# AdaPoinTr: Diverse Point Cloud Completion with Adaptive Geometry-Aware Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.04545 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04545/

## Key facts

- Cited by 67 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 70 of its 92 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Jan 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 70)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Categorical Reparameterization with Gumbel-Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01144/) (2016)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [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)
- [DINO: DETR with Improved DeNoising Anchor Boxes for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03605/) (2022)
- [An overview of gradient descent optimization algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04747/) (2016)
- [A Point Set Generation Network for 3D Object Reconstruction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00603/) (2016)
- [PV-RCNN: Point-Voxel Feature Set Abstraction for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13192/) (2019)
- [Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05751/) (2018)
- [3D Semantic Segmentation with Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10275/) (2017)
- [PCT: Point cloud transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09688/) (2020)
- [Point-BERT: Pre-training 3D Point Cloud Transformers with Masked Point Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14819/) (2021)
- [Frustum PointNets for 3D Object Detection from RGB-D Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08488/) (2017)
- [3D-R2N2: A Unified Approach for Single and Multi-view 3D Object Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.00449/) (2016)
- [AtlasNet: A Papier-Mach'e Approach to Learning 3D Surface Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05384/) (2018)
- [Semantic Scene Completion from a Single Depth Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08974/) (2016)
- [Joint 2D-3D-Semantic Data for Indoor Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.01105/) (2017)
- [PCN: Point Completion Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00671/) (2018)
- [Attention Augmented Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09925/) (2019)
- [Relation-Shape Convolutional Neural Network for Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07601/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 67)

- [Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning in Spectral Domain for Point Cloud Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08114/) (2024)
- [SuperPC: A Single Diffusion Model for Point Cloud Completion, Upsampling, Denoising, and Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14558/) (2025)
- [PointSSC: A Cooperative Vehicle-Infrastructure Point Cloud Benchmark for Semantic Scene Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12708/) (2023)
- [MV-DeepSDF: Implicit Modeling with Multi-Sweep Point Clouds for 3D Vehicle Reconstruction in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16715/) (2023)
- [Explicitly Guided Information Interaction Network for Cross-modal Point Cloud Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02887/) (2024)
- [PointSea: Point Cloud Completion via Self-structure Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17053/) (2025)
- [GenPC: Zero-shot Point Cloud Completion via 3D Generative Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19896/) (2025)
- [LaS-Comp: Zero-shot 3D Completion with Latent-Spatial Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18735/) (2026)
- [T-CorresNet: Template Guided 3D Point Cloud Completion with Correspondence Pooling Query Generation Strategy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05008/) (2024)
- [GeoFormer: Learning Point Cloud Completion with Tri-Plane Integrated Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06596/) (2024)
- [High-Resolution Cranial Defect Reconstruction by Iterative, Low-Resolution, Point Cloud Completion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03813/) (2023)
- [3D Shape Completion on Unseen Categories:A Weakly-supervised Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10578/) (2024)
- [FSC: Few-point Shape Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07359/) (2024)
- [ComPC: Completing a 3D Point Cloud with 2D Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06814/) (2024)
- [Jigsaw++: Imagining Complete Shape Priors for Object Reassembly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11816/) (2024)
- [Deep Learning for 3D Point Cloud Enhancement: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00857/) (2024)
- [ESCAPE: Equivariant Shape Completion via Anchor Point Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00952/) (2024)
- [PointCFormer: a Relation-based Progressive Feature Extraction Network for Point Cloud Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08421/) (2024)
- [ComPose: A Unified Completion-Pose Framework for Robust Category-Level Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25553/) (2026)
- [TCFNet: Bidirectional face-bone transformation via a Transformer-based coarse-to-fine point movement network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14373/) (2025)
- [DAPoinTr: Domain Adaptive Point Transformer for Point Cloud Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19062/) (2024)
- [Flexible-weighted Chamfer Distance: Enhanced Objective Function for Point Cloud Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14218/) (2025)
- [Learning Generalizable Shape Completion with SIM(3) Equivariance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26631/) (2025)
- [Beyond 'Templates': Category-Agnostic Object Pose, Size, and Shape Estimation from a Single View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11687/) (2025)
- [LiNeXt: Revisiting LiDAR Completion with Efficient Non-Diffusion Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10209/) (2025)
- [MGPC: Multimodal Network for Generalizable Point Cloud Completion With Modality Dropout and Progressive Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03660/) (2026)
- [DuInNet: Dual-Modality Feature Interaction for Point Cloud Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07374/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Performance of Point Cloud Completion Networks with Consistency Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07298/) (2024)
- [Evaluation of Intra-operative Patient-specific Methods for Point Cloud Completion for Minimally Invasive Liver Interventions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11969/) (2025)
- [BridgeShape: Latent Diffusion Schr"odinger Bridge for 3D Shape Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23205/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we present a new method that reformulates point cloud completion as a set-to-set translation problem and design a new model, called PoinTr, which adopts a Transformer encoder-decoder architecture for point cloud completion. By representing the point cloud as a set of unordered groups of points with position embeddings, we convert the input data to a sequence of point proxies and employ the Transformers for generation. To facilitate Transformers to better leverage the inductive bias about 3D geometric structures of point clouds, we further devise a geometry-aware block that models the local geometric relationships explicitly. The migration of Transformers enables our model to better learn structural knowledge and preserve detailed information for point cloud completion. Taking a step towards more complicated and diverse situations, we further propose AdaPoinTr by developing an adaptive query generation mechanism and designing a novel denoising task during completing a point cloud. Coupling these two techniques enables us to train the model efficiently and effectively: we reduce training time (by 15x or more) and improve completion performance (over 20%). We also show our method can be extended to the scene-level point cloud completion scenario by designing a new geometry-enhanced semantic scene completion framework. Extensive experiments on the existing and newly-proposed datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which attains 6.53 CD on PCN, 0.81 CD on ShapeNet-55 and 0.392 MMD on real-world KITTI, surpassing other work by a large margin and establishing new state-of-the-arts on various benchmarks. Most notably, AdaPoinTr can achieve such promising performance with higher throughputs and fewer FLOPs compared with the previous best methods in practice. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/yuxumin/PoinTr