# Spatio-temporal Self-Supervised Representation Learning for 3D Point Clouds

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.00179 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00179/

## Key facts

- Cited by 180 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 60 of its 84 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 60)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Deep Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06114/) (2017)
- [Contrastive Multiview Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05849/) (2019)
- [Learning deep representations by mutual information estimation and maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06670/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning by Context Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05192/) (2015)
- [PV-RCNN: Point-Voxel Feature Set Abstraction for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13192/) (2019)
- [What Makes for Good Views for Contrastive Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10243/) (2020)
- [PointCNN: Convolution On X-Transformed Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07791/) (2018)
- [Learning Representations by Maximizing Mutual Information Across Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00910/) (2019)
- [Data-Efficient Image Recognition with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09272/) (2019)
- [PointConv: Deep Convolutional Networks on 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07246/) (2018)
- [Deep Hough Voting for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09664/) (2019)
- [Learning a Probabilistic Latent Space of Object Shapes via 3D Generative-Adversarial Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.07584/) (2016)
- [PointContrast: Unsupervised Pre-training for 3D Point Cloud Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10985/) (2020)
- [Time-Contrastive Networks: Self-Supervised Learning from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06888/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 180)

- [Masked Autoencoders for Point Cloud Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06604/) (2022)
- [Point-M2AE: Multi-scale Masked Autoencoders for Hierarchical Point Cloud Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14401/) (2022)
- [Language-Grounded Indoor 3D Semantic Segmentation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07761/) (2022)
- [3D-VisTA: Pre-trained Transformer for 3D Vision and Text Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04352/) (2023)
- [CrossPoint: Self-Supervised Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning for 3D Point Cloud Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00680/) (2022)
- [CLIP2Scene: Towards Label-efficient 3D Scene Understanding by CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04926/) (2023)
- [Masked Discrimination for Self-Supervised Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11183/) (2022)
- [Learning 3D Representations from 2D Pre-trained Models via Image-to-Point Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06785/) (2022)
- [Image-to-Lidar Self-Supervised Distillation for Autonomous Driving Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16258/) (2022)
- [Segment Any Point Cloud Sequences by Distilling Vision Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09347/) (2023)
- [Autoencoders as Cross-Modal Teachers: Can Pretrained 2D Image Transformers Help 3D Representation Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08320/) (2022)
- [Self-Supervised Learning for Videos: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00419/) (2022)
- [UniPAD: A Universal Pre-training Paradigm for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08370/) (2023)
- [ALSO: Automotive Lidar Self-supervision by Occupancy estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05867/) (2022)
- [Ross3D: Reconstructive Visual Instruction Tuning with 3D-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01901/) (2025)
- [PonderV2: Pave the Way for 3D Foundation Model with A Universal Pre-training Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08586/) (2023)
- [4DContrast: Contrastive Learning with Dynamic Correspondences for 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02990/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Point Cloud Representation Learning with Deep Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13589/) (2022)
- [Ponder: Point Cloud Pre-training via Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00157/) (2022)
- [Point Cloud Pre-training with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14960/) (2023)
- [Implicit Autoencoder for Point-Cloud Self-Supervised Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00785/) (2022)
- [Three Pillars improving Vision Foundation Model Distillation for Lidar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17504/) (2023)
- [SAMPro3D: Locating SAM Prompts in 3D for Zero-Shot Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17707/) (2023)
- [ProposalContrast: Unsupervised Pre-training for LiDAR-based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12654/) (2022)
- [Masked Autoencoder for Self-Supervised Pre-training on Lidar Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00531/) (2022)
- [GeoMAE: Masked Geometric Target Prediction for Self-supervised Point Cloud Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08808/) (2023)
- [DynamicCity: Large-Scale 4D Occupancy Generation from Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18084/) (2024)
- [STEPS: Joint Self-supervised Nighttime Image Enhancement and Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01334/) (2023)
- [Active Finetuning: Exploiting Annotation Budget in the Pretraining-Finetuning Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14382/) (2023)
- [GIPSO: Geometrically Informed Propagation for Online Adaptation in 3D LiDAR Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09763/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

To date, various 3D scene understanding tasks still lack practical and generalizable pre-trained models, primarily due to the intricate nature of 3D scene understanding tasks and their immense variations introduced by camera views, lighting, occlusions, etc. In this paper, we tackle this challenge by introducing a spatio-temporal representation learning (STRL) framework, capable of learning from unlabeled 3D point clouds in a self-supervised fashion. Inspired by how infants learn from visual data in the wild, we explore the rich spatio-temporal cues derived from the 3D data. Specifically, STRL takes two temporally-correlated frames from a 3D point cloud sequence as the input, transforms it with the spatial data augmentation, and learns the invariant representation self-supervisedly. To corroborate the efficacy of STRL, we conduct extensive experiments on three types (synthetic, indoor, and outdoor) of datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared with supervised learning methods, the learned self-supervised representation facilitates various models to attain comparable or even better performances while capable of generalizing pre-trained models to downstream tasks, including 3D shape classification, 3D object detection, and 3D semantic segmentation. Moreover, the spatio-temporal contextual cues embedded in 3D point clouds significantly improve the learned representations.