# Unsupervised Point Cloud Representation Learning with Deep Neural Networks: A Survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.13589 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13589/

## Key facts

- Cited by 54 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 102 of its 162 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Feb 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 102)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (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)
- [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)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07728/) (2018)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Deep Clustering for Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05520/) (2018)
- [A Point Set Generation Network for 3D Object Reconstruction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00603/) (2016)
- [PointRCNN: 3D Object Proposal Generation and Detection from Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04244/) (2018)
- [3D Semantic Segmentation with Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10275/) (2017)
- [Self-supervised Learning: Generative or Contrastive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08218/) (2020)
- [Dynamic Routing Between Capsules](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09829/) (2017)
- [Self-supervised Visual Feature Learning with Deep Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06162/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [Segment Any Point Cloud Sequences by Distilling Vision Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09347/) (2023)
- [Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning in Spectral Domain for Point Cloud Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08114/) (2024)
- [Vote2Cap-DETR++: Decoupling Localization and Describing for End-to-End 3D Dense Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02999/) (2023)
- [4D Contrastive Superflows are Dense 3D Representation Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06190/) (2024)
- [End-to-End Autonomous Driving without Costly Modularization and 3D Manual Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17680/) (2024)
- [Point-TTA: Test-Time Adaptation for Point Cloud Registration Using Multitask Meta-Auxiliary Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16481/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Label-Efficient Deep Learning for 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19812/) (2023)
- [LiMoE: Mixture of LiDAR Representation Learners from Automotive Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04004/) (2025)
- [Point2SSM: Learning Morphological Variations of Anatomies from Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14486/) (2023)
- [Beyond First Impressions: Integrating Joint Multi-modal Cues for Comprehensive 3D Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02982/) (2023)
- [An Empirical Study of Training State-of-the-Art LiDAR Segmentation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14870/) (2024)
- [LargeAD: Large-Scale Cross-Sensor Data Pretraining for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04005/) (2025)
- [3EED: Ground Everything Everywhere in 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01755/) (2025)
- [T-MAE: Temporal Masked Autoencoders for Point Cloud Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10217/) (2023)
- [Calib3D: Calibrating Model Preferences for Reliable 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17010/) (2024)
- [Point-DAE: Denoising Autoencoders for Self-supervised Point Cloud Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06841/) (2022)
- [Beyond One Shot, Beyond One Perspective: Cross-View and Long-Horizon Distillation for Better LiDAR Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05260/) (2025)
- [FAPNet: An Effective Frequency Adaptive Point-based Eye Tracker](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03177/) (2024)
- [Deep Learning on 3D Semantic Segmentation: A Detailed Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02104/) (2024)
- [MoST: Efficient Monarch Sparse Tuning for 3D Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18368/) (2025)
- [Adversarial Attacks and Defenses on 3D Point Cloud Classification: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00309/) (2023)
- [Novel class discovery meets foundation models for 3D semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03782/) (2023)
- [MaskLRF: Self-supervised Pretraining via Masked Autoencoding of Local Reference Frames for Rotation-invariant 3D Point Set Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00206/) (2024)
- [Explainability of Point Cloud Neural Networks Using SMILE: Statistical Model-Agnostic Interpretability with Local Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15374/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised semantic segmentation of urban high-density multispectral point clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18520/) (2024)
- [LiDAR Remote Sensing Meets Weak Supervision: Concepts, Methods, and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18384/) (2025)
- [Forging Spatial Intelligence: A Roadmap of Multi-Modal Data Pre-Training for Autonomous Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24385/) (2025)
- [Multi-View Representation is What You Need for Point-Cloud Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02558/) (2023)
- [GeoMask3D: Geometrically Informed Mask Selection for Self-Supervised Point Cloud Learning in 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12419/) (2024)
- [Self-supervised Learning of Rotation-invariant 3D Point Set Features using Transformer and its Self-distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04725/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Point cloud data have been widely explored due to its superior accuracy and robustness under various adverse situations. Meanwhile, deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved very impressive success in various applications such as surveillance and autonomous driving. The convergence of point cloud and DNNs has led to many deep point cloud models, largely trained under the supervision of large-scale and densely-labelled point cloud data. Unsupervised point cloud representation learning, which aims to learn general and useful point cloud representations from unlabelled point cloud data, has recently attracted increasing attention due to the constraint in large-scale point cloud labelling. This paper provides a comprehensive review of unsupervised point cloud representation learning using DNNs. It first describes the motivation, general pipelines as well as terminologies of the recent studies. Relevant background including widely adopted point cloud datasets and DNN architectures is then briefly presented. This is followed by an extensive discussion of existing unsupervised point cloud representation learning methods according to their technical approaches. We also quantitatively benchmark and discuss the reviewed methods over multiple widely adopted point cloud datasets. Finally, we share our humble opinion about several challenges and problems that could be pursued in future research in unsupervised point cloud representation learning. A project associated with this survey has been built at https://github.com/xiaoaoran/3d_url_survey.