SynFlow: Scaling Up LiDAR Scene Flow Estimation with Synthetic Data
About
Reliable 3D dynamic perception requires models that can anticipate motion beyond predefined categories, yet progress is hindered by the scarcity of dense, high-quality motion annotations. While self-supervision on unlabeled real data offers a path forward, empirical evidence suggests that scaling unlabeled data fails to close the performance gap due to noisy proxy signals. In this paper, we propose learning robust real-world motion priors entirely from scalable simulation. We introduce SynFlow, a data generation pipeline for large-scale synthetic LiDAR scene flow. Unlike prior works that prioritize sensor-specific realism, SynFlow employs a motion-oriented strategy to synthesize diverse kinematic patterns across 4,000 sequences ($\sim$940k frames), termed SynFlow-4k. This represents a $34\times$ scale-up in annotated volume over existing real-world benchmarks. Our experiments demonstrate that SynFlow-4k provides a highly domain-invariant motion prior. In a zero-shot regime, models trained only on our synthetic data generalize across multiple real-world benchmarks, comparable to in-domain supervised baselines on nuScenes and outperforming state-of-the-art methods on TruckScenes by 31.8%. Furthermore, SynFlow-4k serves as a label-efficient foundation: fine-tuning with only 5% of real-world labels surpasses models trained from scratch on the full available budget. We open-source the pipeline and dataset to facilitate research in generalizable 3D motion estimation. More detail can be found at https://kin-zhang.github.io/SynFlow.