Beyond Defenses: Manifold-Aligned Regularization for Intrinsic 3D Point Cloud Robustness

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Alonso, Pedro, Li, Chongshou, Li, Tianrui
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Alonso, Pedro
Li, Chongshou
Li, Tianrui
author_facet Alonso, Pedro
Li, Chongshou
Li, Tianrui
contents Despite extensive progress in point cloud robustness, existing methods primarily rely on augmentation strategies or defense mechanisms while overlooking the geometric nature of adversarial fragility. We hypothesize that adversarial vulnerability in 3D networks arises from a manifold misalignment between the latent geometry learned by the model and the intrinsic geometry of the underlying surface. Small, geometry-preserving perturbations along the input manifold often induce disproportionate distortions in feature space, potentially leading to misclassifications. We formalize this phenomenon by developing a geometric interpretation of 3D robustness that links classical adversarial theory to the intrinsic structure of point clouds. Motivated by this analysis, we introduce Manifold-Aligned Point Recognition (MAPR), a framework that regularizes the latent geometry by aligning predictions across intrinsic perturbations. MAPR augments each point cloud with intrinsic features capturing local curvature and diffusion structure, and applies a consistency loss that preserves invariance to intrinsic, geometry-preserving perturbations. Without relying on adversarial training or additional data, MAPR consistently improves robustness under multiple adversarial attacks across several datasets, achieving average robustness gains of +20.02 and +8.83 percentage points over vanilla models on ModelNet40 and ScanObjectNN, respectively.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_07590
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beyond Defenses: Manifold-Aligned Regularization for Intrinsic 3D Point Cloud Robustness
Alonso, Pedro
Li, Chongshou
Li, Tianrui
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Despite extensive progress in point cloud robustness, existing methods primarily rely on augmentation strategies or defense mechanisms while overlooking the geometric nature of adversarial fragility. We hypothesize that adversarial vulnerability in 3D networks arises from a manifold misalignment between the latent geometry learned by the model and the intrinsic geometry of the underlying surface. Small, geometry-preserving perturbations along the input manifold often induce disproportionate distortions in feature space, potentially leading to misclassifications. We formalize this phenomenon by developing a geometric interpretation of 3D robustness that links classical adversarial theory to the intrinsic structure of point clouds. Motivated by this analysis, we introduce Manifold-Aligned Point Recognition (MAPR), a framework that regularizes the latent geometry by aligning predictions across intrinsic perturbations. MAPR augments each point cloud with intrinsic features capturing local curvature and diffusion structure, and applies a consistency loss that preserves invariance to intrinsic, geometry-preserving perturbations. Without relying on adversarial training or additional data, MAPR consistently improves robustness under multiple adversarial attacks across several datasets, achieving average robustness gains of +20.02 and +8.83 percentage points over vanilla models on ModelNet40 and ScanObjectNN, respectively.
title Beyond Defenses: Manifold-Aligned Regularization for Intrinsic 3D Point Cloud Robustness
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07590