PointMixer: MLP-Mixer for Point Cloud Understanding
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Abstract (arXiv)
MLP-Mixer has newly appeared as a new challenger against the realm of CNNs and transformer. Despite its simplicity compared to transformer, the concept of channel-mixing MLPs and token-mixing MLPs achieves noticeable performance in visual recognition tasks. Unlike images, point clouds are inherently sparse, unordered and irregular, which limits the direct use of MLP-Mixer for point cloud understanding. In this paper, we propose PointMixer, a universal point set operator that facilitates information sharing among unstructured 3D points. By simply replacing token-mixing MLPs with a softmax function, PointMixer can "mix" features within/between point sets. By doing so, PointMixer can be broadly used in the network as inter-set mixing, intra-set mixing, and pyramid mixing. Extensive experiments show the competitive or superior performance of PointMixer in semantic segmentation, classification, and point reconstruction against transformer-based methods.
Key facts. Cited by 71 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 77 of its 104 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 22 Nov 2021.
Builds on
77 of 104 references.
References · 77
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50 most cited of 77 All 77 (JSON)
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Citing papers per year: 2021: 3; 2022: 4; 2023: 24; 2024: 18; 2025: 11; 2026: 11.
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- 2023TSMixer: An All-MLP Architecture for Time Series Forecastingcited by 232
- 2023Meta-Transformer: A Unified Framework for Multimodal Learningcited by 136
- 2023Swin3D: A Pretrained Transformer Backbone for 3D Indoor Scene Understandingcited by 111
- 2023Using a Waffle Iron for Automotive Point Cloud Semantic Segmentationcited by 53
- 2025Dr. Splat: Directly Referring 3D Gaussian Splatting via Direct Language Embedding Registrationcited by 50
- 2023Self-positioning Point-based Transformer for Point Cloud Understandingcited by 40
- 2022BALF: Simple and Efficient Blur Aware Local Feature Detectorcited by 34
- 20213D Medical Point Transformer: Introducing Convolution to Attention Networks for Medical Point Cloud Analysiscited by 23
- 2022PointVector: A Vector Representation In Point Cloud Analysiscited by 21
- 2022EPCL: Frozen CLIP Transformer is An Efficient Point Cloud Encodercited by 18
- 2024KPConvX: Modernizing Kernel Point Convolution with Kernel Attentioncited by 16
- 2021Deep Point Cloud Reconstructioncited by 15
38 more
- 2024Rethinking Data Augmentation for Robust LiDAR Semantic Segmentation in Adverse Weathercited by 14
- 2025Accurate and efficient zero-shot 6D pose estimation with frozen foundation modelscited by 13
- 2023Decoupled Local Aggregation for Point Cloud Learningcited by 12
- 2023Mixing-Denoising Generalizable Occupancy Networkscited by 12
- 2024Benchmarking tree species classification from proximally-sensed laser scanning data: introducing the FOR-species20K datasetcited by 12
- 2023SummaryMixing: A Linear-Complexity Alternative to Self-Attention for Speech Recognition and Understandingcited by 11
- 2024MAMBA4D: Efficient Long-Sequence Point Cloud Video Understanding with Disentangled Spatial-Temporal State Space Modelscited by 11
- 2023PointWavelet: Learning in Spectral Domain for 3D Point Cloud Analysiscited by 7
- 2023You Never Get a Second Chance To Make a Good First Impression: Seeding Active Learning for 3D Semantic Segmentationcited by 6
- 2023Semantic segmentation of sparse irregular point clouds for leaf/wood discriminationcited by 6
