4D Point Cloud Segmentation via Active Test-Time Adaptation

Abstract

4D point cloud segmentation is crucial for autonomous driving with continuous LiDAR streams. While test-time adaptation (TTA) is the standard approach for handling dynamic environments, current methods suffer from catastrophic error accumulation due to over-reliance on pseudo-labels. Active learning could provide reliable annotations for critical samples, but combining it with TTA faces severe challenges: realtime processing requirements and expensive 3D labeling costs. In this paper, we propose ATTA-4DSeg, the first framework to achieve efficient active test-time adaptation for 4D point cloud segmentation under extreme budget constraints. Our key insight is a self-reinforcing loop: oracle annotations refine adaptation prototypes, which then guide the selection of subsequent high-value samples from regions with severe distribution shifts, maximizing each annotation’s impact. Specifically, we propose three key innovations: (1) dual-prototype comparison that precisely localizes distribution shift boundaries to narrow annotation scope, (2) Class-Inverse Budget Allocation (CIBA) ensuring balanced adaptation across all categories, coupled with hybrid uncertainty scoring combining voxel-level geometry and point-wise variance for optimal sample selection, and (3) a refinement strategy leveraging sparse oracle annotations to improve predictions on unlabeled points, maximizing annotation utility. Extensive experiments show ATTA-4DSeg improves mIoU by 18.87%, 19.92%, and 3.6% on three domain adaptation benchmarks using only 1% annotation budget. Our method operates 2.28× faster than state-of-the-art methods. Remarkably, our approach reaches 90% of fully-supervised performance using only 5% annotation budget.