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arXiv · 2604.18476

SemLT3D: Semantic-Guided Expert Distillation for Camera-only Long-Tailed 3D Object Detection

Hao Vo·Khoa Vo·Thinh Phan·Ngo Xuan Cuong·Gianfranco Doretto·Hien Nguyen·Anh Nguyen·Ngan Le
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Abstract

Camera-only 3D object detection has emerged as a cost-effective and scalable alternative to LiDAR for autonomous driving, yet existing methods primarily prioritize overall performance while overlooking the severe long-tail imbalance inherent in real-world datasets. In practice, many rare but safety-critical categories such as children, strollers, or emergency vehicles are heavily underrepresented, leading to biased learning and degraded performance. This challenge is further exacerbated by pronounced inter-class ambiguity (e.g., visually similar subclasses) and substantial intra-class diversity (e.g., objects varying widely in appearance, scale, pose, or context), which together hinder reliable long-tail recognition. In this work, we introduce SemLT3D, a Semantic-Guided Expert Distillation framework designed to enrich the representation space for underrepresented classes through semantic priors. SemLT3D consists of: (1) a language-guided mixture-of-experts module that routes 3D queries to specialized experts according to their semantic affinity, enabling the model to better disentangle confusing classes and specialize on tail distributions; and (2) a semantic projection distillation pipeline that aligns 3D queries with CLIP-informed 2D semantics, producing more coherent and discriminative features across diverse visual manifestations. Although motivated by long-tail imbalance, the semantically structured learning in SemLT3D also improves robustness under broader appearance variations and challenging corner cases, offering a principled step toward more reliable camera-only 3D perception.

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Hao Vo, Khoa Vo, Thinh Phan, Ngo Xuan Cuong, Gianfranco Doretto, Hien Nguyen, Anh Nguyen, Ngan Le. 2026-04-20. SemLT3D: Semantic-Guided Expert Distillation for Camera-only Long-Tailed 3D Object Detection. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.18476

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