Biologically-Inspired Evolutionary Domain Symbiosis for Few-shot and Zero-shot Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation

Abstract

Few-shot and zero-shot point cloud semantic segmentation aim to accurately segment novel categories using limited or no labeled samples, respectively. However, existing methods face significant challenges including domain shifts between support and query sets and the inability to handle both few-shot and zero-shot scenarios within a unified framework. To address these issues, we propose a biologically-inspired Evolutionary Domain Symbiosis Network EDS-Net for unified few-shot and zero-shot point cloud semantic segmentation. Specifically, inspired by natural symbiotic evolution, we propose a Symbiotic Evolution Module (SEM) that models co-adaptation between support and query features through self-correlation and cross-correlation mechanisms. Second, motivated by genetic crossover mechanisms, we introduce a Vision-Semantic Bridging Module (VSBM) that treats visual prototypes and semantic prototypes as two “parent” individuals, creating fused offspring prototypes through adaptive crossover operations and mutation strategies for zero-shot scenarios. Third, we develop a multi-generational evolutionary optimization framework employing an adaptive gating network to learn optimal fusion weights across different evolutionary stages. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EDS-Net with biological interpretability achieves state-of-the-art performance on both few-shot and zero-shot settings.