# Progressive Seed Generation Auto-encoder for Unsupervised Point Cloud Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.05213 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05213/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Dec 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (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)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [PointCNN: Convolution On X-Transformed Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07791/) (2018)
- [PointConv: Deep Convolutional Networks on 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07246/) (2018)
- [AtlasNet: A Papier-Mach'e Approach to Learning 3D Surface Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05384/) (2018)
- [PointFlow: 3D Point Cloud Generation with Continuous Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.12320/) (2019)
- [PCN: Point Completion Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00671/) (2018)
- [GRNet: Gridding Residual Network for Dense Point Cloud Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03761/) (2020)
- [PF-Net: Point Fractal Network for 3D Point Cloud Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00410/) (2020)
- [PPF-FoldNet: Unsupervised Learning of Rotation Invariant 3D Local Descriptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.10322/) (2018)
- [3D Point Capsule Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.10775/) (2018)
- [Point Cloud Completion by Skip-attention Network with Hierarchical Folding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03871/) (2020)
- [PointGrow: Autoregressively Learned Point Cloud Generation with Self-Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.05591/) (2018)
- [PMP-Net: Point Cloud Completion by Learning Multi-step Point Moving Paths](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03408/) (2020)
- [Multiresolution Tree Networks for 3D Point Cloud Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03520/) (2018)
- [Discrete Point Flow Networks for Efficient Point Cloud Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10170/) (2020)
- [Point Cloud GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.05795/) (2018)
- [Global-Local Bidirectional Reasoning for Unsupervised Representation Learning of 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12971/) (2020)
- [Detail Preserved Point Cloud Completion via Separated Feature Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02374/) (2020)
- [RL-GAN-Net: A Reinforcement Learning Agent Controlled GAN Network for Real-Time Point Cloud Shape Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12304/) (2019)
- [SoftPoolNet: Shape Descriptor for Point Cloud Completion and Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07358/) (2020)
- [Render4Completion: Synthesizing Multi-View Depth Maps for 3D Shape Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08366/) (2019)
- [Point Set Voting for Partial Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.04537/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [CrossPoint: Self-Supervised Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning for 3D Point Cloud Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00680/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Point Cloud Representation Learning with Deep Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13589/) (2022)
- [MAELi: Masked Autoencoder for Large-Scale LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07207/) (2022)
- [POS-BERT: Point Cloud One-Stage BERT Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00989/) (2022)
- [Leveraging Single-View Images for Unsupervised 3D Point Cloud Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00564/) (2022)
- [3D Shape Completion on Unseen Categories:A Weakly-supervised Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10578/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised 3D Point Cloud Completion via Multi-view Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09786/) (2024)
- [Novel class discovery meets foundation models for 3D semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03782/) (2023)
- [Self-Supervised Feature Learning from Partial Point Clouds via Pose Disentanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03018/) (2022)
- [CLR-GAM: Contrastive Point Cloud Learning with Guided Augmentation and Feature Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14306/) (2023)
- [HFBRI-MAE: Handcrafted Feature Based Rotation-Invariant Masked Autoencoder for 3D Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14132/) (2025)
- [Learning Permutation-invariant Macroscopic Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30812/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the development of 3D scanning technologies, 3D vision tasks have become a popular research area. Owing to the large amount of data acquired by sensors, unsupervised learning is essential for understanding and utilizing point clouds without an expensive annotation process. In this paper, we propose a novel framework and an effective auto-encoder architecture named "PSG-Net" for reconstruction-based learning of point clouds. Unlike existing studies that used fixed or random 2D points, our framework generates input-dependent point-wise features for the latent point set. PSG-Net uses the encoded input to produce point-wise features through the seed generation module and extracts richer features in multiple stages with gradually increasing resolution by applying the seed feature propagation module progressively. We prove the effectiveness of PSG-Net experimentally; PSG-Net shows state-of-the-art performances in point cloud reconstruction and unsupervised classification, and achieves comparable performance to counterpart methods in supervised completion.