Distill, Diffuse, Segment: Unsupervised 3D Semantic Segmentation for Autonomous Driving Based on Multi-Level Distillation and Graph Diffusion

Abstract

LiDAR-based semantic segmentation is essential for autonomous-driving perception, yet dense point-wise annotations are costly, and long-tailed outdoor scenes make small safety-critical objects difficult to discover without supervision. Existing unsupervised methods face three key challenges: they struggle to preserve small and sparsely observed objects under substantial scale variation, have difficulty enforcing intra-region consistency and inter-region discrimination during cross-modal transfer, and lack an efficient feature-preserving mechanism for contextual propagation over superpoint graphs. We therefore propose DDS, an unsupervised 3D semantic segmentation framework. First, a coarse-to-fine multi-granularity mask cascade provides complementary 3D region cues for objects across different scales, improving the preservation of small and sparsely observed objects. Second, region-guided multi-level distillation transfers self-supervised visual knowledge through point-level alignment, mask-level prototype alignment, and prototype-level contrastive learning, enhancing intra-region consistency and inter-region discrimination. Third, restart-based graph diffusion efficiently propagates contextual information among superpoints while anchoring the refined representation to the initial distilled features and avoiding explicit graph eigendecomposition. Experiments on real-world driving datasets show that DDS outperforms representative unsupervised baselines, improving oAcc, mAcc, and mIoU by up to 2.9%, 9.7%, and 4.1%, respectively. These results demonstrate the effectiveness and transferability of DDS for unsupervised 3D scene understanding in autonomous-driving scenarios.