MSSP: Multi-Scale Spatially-Constrained Partition for Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation of 3D Point Clouds

Unsupervised point cloud segmentation is critical for embodied artificial intelligence and autonomous driving, as it mitigates the prohibitive cost of dense point-level annotations required by fully supervised methods. While integrating 2D pre-trained models such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to supplement semantic information is a natural choice, this approach faces a fundamental mismatch between discrete 3D points and continuous 2D images. This mismatch leads to inevitable projection overlap and complex modality alignment, resulting in compromised semantic consistency across 2D-3D transfer. To address these limitations, this paper proposes PointGS, a simple yet effective pipeline for unsupervised 3D point cloud segmentation. PointGS leverages 3D Gaussian Splatting as a unified intermediate representation to bridge the discrete-continuous domain gap. Input sparse point clouds are first reconstructed into dense 3D Gaussian spaces via multi-view observations, filling spatial gaps and encoding occlusion relationships to eliminate projection-induced semantic conflation. Multi-view dense images are rendered from the Gaussian space, with 2D semantic masks extracted via SAM, and semantics are distilled to 3D Gaussian primitives through contrastive learning to ensure consistent semantic assignments across different views. The Gaussian space is aligned with the original point cloud via two-step registration, and point semantics are assigned through nearest-neighbor search on labeled Gaussians. Experiments demonstrate that PointGS outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised methods, achieving +0.9% mIoU on ScanNet-V2 and +2.8% mIoU on S3DIS.

Current semantic segmentation approaches for point cloud scenes heavily rely on manual labeling, while research on unsupervised semantic segmentation methods specifically for raw point clouds is still in its early stages. Unsupervised point cloud learning poses significant challenges due to the absence of annotation information and the lack of pre-training. The development of effective strategies is crucial in this context. In this paper, we propose a novel prototype library-driven unsupervised point cloud semantic segmentation strategy that utilizes Structure Learning and Consistent Reasoning (P-SLCR). First, we propose a Consistent Structure Learning to establish structural feature learning between consistent points and the library of consistent prototypes by selecting high-quality features. Second, we propose a Semantic Relation Consistent Reasoning that constructs a prototype inter-relation matrix between consistent and ambiguous prototype libraries separately. This process ensures the preservation of semantic consistency by imposing constraints on consistent and ambiguous prototype libraries through the prototype inter-relation matrix. Finally, our method was extensively evaluated on the S3DIS, SemanticKITTI, and Scannet datasets, achieving the best performance compared to unsupervised methods. Specifically, the mIoU of 47.1% is achieved for Area-5 of the S3DIS dataset, surpassing the classical fully supervised method PointNet by 2.5%.

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.