- 2023Retro-FPN: Retrospective Feature Pyramid Network for Point Cloud Semantic Segmentationcited by 6
- 2024FSC: Few-point Shape Completioncited by 6
- 2023Full Point Encoding for Local Feature Aggregation in 3D Point Cloudscited by 5
- 2024Fine-grained Image-to-LiDAR Contrastive Distillation with Visual Foundation Modelscited by 5
- 2025No Thing, Nothing: Highlighting Safety-Critical Classes for Robust LiDAR Semantic Segmentation in Adverse Weathercited by 5
- 2023Test-Time Augmentation for 3D Point Cloud Classification and Segmentationcited by 4
- 2024Adapt PointFormer: 3D Point Cloud Analysis via Adapting 2D Visual Transformerscited by 4
- 2025Fourier Decomposition for Explicit Representation of 3D Point Cloud Attributescited by 4
- 2023Asynchronous Events-based Panoptic Segmentation using Graph Mixer Neural Networkcited by 3
- 2023Object Re-Identification from Point Cloudscited by 3
- 2023Stable and Consistent Prediction of 3D Characteristic Orientation via Invariant Residual Learningcited by 3
- 2023PatchMixer: Rethinking network design to boost generalization for 3D point cloud understandingcited by 3
- 2023PointHR: Exploring High-Resolution Architectures for 3D Point Cloud Segmentationcited by 3
- 2024Advancements in Point Cloud-Based 3D Defect Detection and Classification for Industrial Systems: A Comprehensive Surveycited by 3
- 2024GeoAuxNet: Towards Universal 3D Representation Learning for Multi-sensor Point Cloudscited by 3
- 2024Learning SO(3)-Invariant Semantic Correspondence via Local Shape Transformcited by 3
- 2024Is Contrastive Distillation Enough for Learning Comprehensive 3D Representations?cited by 3
- 2021Putting 3D Spatially Sparse Networks on a Dietcited by 2
- 2023SelFLoc: Selective Feature Fusion for Large-scale Point Cloud-based Place Recognitioncited by 2
- 2024APC2Mesh: Bridging the gap from occluded building faccades to full 3D modelscited by 2
- 2024PointViG: A Lightweight GNN-based Model for Efficient Point Cloud Analysiscited by 2
- 2025Mesh Mamba: A Unified State Space Model for Saliency Prediction in Non-Textured and Textured Meshescited by 2
- 2023Cloud-RAIN: Point Cloud Analysis with Reflectional Invariancecited by 1
- 2025Is clustering enough for LiDAR instance segmentation? A state-of-the-art training-free baselinecited by 1
- 2025Ambiguity-aware Point Cloud Segmentation by Adaptive Margin Contrastive Learningcited by 1
- 2026STS-Mixer: Spatio-Temporal-Spectral Mixer for 4D Point Cloud Video Understandingcited by 1
- 2022Diffusion Unit: Interpretable Edge Enhancement and Suppression Learning for 3D Point Cloud Segmentationcited by 0
- 2023APPT : Asymmetric Parallel Point Transformer for 3D Point Cloud Understandingcited by 0
50 most cited of 71 All 71 (JSON)
- 2026QSV: Quat-Sphere-Vision for Coupled Quaternion Attention on Spherical Lattices24 Sep 2026
- 2026PCT-Prompt: A Prompt-Guided Transformer Framework for Dense Prediction Tasks in Point Clouds17 Aug 2026
- 2026Vanilla ViT for Automotive Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation29 May 2026
- 2026Ilov3Splat: Instance-Level Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Understanding in Gaussian Splatting6 May 2026
- 2026LOD-Net: Locality-Aware 3D Object Detection Using Multi-Scale Transformer Network17 Apr 2026
- 2026P3T: Prototypical Point-level Prompt Tuning with Enhanced Generalization for 3D Vision-Language Models17 Apr 2026
- 2026STS-Mixer: Spatio-Temporal-Spectral Mixer for 4D Point Cloud Video Understanding13 Apr 2026
- 2026Mamba Learns in Context: Structure-Aware Domain Generalization for Multi-Task Point Cloud Understanding21 Mar 2026
- 2026TCATSeg: A Tooth Center-Wise Attention Network for 3D Dental Model Semantic Segmentation17 Mar 2026
