# Energy-Based Residual Latent Transport for Unsupervised Point Cloud Completion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.06820 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06820/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Nov 2022.

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

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [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)
- [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)
- [What Uncertainties Do We Need in Bayesian Deep Learning for Computer Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04977/) (2017)
- [Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00028/) (2017)
- [Spectral Normalization for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05957/) (2018)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06158/) (2017)
- [Deep Hough Voting for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09664/) (2019)
- [Deep Learning for 3D Point Clouds: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12033/) (2019)
- [PCN: Point Completion Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00671/) (2018)
- [PoinTr: Diverse Point Cloud Completion with Geometry-Aware Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08839/) (2021)
- [Geometric GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02894/) (2017)
- [Shape Completion using 3D-Encoder-Predictor CNNs and Shape Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00101/) (2016)
- [A Theory of Generative ConvNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.03264/) (2016)
- [GRNet: Gridding Residual Network for Dense Point Cloud Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03761/) (2020)
- [PU-GAN: a Point Cloud Upsampling Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10844/) (2019)
- [SnowflakeNet: Point Cloud Completion by Snowflake Point Deconvolution with Skip-Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04444/) (2021)
- [Point Cloud Completion by Skip-attention Network with Hierarchical Folding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03871/) (2020)
- [Learning Latent Space Energy-Based Prior Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08205/) (2020)
- [Variational Relational Point Completion Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10154/) (2021)
- [Semantic Segmentation for Real Point Cloud Scenes via Bilateral Augmentation and Adaptive Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07074/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised 3D Shape Completion through GAN Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13366/) (2021)
- [Unpaired Point Cloud Completion on Real Scans using Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00069/) (2019)
- [Generative PointNet: Deep Energy-Based Learning on Unordered Point Sets for 3D Generation, Reconstruction and Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01301/) (2020)
- [Learning Generative Vision Transformer with Energy-Based Latent Space for Saliency Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.13528/) (2021)
- [Cycle4Completion: Unpaired Point Cloud Completion using Cycle Transformation with Missing Region Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07838/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [P2C: Self-Supervised Point Cloud Completion from Single Partial Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14726/) (2023)
- [Advancing Extended Reality with 3D Gaussian Splatting: Innovations and Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06257/) (2024)
- [NeuSDFusion: A Spatial-Aware Generative Model for 3D Shape Completion, Reconstruction, and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18241/) (2024)
- [LAM3D: Large Image-Point-Cloud Alignment Model for 3D Reconstruction from Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15622/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised 3D Point Cloud Completion via Multi-view Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09786/) (2024)
- [NumGrad-Pull: Numerical Gradient Guided Tri-plane Representation for Surface Reconstruction from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17392/) (2024)
- [MS2Mesh-XR: Multi-modal Sketch-to-Mesh Generation in XR Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09008/) (2024)
- [RefComp: A Reference-guided Unified Framework for Unpaired Point Cloud Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13788/) (2025)
- [Energy-Based Open-Set Active Learning for Object Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20083/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unsupervised point cloud completion aims to infer the whole geometry of a partial object observation without requiring partial-complete correspondence. Differing from existing deterministic approaches, we advocate generative modeling based unsupervised point cloud completion to explore the missing correspondence. Specifically, we propose a novel framework that performs completion by transforming a partial shape encoding into a complete one using a latent transport module, and it is designed as a latent-space energy-based model (EBM) in an encoder-decoder architecture, aiming to learn a probability distribution conditioned on the partial shape encoding. To train the latent code transport module and the encoder-decoder network jointly, we introduce a residual sampling strategy, where the residual captures the domain gap between partial and complete shape latent spaces. As a generative model-based framework, our method can produce uncertainty maps consistent with human perception, leading to explainable unsupervised point cloud completion. We experimentally show that the proposed method produces high-fidelity completion results, outperforming state-of-the-art models by a significant margin.