# The Devil is in the Pose: Ambiguity-free 3D Rotation-invariant Learning via Pose-aware Convolution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.15210 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15210/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [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)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Fast Graph Representation Learning with PyTorch Geometric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02428/) (2019)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Fourier Features Let Networks Learn High Frequency Functions in Low Dimensional Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10739/) (2020)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02025/) (2015)
- [KPConv: Flexible and Deformable Convolution for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08889/) (2019)
- [PointCNN: Convolution On X-Transformed Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07791/) (2018)
- [Tensor field networks: Rotation- and translation-equivariant neural networks for 3D point clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08219/) (2018)
- [PointConv: Deep Convolutional Networks on 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07246/) (2018)
- [SE(3)-Transformers: 3D Roto-Translation Equivariant Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10503/) (2020)
- [Deep Learning for 3D Point Clouds: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12033/) (2019)
- [Revisiting Point Cloud Classification: A New Benchmark Dataset and Classification Model on Real-World Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04616/) (2019)
- [Spherical CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.10130/) (2018)
- [Relation-Shape Convolutional Neural Network for Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07601/) (2019)
- [Dynamic Edge-Conditioned Filters in Convolutional Neural Networks on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02901/) (2017)
- [Vector Neurons: A General Framework for SO(3)-Equivariant Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12229/) (2021)
- [SpiderCNN: Deep Learning on Point Sets with Parameterized Convolutional Filters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11527/) (2018)
- [PointASNL: Robust Point Clouds Processing using Nonlocal Neural Networks with Adaptive Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00492/) (2020)
- [PAConv: Position Adaptive Convolution with Dynamic Kernel Assembling on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14635/) (2021)
- [PPF-FoldNet: Unsupervised Learning of Rotation Invariant 3D Local Descriptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.10322/) (2018)
- [A Closer Look at Local Aggregation Operators in Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01294/) (2020)
- [Interpolated Convolutional Networks for 3D Point Cloud Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04512/) (2019)
- [Rotation Invariant Convolutions for 3D Point Clouds Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06297/) (2019)
- [A Rotation-Invariant Framework for Deep Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07238/) (2020)
- [Adaptive Graph Convolution for Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08035/) (2021)
- [Rotation-Invariant Local-to-Global Representation Learning for 3D Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03318/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [RI-MAE: Rotation-Invariant Masked AutoEncoders for Self-Supervised Point Cloud Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00353/) (2024)
- [PaRot: Patch-Wise Rotation-Invariant Network via Feature Disentanglement and Pose Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02535/) (2023)
- [Local-consistent Transformation Learning for Rotation-invariant Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11113/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Rotation Invariance with Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00149/) (2022)
- [An intuitive multi-frequency feature representation for SO(3)-equivariant networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04537/) (2024)
- [Rotation-Adaptive Point Cloud Domain Generalization via Intricate Orientation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02247/) (2025)
- [Open-Pose 3D Zero-Shot Learning: Benchmark and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07039/) (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)
- [TetraSphere: A Neural Descriptor for O(3)-Invariant Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14456/) (2022)
- [Equivariant vs. Invariant Layers: A Comparison of Backbone and Pooling for Point Cloud Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05553/) (2023)
- [Self-supervised Learning of Rotation-invariant 3D Point Set Features using Transformer and its Self-distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04725/) (2023)
- [RIDE: Boosting 3D Object Detection for LiDAR Point Clouds via Rotation-Invariant Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15643/) (2024)
- [HFBRI-MAE: Handcrafted Feature Based Rotation-Invariant Masked Autoencoder for 3D Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14132/) (2025)
- [Evaluating 3D Shape Analysis Methods for Robustness to Rotation Invariance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18557/) (2023)
- [Rethinking Rotation-Invariant Recognition of Fine-grained Shapes from the Perspective of Contour Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10992/) (2025)
- [Hierarchical Direction Perception via Atomic Dot-Product Operators for Rotation-Invariant Point Clouds Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08240/) (2025)
- [RI-Mamba: Rotation-Invariant Mamba for Robust Text-to-Shape Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11673/) (2026)
- [IRGNN: Efficient Invariant Radar Graph Neural Network for Radar Point Cloud Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.14394/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Rotation-invariant (RI) 3D deep learning methods suffer performance degradation as they typically design RI representations as input that lose critical global information comparing to 3D coordinates. Most state-of-the-arts address it by incurring additional blocks or complex global representations in a heavy and ineffective manner. In this paper, we reveal that the global information loss stems from an unexplored pose information loss problem, which can be solved more efficiently and effectively as we only need to restore more lightweight local pose in each layer, and the global information can be hierarchically aggregated in the deep networks without extra efforts. To address this problem, we develop a Pose-aware Rotation Invariant Convolution (i.e., PaRI-Conv), which dynamically adapts its kernels based on the relative poses. To implement it, we propose an Augmented Point Pair Feature (APPF) to fully encode the RI relative pose information, and a factorized dynamic kernel for pose-aware kernel generation, which can further reduce the computational cost and memory burden by decomposing the kernel into a shared basis matrix and a pose-aware diagonal matrix. Extensive experiments on shape classification and part segmentation tasks show that our PaRI-Conv surpasses the state-of-the-art RI methods while being more compact and efficient.