Resolving Long-Tail Ambiguity in Unsupervised 3D Point Cloud Segmentation with Language Priors

Abstract

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.