MetaSSC: Enhancing 3D semantic scene completion for autonomous driving through meta-learning and long-sequence modeling

Semantic scene completion (SSC) plays a pivotal role in achieving comprehensive perceptions of autonomous driving systems. However, existing methods often neglect the high deployment costs of SSC in real-world applications, and traditional architectures such as three-dimensional (3D) convolutional neural networks (3D CNNs) and self-attention mechanisms struggle to efficiently capture long-range dependencies within 3D voxel grids, limiting their effectiveness. To address these challenges, we propose MetaSSC, a novel meta-learning-based framework for SSC that leverages deformable convolution, large-kernel attention, and the Mamba (D-LKA-M) model. Our approach begins with a voxel-based semantic segmentation (SS) pretraining task, which is designed to explore the semantics and geometry of incomplete regions while acquiring transferable meta-knowledge. Using simulated cooperative perception datasets, we supervise the training of a single vehicle's perception via the aggregated sensor data from multiple nearby connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs), generating richer and more comprehensive labels. This meta-knowledge is then adapted to the target domain through a dual-phase training strategy—without adding extra model parameters—ensuring efficient deployment. To further enhance the model's ability to capture long-sequence relationships in 3D voxel grids, we integrate Mamba blocks with deformable convolution and large-kernel attention into the backbone network. Extensive experiments show that MetaSSC achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing competing models by a significant margin while also reducing deployment costs.