# TorchSparse: Efficient Point Cloud Inference Engine

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.10319 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10319/

## Key facts

- Cited by 73 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [3D U-Net: Learning Dense Volumetric Segmentation from Sparse Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06650/) (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)
- [Center-based 3D Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11275/) (2020)
- [PV-RCNN: Point-Voxel Feature Set Abstraction for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13192/) (2019)
- [PointCNN: Convolution On X-Transformed Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07791/) (2018)
- [3D Semantic Segmentation with Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10275/) (2017)
- [PointConv: Deep Convolutional Networks on 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07246/) (2018)
- [Searching Efficient 3D Architectures with Sparse Point-Voxel Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.16100/) (2020)
- [Point-Voxel CNN for Efficient 3D Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03739/) (2019)
- [Volumetric and Multi-View CNNs for Object Classification on 3D Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03265/) (2016)
- [PV-RCNN++: Point-Voxel Feature Set Abstraction With Local Vector Representation for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00463/) (2021)
- [FeatGraph: A Flexible and Efficient Backend for Graph Neural Network Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.11359/) (2020)
- [PointAcc: Efficient Point Cloud Accelerator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07600/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 73)

- [XCube: Large-Scale 3D Generative Modeling using Sparse Voxel Hierarchies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03806/) (2023)
- [Robo3D: Towards Robust and Reliable 3D Perception against Corruptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17597/) (2023)
- [Delving into the Devils of Bird's-eye-view Perception: A Review, Evaluation and Recipe](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05324/) (2022)
- [DistriFusion: Distributed Parallel Inference for High-Resolution Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19481/) (2024)
- [SceneScript: Reconstructing Scenes With An Autoregressive Structured Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13064/) (2024)
- [FlatFormer: Flattened Window Attention for Efficient Point Cloud Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08739/) (2023)
- [Towards Realistic Scene Generation with LiDAR Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00815/) (2024)
- [Neural LiDAR Fields for Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01643/) (2023)
- [SpatialLM: Training Large Language Models for Structured Indoor Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07491/) (2025)
- [SparseViT: Revisiting Activation Sparsity for Efficient High-Resolution Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17605/) (2023)
- [SCube: Instant Large-Scale Scene Reconstruction using VoxSplats](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20030/) (2024)
- [Using a Waffle Iron for Automotive Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10100/) (2023)
- [SparseTIR: Composable Abstractions for Sparse Compilation in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04606/) (2022)
- [Dynamic 3D Scene Analysis by Point Cloud Accumulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12394/) (2022)
- [3D Semantic Segmentation in the Wild: Learning Generalized Models for Adverse-Condition Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00690/) (2023)
- [Efficient Spatially Sparse Inference for Conditional GANs and Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.02048/) (2022)
- [TorchSparse++: Efficient Training and Inference Framework for Sparse Convolution on GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12862/) (2023)
- [4D Contrastive Superflows are Dense 3D Representation Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06190/) (2024)
- [Enable Deep Learning on Mobile Devices: Methods, Systems, and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11786/) (2022)
- [PointConvFormer: Revenge of the Point-based Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02879/) (2022)
- [LinK: Linear Kernel for LiDAR-based 3D Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16094/) (2023)
- [Dynamic LiDAR Re-simulation using Compositional Neural Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05247/) (2023)
- [DiffInDScene: Diffusion-based High-Quality 3D Indoor Scene Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00519/) (2023)
- [fVDB: A Deep-Learning Framework for Sparse, Large-Scale, and High-Performance Spatial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01781/) (2024)
- [∞-Diff: Infinite Resolution Diffusion with Subsampled Mollified States](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18242/) (2023)
- [SALUDA: Surface-based Automotive Lidar Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03251/) (2023)
- [EVolSplat: Efficient Volume-based Gaussian Splatting for Urban View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20168/) (2025)
- [LiMoE: Mixture of LiDAR Representation Learners from Automotive Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04004/) (2025)
- [SVQNet: Sparse Voxel-Adjacent Query Network for 4D Spatio-Temporal LiDAR Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13323/) (2023)
- [MemorySeg: Online LiDAR Semantic Segmentation with a Latent Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01556/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep learning on point clouds has received increased attention thanks to its wide applications in AR/VR and autonomous driving. These applications require low latency and high accuracy to provide real-time user experience and ensure user safety. Unlike conventional dense workloads, the sparse and irregular nature of point clouds poses severe challenges to running sparse CNNs efficiently on the general-purpose hardware. Furthermore, existing sparse acceleration techniques for 2D images do not translate to 3D point clouds. In this paper, we introduce TorchSparse, a high-performance point cloud inference engine that accelerates the sparse convolution computation on GPUs. TorchSparse directly optimizes the two bottlenecks of sparse convolution: irregular computation and data movement. It applies adaptive matrix multiplication grouping to trade computation for better regularity, achieving 1.4-1.5x speedup for matrix multiplication. It also optimizes the data movement by adopting vectorized, quantized and fused locality-aware memory access, reducing the memory movement cost by 2.7x. Evaluated on seven representative models across three benchmark datasets, TorchSparse achieves 1.6x and 1.5x measured end-to-end speedup over the state-of-the-art MinkowskiEngine and SpConv, respectively.