# LidarNAS: Unifying and Searching Neural Architectures for 3D Point Clouds

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.05018 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05018/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 55 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [DARTS: Differentiable Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09055/) (2018)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [Neural Architecture Search with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01578/) (2016)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [VoxelNet: End-to-End Learning for Point Cloud Based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06396/) (2017)
- [Objects as Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07850/) (2019)
- [Center-based 3D Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11275/) (2020)
- [PointRCNN: 3D Object Proposal Generation and Detection from Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04244/) (2018)
- [Regularized Evolution for Image Classifier Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01548/) (2018)
- [PV-RCNN: Point-Voxel Feature Set Abstraction for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13192/) (2019)
- [Efficient Neural Architecture Search via Parameter Sharing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03268/) (2018)
- [Multi-View 3D Object Detection Network for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07759/) (2016)
- [Deep Hough Voting for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09664/) (2019)
- [Progressive Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00559/) (2017)
- [Searching Efficient 3D Architectures with Sparse Point-Voxel Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.16100/) (2020)
- [Voxel R-CNN: Towards High Performance Voxel-based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15712/) (2020)
- [PIXOR: Real-time 3D Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06326/) (2019)
- [Large-Scale Evolution of Image Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01041/) (2017)
- [Point-Voxel CNN for Efficient 3D Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03739/) (2019)
- [NAS-FPN: Learning Scalable Feature Pyramid Architecture for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07392/) (2019)
- [Designing Neural Network Architectures using Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.02167/) (2016)
- [Auto-DeepLab: Hierarchical Neural Architecture Search for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02985/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [MoDAR: Using Motion Forecasting for 3D Object Detection in Point Cloud Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03206/) (2023)
- [Efficient Transformer-based 3D Object Detection with Dynamic Token Halting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05078/) (2023)
- [LEF: Late-to-Early Temporal Fusion for LiDAR 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16870/) (2023)
- [Rethink 3D Object Detection from Physical World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00190/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Developing neural models that accurately understand objects in 3D point clouds is essential for the success of robotics and autonomous driving. However, arguably due to the higher-dimensional nature of the data (as compared to images), existing neural architectures exhibit a large variety in their designs, including but not limited to the views considered, the format of the neural features, and the neural operations used. Lack of a unified framework and interpretation makes it hard to put these designs in perspective, as well as systematically explore new ones. In this paper, we begin by proposing a unified framework of such, with the key idea being factorizing the neural networks into a series of view transforms and neural layers. We demonstrate that this modular framework can reproduce a variety of existing works while allowing a fair comparison of backbone designs. Then, we show how this framework can easily materialize into a concrete neural architecture search (NAS) space, allowing a principled NAS-for-3D exploration. In performing evolutionary NAS on the 3D object detection task on the Waymo Open Dataset, not only do we outperform the state-of-the-art models, but also report the interesting finding that NAS tends to discover the same macro-level architecture concept for both the vehicle and pedestrian classes.