information in point clouds. To better exploit spatial structure, we propose Geometric-Aware Prototypes to enhance the representation of class-level geometric cues. By propagating geometric information through hyperedges, the proposed method improves the understanding of spatial distributions across classes and leads to more accurate segmentation. Experiments on the SemanticKITTI and SemanticPOSS datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method.
Point cloud segmentation is critical for 3D scene understanding. However, sparse and irregular point distributions provide limited appearance evidence, making geometry-only features insufficient to distinguish objects with similar shapes but distinct appearances e.g., color, texture, and material. We propose Gaussian-to-Point (G2P), which transfers Gaussian attributes from 3D Gaussian Splatting to point clouds for more discriminative and appearance-consistent segmentation. Our G2P addresses the misalignment between optimized Gaussians and original point geometry by establishing point-wise correspondences. By distilling opacity-derived visibility cues, we mitigate the geometric ambiguity that limits existing models. Additionally, Gaussian scale attributes enable precise boundary localization in complex 3D scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive performance on standard benchmarks and shows notable improvements on geometrically challenging classes, without pretrained 2D features or language supervision in our segmentation pipeline.
Point clouds are a fundamental representation for robotic perception tasks such as localization, mapping, and object pose estimation. However, LiDAR-acquired point clouds are inherently sparse and non-uniform, providing incomplete observations of the underlying scene geometry. This makes reliable geometric reasoning challenging and degrades downstream perception performance. Existing approaches attempt to compensate for these limitations by estimating local geometry, but often rely on hand-crafted statistics or end-to-end supervised learning, which can suffer from limited scalability or require large amounts of accurately labeled data. To address these challenges, we explicitly model point cloud geometry under a principled mathematical formulation. We represent local geometry as a statistical manifold induced by a family of Gaussian distributions, where each point is associated with a Gaussian capturing its local geometric structure. Based on this formulation, we introduce Point-to-Ellipsoid (POLI), a deep neural estimator that predicts per-point Gaussian geometry. POLI learns a mapping from point cloud observations to their underlying geometry in a self-supervised manner, removing the need for labeled data while preserving strong geometric inductive biases. The resulting representation integrates seamlessly into existing robotic perception pipelines without architectural modifications. Extensive experiments show that POLI enables accurate and robust geometry estimation and consistently improves performance across diverse robotic perception tasks.
Existing approaches for unsupervised 3D point cloud segmentation predominantly rely on a purely visual similarity-based learning-by-clustering paradigm, which suffers from a fundamental limitation: long-tail ambiguity. In such a paradigm, features of minor classes are consistently absorbed by dominant clusters, leading to severely imbalanced predictions. To address this issue, we propose LangTail, a language-guided hierarchical learning framework that leverages the balanced world knowledge encoded in language models to mitigate long-tail ambiguity in unsupervised 3D segmentation. The key idea is to establish multi-level associations between language-derived semantic priors and visually underrepresented minor classes, thereby compensating for the biased attention of purely visual clustering toward dominant classes. Specifically, LangTail first constructs an entity-level semantic prior from language models, capturing balanced and fine-grained world knowledge across categories. These priors are injected into a hierarchical clustering framework via contrastive alignment. This guides multi-granularity semantic structure formation and prevents minor classes from being absorbed by dominant clusters, yielding more discriminative representations for underrepresented categories. Extensive experiments on ScanNet-v2, S3DIS, and nuScenes demonstrate that LangTail consistently outperforms existing methods by significant margins, \ie, +13.5, +12.9, and +8.9 mIoU, respectively. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of language priors in improving the representation of minority classes in 3D point clouds. The code will be released at: https://github.com/Whisky0129/langtail_official.