Can we Trust Unreliable Voxels? Exploring 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction under Label Noise
This addresses a critical vulnerability in safety-critical robotic perception systems by bridging label noise learning with 3D perception, though it appears incremental as it adapts existing concepts to a new domain.
The paper tackles the problem of 3D semantic occupancy prediction under unreliable voxel annotations corrupted by structural artifacts and dynamic trailing effects, establishing the first benchmark (OccNL) for this issue and proposing a noise-robust framework (DPR-Occ) that achieves significant performance gains of up to 2.57% mIoU and 13.91% IoU even at 90% label noise.
3D semantic occupancy prediction is a cornerstone of robotic perception, yet real-world voxel annotations are inherently corrupted by structural artifacts and dynamic trailing effects. This raises a critical but underexplored question: can autonomous systems safely rely on such unreliable occupancy supervision? To systematically investigate this issue, we establish OccNL, the first benchmark dedicated to 3D occupancy under occupancy-asymmetric and dynamic trailing noise. Our analysis reveals a fundamental domain gap: state-of-the-art 2D label noise learning strategies collapse catastrophically in sparse 3D voxel spaces, exposing a critical vulnerability in existing paradigms. To address this challenge, we propose DPR-Occ, a principled label noise-robust framework that constructs reliable supervision through dual-source partial label reasoning. By synergizing temporal model memory with representation-level structural affinity, DPR-Occ dynamically expands and prunes candidate label sets to preserve true semantics while suppressing noise propagation. Extensive experiments on SemanticKITTI demonstrate that DPR-Occ prevents geometric and semantic collapse under extreme corruption. Notably, even at 90% label noise, our method achieves significant performance gains (up to 2.57% mIoU and 13.91% IoU) over existing label noise learning baselines adapted to the 3D occupancy prediction task. By bridging label noise learning and 3D perception, OccNL and DPR-Occ provide a reliable foundation for safety-critical robotic perception in dynamic environments. The benchmark and source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/mylwx/OccNL.