- 2026Efficient Point Cloud Processing with High-Dimensional Positional Encoding and Non-Local MLPs4 Mar 2026
- 2026Adaptive Augmentation-Aware Latent Learning for Robust LiDAR Semantic Segmentation1 Mar 2026
- 2025Unlocking Hidden Potential in Point Cloud Networks with Attention-Guided Grouping-Feature Coordination20 Sep 2025
38 more
- 2025Adaptive Point-Prompt Tuning: Fine-Tuning Heterogeneous Foundation Models for 3D Point Cloud Analysis30 Aug 2025
- 2025PointVDP: Learning View-Dependent Projection by Fireworks Rays for 3D Point Cloud Segmentation9 Jul 2025
- 2025Ambiguity-aware Point Cloud Segmentation by Adaptive Margin Contrastive Learning9 Jul 2025
- 2025Accurate and efficient zero-shot 6D pose estimation with frozen foundation models11 Jun 2025
- 2025Towards Generalized Range-View LiDAR Segmentation in Adverse Weather10 Jun 2025
- 2025Mesh Mamba: A Unified State Space Model for Saliency Prediction in Non-Textured and Textured Meshes2 Apr 2025
- 2025No Thing, Nothing: Highlighting Safety-Critical Classes for Robust LiDAR Semantic Segmentation in Adverse Weather20 Mar 2025
- 2025Is clustering enough for LiDAR instance segmentation? A state-of-the-art training-free baseline17 Mar 2025
- 2025Fourier Decomposition for Explicit Representation of 3D Point Cloud Attributes13 Mar 2025
- 2025Dr. Splat: Directly Referring 3D Gaussian Splatting via Direct Language Embedding Registration23 Feb 2025
- 2024Is Contrastive Distillation Enough for Learning Comprehensive 3D Representations?12 Dec 2024
- 2024Efficient Point Cloud Classification via Offline Distillation Framework and Negative-Weight Self-Distillation Technique3 Sep 2024
- 2024RegTrack: Simplicity Beneath Complexity in Robust Multi-Modal 3D Multi-Object Tracking1 Sep 2024
- 2024Benchmarking tree species classification from proximally-sensed laser scanning data: introducing the FOR-species20K dataset12 Aug 2024
- 2024Adapt PointFormer: 3D Point Cloud Analysis via Adapting 2D Visual Transformers18 Jul 2024
- 2024Enhancing Robustness to Noise Corruption for Point Cloud Recognition via Spatial Sorting and Set-Mixing Aggregation Module15 Jul 2024
- 2024Rethinking Data Augmentation for Robust LiDAR Semantic Segmentation in Adverse Weather2 Jul 2024
- 2024PointViG: A Lightweight GNN-based Model for Efficient Point Cloud Analysis1 Jul 2024
- 2024WindowMixer: Intra-Window and Inter-Window Modeling for Time Series Forecasting14 Jun 2024
- 2024MAMBA4D: Efficient Long-Sequence Point Cloud Video Understanding with Disentangled Spatial-Temporal State Space Models23 May 2024
- 2024Fine-grained Image-to-LiDAR Contrastive Distillation with Visual Foundation Models23 May 2024
- 2024KPConvX: Modernizing Kernel Point Convolution with Kernel Attention21 May 2024
- 2024Learning SO(3)-Invariant Semantic Correspondence via Local Shape Transform17 Apr 2024
- 2024APC2Mesh: Bridging the gap from occluded building faccades to full 3D models3 Apr 2024
- 2024GeoAuxNet: Towards Universal 3D Representation Learning for Multi-sensor Point Clouds28 Mar 2024
- 2024Soft Masked Transformer for Point Cloud Processing with Skip Attention-Based Upsampling21 Mar 2024
- 2024FSC: Few-point Shape Completion12 Mar 2024
- 2024Advancements in Point Cloud-Based 3D Defect Detection and Classification for Industrial Systems: A Comprehensive Survey20 Feb 2024
- 2023Test-Time Augmentation for 3D Point Cloud Classification and Segmentation22 Nov 2023
- 2023Mixing-Denoising Generalizable Occupancy Networks20 Nov 2023
- 2023PointHR: Exploring High-Resolution Architectures for 3D Point Cloud Segmentation11 Oct 2023
- 2023Bidirectional Knowledge Reconfiguration for Lightweight Point Cloud Analysis8 Oct 2023
- 2023Decoupled Local Aggregation for Point Cloud Learning31 Aug 2023
