Spira: Exploiting Voxel Data Structural Properties for Efficient Sparse Convolution in Point Cloud Networks

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Adamopoulos, Dionysios, Poulopoulou, Anastasia, Goumas, Georgios, Giannoula, Christina
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Adamopoulos, Dionysios
Poulopoulou, Anastasia
Goumas, Georgios
Giannoula, Christina
author_facet Adamopoulos, Dionysios
Poulopoulou, Anastasia
Goumas, Georgios
Giannoula, Christina
contents Sparse Convolution (SpC) powers 3D point cloud networks widely used in autonomous driving and augmented/virtual reality. SpC builds a kernel map that stores mappings between input voxel coordinates, output coordinates, and weight offsets, then uses this map to compute feature vectors for output coordinates. Our work identifies three key properties of voxel coordinates: they are integer-valued, bounded within a limited spatial range, and geometrically continuous, i.e., neighboring voxels on the same object surface are highly likely to exist at small spatial offsets from each other. Prior SpC engines do not fully exploit these properties and suffer from high pre-processing and post-processing overheads during kernel map construction. To address this, we design Spira, the first voxel-property-aware SpC engine for GPUs. Spira proposes (i) a high-performance one-shot search algorithm that builds the kernel map with no pre-processing and high data locality, (ii) an effective packed-native processing scheme that accesses packed voxel coordinates at low cost, (iii) a flexible dual-dataflow execution mechanism that efficiently computes output feature vectors by adapting to layer characteristics, and (iv) a network-wide parallelization strategy that builds kernel maps for all SpC layers concurrently at network start. Our evaluation shows that Spira significantly outperforms prior state-of-the-art SpC engines by 1.68x on average and up to 3.04x for end-to-end inference, and by 2.11x on average and up to 3.44x for layer-wise execution across diverse layer configurations. The source code of Spira is freely available at github.com/SPIN-Research-Group/Spira.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_20834
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Spira: Exploiting Voxel Data Structural Properties for Efficient Sparse Convolution in Point Cloud Networks
Adamopoulos, Dionysios
Poulopoulou, Anastasia
Goumas, Georgios
Giannoula, Christina
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Hardware Architecture
Machine Learning
Performance
Sparse Convolution (SpC) powers 3D point cloud networks widely used in autonomous driving and augmented/virtual reality. SpC builds a kernel map that stores mappings between input voxel coordinates, output coordinates, and weight offsets, then uses this map to compute feature vectors for output coordinates. Our work identifies three key properties of voxel coordinates: they are integer-valued, bounded within a limited spatial range, and geometrically continuous, i.e., neighboring voxels on the same object surface are highly likely to exist at small spatial offsets from each other. Prior SpC engines do not fully exploit these properties and suffer from high pre-processing and post-processing overheads during kernel map construction. To address this, we design Spira, the first voxel-property-aware SpC engine for GPUs. Spira proposes (i) a high-performance one-shot search algorithm that builds the kernel map with no pre-processing and high data locality, (ii) an effective packed-native processing scheme that accesses packed voxel coordinates at low cost, (iii) a flexible dual-dataflow execution mechanism that efficiently computes output feature vectors by adapting to layer characteristics, and (iv) a network-wide parallelization strategy that builds kernel maps for all SpC layers concurrently at network start. Our evaluation shows that Spira significantly outperforms prior state-of-the-art SpC engines by 1.68x on average and up to 3.04x for end-to-end inference, and by 2.11x on average and up to 3.44x for layer-wise execution across diverse layer configurations. The source code of Spira is freely available at github.com/SPIN-Research-Group/Spira.
title Spira: Exploiting Voxel Data Structural Properties for Efficient Sparse Convolution in Point Cloud Networks
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Hardware Architecture
Machine Learning
Performance
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20834