Yakov Miron
Publications
Hyp2Former: Hierarchy-Aware Hyperbolic Embeddings for Open-Set Panoptic Segmentation
Recognizing unknown objects is crucial for safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving and robotics. Open-Set Panoptic Segmentation (OPS) aims to segment known thing and stuff classes while identifying valid unknown objects as separate instances. Prior OPS approaches largely treat known categories as a flat label set, ignoring the semantic hierarchy that provides valuable structural priors for distinguishing unknown objects from in-distribution classes. In this work, we propose Hyp2Former, an end-to-end framework for OPS that does not require explicit modeling of unknowns during training, and instead learns hierarchical semantic similarities continuously in hyperbolic space. By explicitly encoding hierarchical relationships among known categories, the model learns a structured embedding space that captures multiple levels of semantic abstraction. As a result, unknown objects that cannot be confidently classified as known categories still remain in close proximity to higher-level concepts (e.g., an unknown animal remains closer to "animal" or "object" than to unrelated concepts such as "electronics" or "stuff") and can therefore be reliably detected, even if their fine-grained category was not represented during training. Empirical evaluations across multiple public datasets such as MS COCO, Cityscapes, and Lost&Found demonstrate that Hyp2Former outperforms existing methods on OPS, achieving the best balance between unknown object discovery and in-distribution robustness.
Latent Gaussian Splatting for 4D Panoptic Occupancy Tracking
Capturing 4D spatiotemporal surroundings is crucial for the safe and reliable operation of robots in dynamic environments. However, most existing methods address only one side of the problem: they either provide coarse geometric tracking via bounding boxes, or detailed 3D structures like voxel-based occupancy that lack explicit temporal association. In this work, we present Latent Gaussian Splatting for 4D Panoptic Occupancy Tracking (LaGS) that advances spatiotemporal scene understanding in a holistic direction. Our approach incorporates camera-based end-to-end tracking with mask-based multi-view panoptic occupancy prediction, and addresses the key challenge of efficiently aggregating multi-view information into 3D voxel grids via a novel latent Gaussian splatting approach. Specifically, we first fuse observations into 3D Gaussians that serve as a sparse point-centric latent representation of the 3D scene, and then splat the aggregated features onto a 3D voxel grid that is decoded by a mask-based segmentation head. We evaluate LaGS on the Occ3D nuScenes and Waymo datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance for 4D panoptic occupancy tracking. We make our code available at https://lags.cs.uni-freiburg.de/.
UP-Fuse: Uncertainty-guided LiDAR-Camera Fusion for 3D Panoptic Segmentation
LiDAR-camera fusion enhances 3D panoptic segmentation by leveraging camera images to complement sparse LiDAR scans, but it also introduces a critical failure mode. Under adverse conditions, degradation or failure of the camera sensor can significantly compromise the reliability of the perception system. To address this problem, we introduce UP-Fuse, a novel uncertainty-aware fusion framework in the 2D range-view that remains robust under camera sensor degradation, calibration drift, and sensor failure. Raw LiDAR data is first projected into the range-view and encoded by a LiDAR encoder, while camera features are simultaneously extracted and projected into the same shared space. At its core, UP-Fuse employs an uncertainty-guided fusion module that dynamically modulates cross-modal interaction using predicted uncertainty maps. These maps are learned by quantifying representational divergence under diverse visual degradations, ensuring that only reliable visual cues influence the fused representation. The fused range-view features are decoded by a novel hybrid 2D-3D transformer that mitigates spatial ambiguities inherent to the 2D projection and directly predicts 3D panoptic segmentation masks. Extensive experiments on Panoptic nuScenes, SemanticKITTI, and our introduced Panoptic Waymo benchmark demonstrate the efficacy and robustness of UP-Fuse, which maintains strong performance even under severe visual corruption or misalignment, making it well suited for robotic perception in safety-critical settings.