# PointGrow: Autoregressively Learned Point Cloud Generation with Self-Attention

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.05591 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.05591/

## Key facts

- Cited by 105 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 12 Oct 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 105)

- [Diffusion Probabilistic Models for 3D Point Cloud Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01458/) (2021)
- [LION: Latent Point Diffusion Models for 3D Shape Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06978/) (2022)
- [3D Shape Generation and Completion through Point-Voxel Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03670/) (2021)
- [3DShape2VecSet: A 3D Shape Representation for Neural Fields and Generative Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11445/) (2023)
- [LucidDreamer: Domain-free Generation of 3D Gaussian Splatting Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13384/) (2023)
- [Spatio-temporal Self-Supervised Representation Learning for 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00179/) (2021)
- [Density-aware Chamfer Distance as a Comprehensive Metric for Point Cloud Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12702/) (2021)
- [ShapeFormer: Transformer-based Shape Completion via Sparse Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10326/) (2022)
- [3DILG: Irregular Latent Grids for 3D Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13914/) (2022)
- [Learning to Generate Realistic LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03954/) (2022)
- [SDF-StyleGAN: Implicit SDF-Based StyleGAN for 3D Shape Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.12055/) (2022)
- [TexFusion: Synthesizing 3D Textures with Text-Guided Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13772/) (2023)
- [Towards Implicit Text-Guided 3D Shape Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14622/) (2022)
- [3D-LDM: Neural Implicit 3D Shape Generation with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00842/) (2022)
- [SALAD: Part-Level Latent Diffusion for 3D Shape Generation and Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12236/) (2023)
- [Advances in 3D Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17807/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Point Cloud Representation Learning with Deep Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13589/) (2022)
- [Self-Contrastive Learning with Hard Negative Sampling for Self-supervised Point Cloud Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.01886/) (2021)
- [Point-set Distances for Learning Representations of 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04014/) (2021)
- [RangeLDM: Fast Realistic LiDAR Point Cloud Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10094/) (2024)
- [Comprehensive Review of Deep Learning-Based 3D Point Cloud Completion Processing and Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03311/) (2022)
- [Octree Transformer: Autoregressive 3D Shape Generation on Hierarchically Structured Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12480/) (2021)
- [Autoregressive 3D Shape Generation via Canonical Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01955/) (2022)
- [Top-N: Equivariant set and graph generation without exchangeability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02096/) (2021)
- [DiffFacto: Controllable Part-Based 3D Point Cloud Generation with Cross Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01921/) (2023)
- [Orienting Point Clouds with Dipole Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01604/) (2021)
- [OctGPT: Octree-based Multiscale Autoregressive Models for 3D Shape Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09975/) (2025)
- [Make-A-Shape: a Ten-Million-scale 3D Shape Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11067/) (2024)
- [GECCO: Geometrically-Conditioned Point Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05916/) (2023)
- [Learning to Generate 3D Shapes with Generative Cellular Automata](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04130/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generating 3D point clouds is challenging yet highly desired. This work presents a novel autoregressive model, PointGrow, which can generate diverse and realistic point cloud samples from scratch or conditioned on semantic contexts. This model operates recurrently, with each point sampled according to a conditional distribution given its previously-generated points, allowing inter-point correlations to be well-exploited and 3D shape generative processes to be better interpreted. Since point cloud object shapes are typically encoded by long-range dependencies, we augment our model with dedicated self-attention modules to capture such relations. Extensive evaluations show that PointGrow achieves satisfying performance on both unconditional and conditional point cloud generation tasks, with respect to realism and diversity. Several important applications, such as unsupervised feature learning and shape arithmetic operations, are also demonstrated.