Invascal: Inverse-Vacuity Self-Calibration for Uncertainty-Aware LiDAR Range-View Semantic Segmentation
arXiv:2606.00069v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LiDAR semantic segmentation is a core perception capability for autonomous vehicles and mobile robots. However, safe operation also depends on knowing when predictions are unreliable. Existing approaches typically rely on softmax confidence, which is often miscalibrated and overconfident, while stronger uncertainty estimates from Monte Carlo dropout or ensembles are often computationally expensive for real-time use. To this end, we introduce a novel, architecture-agnostic uncertainty-aware Adapter Head. It decomposes the prediction into a Preference Head for class ranking and a Strength Head that refines uncertainty assessment, thereby enabling a principled construction of evidential Dirichlet representations. Building on this design, we propose our inverse-vacuity self-calibration objective (Invascal), which directly supervises the strength signal to produce reliable and well-calibrated uncertainty estimates while preventing runaway evidence growth. We evaluate our framework across multiple LiDAR datasets and backbone architectures. We compare against deterministic training, Monte Carlo dropout and ensembles, and prior evidential methods. Our approach consistently improves uncertainty calibration over traditional deterministic methods with minimal computational overhead. At the same time, it preserves competitive segmentation accuracy, where prior evidential methods often suffer performance degradation.
[2606.00069] Invascal: Inverse-Vacuity Self-Calibration for Uncertainty-Aware LiDAR Range-View Semantic Segmentation
[Submitted on 20 May 2026]
Title:Invascal: Inverse-Vacuity Self-Calibration for Uncertainty-Aware LiDAR Range-View Semantic Segmentation
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Abstract:LiDAR semantic segmentation is a core perception capability for autonomous vehicles and mobile robots. However, safe operation also depends on knowing when predictions are unreliable. Existing approaches typically rely on softmax confidence, which is often miscalibrated and overconfident, while stronger uncertainty estimates from Monte Carlo dropout or ensembles are often computationally expensive for real-time use. To this end, we introduce a novel, architecture-agnostic uncertainty-aware Adapter Head. It decomposes the prediction into a Preference Head for class ranking and a Strength Head that refines uncertainty assessment, thereby enabling a principled construction of evidential Dirichlet representations. Building on this design, we propose our inverse-vacuity self-calibration objective (Invascal), which directly supervises the strength signal to produce reliable and well-calibrated uncertainty estimates while preventing runaway evidence growth. We evaluate our framework across multiple LiDAR datasets and backbone architectures. We compare against deterministic training, Monte Carlo dropout and ensembles, and prior evidential methods. Our approach consistently improves uncertainty calibration over traditional deterministic methods with minimal computational overhead. At the same time, it preserves competitive segmentation accuracy, where prior evidential methods often suffer performance degradation.
Comments: Accepted for publication at the 2026 IEEE 29th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC)
Subjects:
Robotics (cs.RO); Image and Video Processing (eess.IV)
Cite as: arXiv:2606.00069 [cs.RO]
(or arXiv:2606.00069v1 [cs.RO] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.00069
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Kerim Turacan [view email] [v1] Wed, 20 May 2026 16:39:29 UTC (2,516 KB)
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