LitePT: Lighter Yet Stronger Point Transformer

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Yue, Yuanwen, Robert, Damien, Wang, Jianyuan, Hong, Sunghwan, Wegner, Jan Dirk, Rupprecht, Christian, Schindler, Konrad
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Yue, Yuanwen
Robert, Damien
Wang, Jianyuan
Hong, Sunghwan
Wegner, Jan Dirk
Rupprecht, Christian
Schindler, Konrad
author_facet Yue, Yuanwen
Robert, Damien
Wang, Jianyuan
Hong, Sunghwan
Wegner, Jan Dirk
Rupprecht, Christian
Schindler, Konrad
contents Modern neural architectures for 3D point cloud processing contain both convolutional layers and attention blocks, but the best way to assemble them remains unclear. We analyse the role of different computational blocks in 3D point cloud networks and find an intuitive behaviour: convolution is adequate to extract low-level geometry at high-resolution in early layers, where attention is expensive without bringing any benefits; attention captures high-level semantics and context in low-resolution, deep layers more efficiently, where convolution inflates the parameter count. Guided by this design principle, we propose a new, improved 3D point cloud backbone that employs convolutions in early stages and switches to attention for deeper layers. To avoid the loss of spatial layout information when discarding redundant convolution layers, we introduce a novel, parameter-free 3D positional encoding, PointROPE. The resulting LitePT model has $3.6\times$ fewer parameters, runs $2\times$ faster, and uses $2\times$ less memory than the state-of-the-art Point Transformer V3, but nonetheless matches or outperforms it on a range of tasks and datasets. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/prs-eth/LitePT.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_13689
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LitePT: Lighter Yet Stronger Point Transformer
Yue, Yuanwen
Robert, Damien
Wang, Jianyuan
Hong, Sunghwan
Wegner, Jan Dirk
Rupprecht, Christian
Schindler, Konrad
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Modern neural architectures for 3D point cloud processing contain both convolutional layers and attention blocks, but the best way to assemble them remains unclear. We analyse the role of different computational blocks in 3D point cloud networks and find an intuitive behaviour: convolution is adequate to extract low-level geometry at high-resolution in early layers, where attention is expensive without bringing any benefits; attention captures high-level semantics and context in low-resolution, deep layers more efficiently, where convolution inflates the parameter count. Guided by this design principle, we propose a new, improved 3D point cloud backbone that employs convolutions in early stages and switches to attention for deeper layers. To avoid the loss of spatial layout information when discarding redundant convolution layers, we introduce a novel, parameter-free 3D positional encoding, PointROPE. The resulting LitePT model has $3.6\times$ fewer parameters, runs $2\times$ faster, and uses $2\times$ less memory than the state-of-the-art Point Transformer V3, but nonetheless matches or outperforms it on a range of tasks and datasets. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/prs-eth/LitePT.
title LitePT: Lighter Yet Stronger Point Transformer
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.13689