CLIMB-3D: Continual Learning for Imbalanced 3D Instance Segmentation

Code

• github.com/vgthengane/climb3d
  OfficialIn papernone★ 3

Abstract

While 3D instance segmentation (3DIS) has advanced significantly, existing methods typically assume that all object classes are known in advance and are uniformly distributed. However, this assumption is unrealistic in dynamic, real-world environments where new classes emerge gradually and exhibit natural imbalance. Although some approaches have addressed class emergence, they often overlook class imbalance, resulting in suboptimal performance -- particularly on rare categories. To tackle this challenge, we propose CLIMB-3D, a unified framework for CLass-incremental Imbalance-aware 3DIS. Building upon established exemplar replay (ER) strategies, we show that ER alone is insufficient to achieve robust performance under constrained memory conditions. To mitigate this, we introduce a novel pseudo-label generator (PLG) that extends supervision to previously learned categories by leveraging predictions from a frozen prior model. Despite its promise, PLG tends to bias towards frequent classes. Therefore, we propose a class-balanced re-weighting (CBR) scheme, that estimates object frequencies from pseudo-labels and dynamically adjusts training bias -- without requiring access to past data. We design and evaluate three incremental scenarios for 3DIS on the challenging ScanNet200 dataset, and additionally on semantic segmentation on ScanNetV2. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results, surpassing prior work by up to 16.76\% mAP for instance segmentation and approximately 30\% mIoU for semantic segmentation, demonstrating strong generalization across both frequent and rare classes.

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