# Fast Point Cloud Generation with Straight Flows

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.01747 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01747/

## Key facts

- Cited by 56 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in 3D, point cloud and scene generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 44 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Dec 2022.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [3D, point cloud and scene generation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/3d-point-cloud-and-scene-generation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Neural Ordinary Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07366/) (2018)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (2022)
- [Normalizing Flows for Probabilistic Modeling and Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02762/) (2019)
- [Building Normalizing Flows with Stochastic Interpolants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15571/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Probabilistic Models for 3D Point Cloud Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01458/) (2021)
- [Learning a Probabilistic Latent Space of Object Shapes via 3D Generative-Adversarial Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.07584/) (2016)
- [LION: Latent Point Diffusion Models for 3D Shape Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06978/) (2022)
- [3D Shape Generation and Completion through Point-Voxel Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03670/) (2021)
- [PointFlow: 3D Point Cloud Generation with Continuous Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.12320/) (2019)
- [GET3D: A Generative Model of High Quality 3D Textured Shapes Learned from Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11163/) (2022)
- [Knowledge Distillation in Iterative Generative Models for Improved Sampling Speed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02388/) (2021)
- [Point-Voxel CNN for Efficient 3D Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03739/) (2019)
- [Text2Mesh: Text-Driven Neural Stylization for Meshes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03221/) (2021)
- [Rectified Flow: A Marginal Preserving Approach to Optimal Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14577/) (2022)
- [Learning Gradient Fields for Shape Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.06520/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Probabilistic Modeling for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09481/) (2022)
- [3D Point Cloud Generative Adversarial Network Based on Tree Structured Graph Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06292/) (2019)
- [On Fast Sampling of Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00132/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [InstaFlow: One Step is Enough for High-Quality Diffusion-Based Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06380/) (2023)
- [Flow Matching in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08698/) (2023)
- [Sparc3D: Sparse Representation and Construction for High-Resolution 3D Shapes Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14521/) (2025)
- [ZigMa: A DiT-style Zigzag Mamba Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13802/) (2024)
- [DepthFM: Fast Monocular Depth Estimation with Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13788/) (2024)
- [A Survey of World Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11260/) (2025)
- [Flash Diffusion: Accelerating Any Conditional Diffusion Model for Few Steps Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02347/) (2024)
- [AdaFlow: Imitation Learning with Variance-Adaptive Flow-Based Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04292/) (2024)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Knowledge Distillation of Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04262/) (2023)
- [Motion Flow Matching for Human Motion Synthesis and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08895/) (2023)
- [Latent Space Editing in Transformer-Based Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10825/) (2023)
- [MoFlow: One-Step Flow Matching for Human Trajectory Forecasting via Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation based Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09950/) (2025)
- [Wasserstein Flow Matching: Generative modeling over families of distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00698/) (2024)
- [Text2LiDAR: Text-guided LiDAR Point Cloud Generation via Equirectangular Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19628/) (2024)
- [FlowTS: Time Series Generation via Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07506/) (2024)
- [GeoDrive: 3D Geometry-Informed Driving World Model with Precise Action Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22421/) (2025)
- [Imagination Policy: Using Generative Point Cloud Models for Learning Manipulation Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11740/) (2024)
- [Not-So-Optimal Transport Flows for 3D Point Cloud Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12456/) (2025)
- [Compress3D: a Compressed Latent Space for 3D Generation from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13524/) (2024)
- [StraightPCF: Straight Point Cloud Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08322/) (2024)
- [FrePolad: Frequency-Rectified Point Latent Diffusion for Point Cloud Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12090/) (2023)
- [Guided Diffusion from Self-Supervised Diffusion Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08825/) (2023)
- [PointNSP: Autoregressive 3D Point Cloud Generation with Next-Scale Level-of-Detail Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05613/) (2025)
- [EventFlow: Forecasting Temporal Point Processes with Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07430/) (2024)
- [Efficient and Scalable Point Cloud Generation with Sparse Point-Voxel Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06145/) (2024)
- [ARFlow: Human Action-Reaction Flow Matching with Physical Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16973/) (2025)
- [MATCH POLICY: A Simple Pipeline from Point Cloud Registration to Manipulation Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15517/) (2024)
- [Jigsaw++: Imagining Complete Shape Priors for Object Reassembly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11816/) (2024)
- [Audio synthesizer inversion in symmetric parameter spaces with approximately equivariant flow matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07199/) (2025)
- [Efficient Molecular Conformer Generation with SO(3)-Averaged Flow Matching and Reflow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09785/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful tool for point cloud generation. A key component that drives the impressive performance for generating high-quality samples from noise is iteratively denoise for thousands of steps. While beneficial, the complexity of learning steps has limited its applications to many 3D real-world. To address this limitation, we propose Point Straight Flow (PSF), a model that exhibits impressive performance using one step. Our idea is based on the reformulation of the standard diffusion model, which optimizes the curvy learning trajectory into a straight path. Further, we develop a distillation strategy to shorten the straight path into one step without a performance loss, enabling applications to 3D real-world with latency constraints. We perform evaluations on multiple 3D tasks and find that our PSF performs comparably to the standard diffusion model, outperforming other efficient 3D point cloud generation methods. On real-world applications such as point cloud completion and training-free text-guided generation in a low-latency setup, PSF performs favorably.