# Towards Efficient Graph Convolutional Networks for Point Cloud Handling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.05706 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05706/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 52 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [Deep Compression: Compressing Deep Neural Networks with Pruning, Trained Quantization and Huffman Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.00149/) (2015)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks on Graphs with Fast Localized Spectral Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09375/) (2016)
- [Occupancy Networks: Learning 3D Reconstruction in Function Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03828/) (2018)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [Beyond a Gaussian Denoiser: Residual Learning of Deep CNN for Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03981/) (2016)
- [4D Spatio-Temporal ConvNets: Minkowski Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08755/) (2019)
- [KPConv: Flexible and Deformable Convolution for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08889/) (2019)
- [ShuffleNet: An Extremely Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01083/) (2017)
- [ShuffleNet V2: Practical Guidelines for Efficient CNN Architecture Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11164/) (2018)
- [SqueezeNet: AlexNet-level accuracy with 50x fewer parameters and <0.5MB model size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07360/) (2016)
- [PV-RCNN: Point-Voxel Feature Set Abstraction for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13192/) (2019)
- [Hierarchical Graph Representation Learning with Differentiable Pooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08804/) (2018)
- [Accelerating 3D Deep Learning with PyTorch3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08501/) (2020)
- [Convolutional Occupancy Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04618/) (2020)
- [PCT: Point cloud transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09688/) (2020)
- [Open3D: A Modern Library for 3D Data Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09847/) (2018)
- [Channel Pruning for Accelerating Very Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06168/) (2017)
- [Rethinking the Value of Network Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.05270/) (2018)
- [RandLA-Net: Efficient Semantic Segmentation of Large-Scale Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11236/) (2019)
- [Graph Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06455/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [A Survey on Graph Neural Networks and Graph Transformers in Computer Vision: A Task-Oriented Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13232/) (2022)
- [PointDistiller: Structured Knowledge Distillation Towards Efficient and Compact 3D Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11098/) (2022)
- [Invariant Training 2D-3D Joint Hard Samples for Few-Shot Point Cloud Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09694/) (2023)
- [Hardware-Aware Graph Neural Network Automated Design for Edge Computing Platforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10875/) (2023)
- [Decoupled Local Aggregation for Point Cloud Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16532/) (2023)
- [Towards Efficient Point Cloud Graph Neural Networks Through Architectural Simplification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06317/) (2021)
- [A Comprehensive Benchmark on Spectral GNNs: The Impact on Efficiency, Memory, and Effectiveness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09675/) (2024)
- [Haar Wavelet Feature Compression for Quantized Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04824/) (2021)
- [Graph Neural Networks Automated Design and Deployment on Device-Edge Co-Inference Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05605/) (2024)
- [Key-Graph Transformer for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02634/) (2024)
- [GraNNite: Enabling High-Performance Execution of Graph Neural Networks on Resource-Constrained Neural Processing Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06921/) (2025)
- [Point Cloud Denoising and Outlier Detection with Local Geometric Structure by Dynamic Graph CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07376/) (2023)
- [HGNAS: Hardware-Aware Graph Neural Architecture Search for Edge Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12840/) (2024)
- [GCoDE: Efficient Device-Edge Co-Inference for GNNs via Architecture-Mapping Co-Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11856/) (2025)
- [Exploring Spatial-Temporal Representation via Star Graph for mmWave Radar-based Human Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12013/) (2025)
- [HyQuRP: Hybrid quantum-classical neural network with rotational and permutational equivariance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06381/) (2026)
- [Coden: Efficient Temporal Graph Neural Networks for Continuous Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12613/) (2026)
- [Rotation-Invariant Multi-IMU Activity Recognition under Independent Per-Location Orientation Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15621/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we aim at improving the computational efficiency of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) for learning on point clouds. The basic graph convolution that is typically composed of a K-nearest neighbor (KNN) search and a multilayer perceptron (MLP) is examined. By mathematically analyzing the operations there, two findings to improve the efficiency of GCNs are obtained. (1) The local geometric structure information of 3D representations propagates smoothly across the GCN that relies on KNN search to gather neighborhood features. This motivates the simplification of multiple KNN searches in GCNs. (2) Shuffling the order of graph feature gathering and an MLP leads to equivalent or similar composite operations. Based on those findings, we optimize the computational procedure in GCNs. A series of experiments show that the optimized networks have reduced computational complexity, decreased memory consumption, and accelerated inference speed while maintaining comparable accuracy for learning on point clouds. Code will be available at urlhttps://github.com/ofsoundof/EfficientGCN.git.