- 2023Retro-FPN: Retrospective Feature Pyramid Network for Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation18 Aug 2023
- 2023PatchMixer: Rethinking network design to boost generalization for 3D point cloud understanding28 Jul 2023
- 2023Meta-Transformer: A Unified Framework for Multimodal Learning20 Jul 2023
- 2023SummaryMixing: A Linear-Complexity Alternative to Self-Attention for Speech Recognition and Understanding12 Jul 2023
- 2023Stable and Consistent Prediction of 3D Characteristic Orientation via Invariant Residual Learning20 Jun 2023
50 newest of 71 All 71 (JSON)
- 2024MAMBA4D: Efficient Long-Sequence Point Cloud Video Understanding with Disentangled Spatial-Temporal State Space Modelscited by 11
- 2025Mesh Mamba: A Unified State Space Model for Saliency Prediction in Non-Textured and Textured Meshescited by 2
- 2026Mamba Learns in Context: Structure-Aware Domain Generalization for Multi-Task Point Cloud Understandingcited by 0
- 2026Mamba Learns in Context: Structure-Aware Domain Generalization for Multi-Task Point Cloud Understanding21 Mar 2026
- 2025Mesh Mamba: A Unified State Space Model for Saliency Prediction in Non-Textured and Textured Meshes2 Apr 2025
- 2024MAMBA4D: Efficient Long-Sequence Point Cloud Video Understanding with Disentangled Spatial-Temporal State Space Models23 May 2024
- 2023TSMixer: An All-MLP Architecture for Time Series Forecastingcited by 232
- 2023Meta-Transformer: A Unified Framework for Multimodal Learningcited by 136
- 2023Swin3D: A Pretrained Transformer Backbone for 3D Indoor Scene Understandingcited by 111
- 2023Using a Waffle Iron for Automotive Point Cloud Semantic Segmentationcited by 53
- 2025Dr. Splat: Directly Referring 3D Gaussian Splatting via Direct Language Embedding Registrationcited by 50
- 2023Self-positioning Point-based Transformer for Point Cloud Understandingcited by 40
- 2022BALF: Simple and Efficient Blur Aware Local Feature Detectorcited by 34
- 20213D Medical Point Transformer: Introducing Convolution to Attention Networks for Medical Point Cloud Analysiscited by 23
- 2022PointVector: A Vector Representation In Point Cloud Analysiscited by 21
- 2022EPCL: Frozen CLIP Transformer is An Efficient Point Cloud Encodercited by 18
- 2024KPConvX: Modernizing Kernel Point Convolution with Kernel Attentioncited by 16
- 2021Deep Point Cloud Reconstructioncited by 15
12 most cited of 66 All 66 (JSON)
- 2026QSV: Quat-Sphere-Vision for Coupled Quaternion Attention on Spherical Lattices24 Sep 2026
- 2026PCT-Prompt: A Prompt-Guided Transformer Framework for Dense Prediction Tasks in Point Clouds17 Aug 2026
- 2026Vanilla ViT for Automotive Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation29 May 2026
- 2026Ilov3Splat: Instance-Level Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Understanding in Gaussian Splatting6 May 2026
- 2026LOD-Net: Locality-Aware 3D Object Detection Using Multi-Scale Transformer Network17 Apr 2026
- 2026STS-Mixer: Spatio-Temporal-Spectral Mixer for 4D Point Cloud Video Understanding13 Apr 2026
- 2026TCATSeg: A Tooth Center-Wise Attention Network for 3D Dental Model Semantic Segmentation17 Mar 2026
- 2026Efficient Point Cloud Processing with High-Dimensional Positional Encoding and Non-Local MLPs4 Mar 2026
- 2026Adaptive Augmentation-Aware Latent Learning for Robust LiDAR Semantic Segmentation1 Mar 2026
- 2025Unlocking Hidden Potential in Point Cloud Networks with Attention-Guided Grouping-Feature Coordination20 Sep 2025
- 2025Adaptive Point-Prompt Tuning: Fine-Tuning Heterogeneous Foundation Models for 3D Point Cloud Analysis30 Aug 2025
- 2025PointVDP: Learning View-Dependent Projection by Fireworks Rays for 3D Point Cloud Segmentation9 Jul 2025
12 newest of 66 All 66 (JSON)