Bi3D++: Hybrid Bi-Domain Active Learning for Cross-Domain 3D Object Detection

Domain adaptation has recently been widely explored for 3D detection. Previous works mainly use unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) to address domain discrepancies. Despite notable improvements, their performance still largely trails models trained with fully annotated target data, due to larger domain gaps caused by different sensors and changing environments. In this paper, we exploit key characteristics of autonomous driving scenarios, including similar scenes and classimbalanced distributions, and explore a new task named active domain adaptation (ADA) for 3D object detection, which selects partial but important target data for annotation to further improve target-domain performance. Such a setting better reflects practical deployment in practice, where annotating all target-domain point clouds is prohibitively expensive while limited labels can substantially guide adaptation effectively. To this end, we propose a hybrid bi-domain active learning strategy, Bi3D++, to sample valuable data from both source and target domains and transfer source-domain knowledge to the target domain. Bi3D++ first samples target-like source data by measuring scene-level and instance-level similarity between domains, avoiding interference from irrelevant source data. Then, a hybrid active target sampling strategy selects target data by jointly considering rare-class similarity, intra-frame diversity, and inter-frame diversity, enabling diverse frames with diverse instances while emphasizing rare classes. Experiments on multiple cross-domain settings, including cross-beam and cross-location, show that Bi3D++ outperforms state-of-theart UDA methods with only 1% labeled target data and consistently improves performance as target annotations increase.