# DSVT: Dynamic Sparse Voxel Transformer with Rotated Sets

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.06051 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06051/

## Key facts

- Cited by 122 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 53 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jan 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [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)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [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)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05095/) (2021)
- [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)
- [4D Spatio-Temporal ConvNets: Minkowski Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08755/) (2019)
- [KPConv: Flexible and Deformable Convolution for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08889/) (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)
- [PV-RCNN: Point-Voxel Feature Set Abstraction for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13192/) (2019)
- [BEVFusion: Multi-Task Multi-Sensor Fusion with Unified Bird's-Eye View Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13542/) (2022)
- [3D Semantic Segmentation with Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10275/) (2017)
- [Deep Hough Voting for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09664/) (2019)
- [CSWin Transformer: A General Vision Transformer Backbone with Cross-Shaped Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00652/) (2021)
- [TransFusion: Robust LiDAR-Camera Fusion for 3D Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11496/) (2022)
- [3DSSD: Point-based 3D Single Stage Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10187/) (2020)
- [Voxel R-CNN: Towards High Performance Voxel-based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15712/) (2020)
- [ChauffeurNet: Learning to Drive by Imitating the Best and Synthesizing the Worst](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03079/) (2018)
- [From Points to Parts: 3D Object Detection from Point Cloud with Part-aware and Part-aggregation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03670/) (2019)
- [Target-driven Visual Navigation in Indoor Scenes using Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05143/) (2016)
- [Class-balanced Grouping and Sampling for Point Cloud 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09492/) (2019)
- [Relation-Shape Convolutional Neural Network for Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07601/) (2019)
- [Axial-DeepLab: Stand-Alone Axial-Attention for Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07853/) (2020)
- [Voxel Transformer for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02497/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 122)

- [MTR++: Multi-Agent Motion Prediction with Symmetric Scene Modeling and Guided Intention Querying](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17770/) (2023)
- [UniTR: A Unified and Efficient Multi-Modal Transformer for Bird's-Eye-View Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07732/) (2023)
- [Voxel Mamba: Group-Free State Space Models for Point Cloud based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10700/) (2024)
- [SAFDNet: A Simple and Effective Network for Fully Sparse 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05817/) (2024)
- [HEDNet: A Hierarchical Encoder-Decoder Network for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20234/) (2023)
- [LION: Linear Group RNN for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18232/) (2024)
- [TorchSparse++: Efficient Training and Inference Framework for Sparse Convolution on GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12862/) (2023)
- [FSD V2: Improving Fully Sparse 3D Object Detection with Virtual Voxels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03755/) (2023)
- [L4DR: LiDAR-4DRadar Fusion for Weather-Robust 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03677/) (2024)
- [MUVO: A Multimodal Generative World Model for Autonomous Driving with Geometric Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11762/) (2023)
- [Once Detected, Never Lost: Surpassing Human Performance in Offline LiDAR based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12315/) (2023)
- [Detecting As Labeling: Rethinking LiDAR-camera Fusion in 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07152/) (2023)
- [GiT: Towards Generalist Vision Transformer through Universal Language Interface](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09394/) (2024)
- [SEED: A Simple and Effective 3D DETR in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10749/) (2024)
- [V2X-R: Cooperative LiDAR-4D Radar Fusion with Denoising Diffusion for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.08402/) (2024)
- [MCTrack: A Unified 3D Multi-Object Tracking Framework for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16149/) (2024)
- [BEVSpread: Spread Voxel Pooling for Bird's-Eye-View Representation in Vision-based Roadside 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08785/) (2024)
- [DeepInteraction++: Multi-Modality Interaction for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05075/) (2024)
- [Commonsense Prototype for Outdoor Unsupervised 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16493/) (2024)
- [UniM2AE: Multi-modal Masked Autoencoders with Unified 3D Representation for 3D Perception in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10421/) (2023)
- [Locality-Sensitive Hashing-Based Efficient Point Transformer with Applications in High-Energy Physics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12535/) (2024)
- [LiDARFormer: A Unified Transformer-based Multi-task Network for LiDAR Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12194/) (2023)
- [ScatterFormer: Efficient Voxel Transformer with Scattered Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00912/) (2024)
- [Sunshine to Rainstorm: Cross-Weather Knowledge Distillation for Robust 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18493/) (2024)
- [MaskBEV: Towards A Unified Framework for BEV Detection and Map Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09122/) (2024)
- [UniMamba: Unified Spatial-Channel Representation Learning with Group-Efficient Mamba for LiDAR-based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12009/) (2025)
- [MixSup: Mixed-grained Supervision for Label-efficient LiDAR-based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16305/) (2024)
- [Words in Motion: Extracting Interpretable Control Vectors for Motion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11624/) (2024)
- [FlatFusion: Delving into Details of Sparse Transformer-based Camera-LiDAR Fusion for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06832/) (2024)
- [TokenFormer: Rethinking Transformer Scaling with Tokenized Model Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23168/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Designing an efficient yet deployment-friendly 3D backbone to handle sparse point clouds is a fundamental problem in 3D perception. Compared with the customized sparse convolution, the attention mechanism in Transformers is more appropriate for flexibly modeling long-range relationships and is easier to be deployed in real-world applications. However, due to the sparse characteristics of point clouds, it is non-trivial to apply a standard transformer on sparse points. In this paper, we present Dynamic Sparse Voxel Transformer (DSVT), a single-stride window-based voxel Transformer backbone for outdoor 3D perception. In order to efficiently process sparse points in parallel, we propose Dynamic Sparse Window Attention, which partitions a series of local regions in each window according to its sparsity and then computes the features of all regions in a fully parallel manner. To allow the cross-set connection, we design a rotated set partitioning strategy that alternates between two partitioning configurations in consecutive self-attention layers. To support effective downsampling and better encode geometric information, we also propose an attention-style 3D pooling module on sparse points, which is powerful and deployment-friendly without utilizing any customized CUDA operations. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance with a broad range of 3D perception tasks. More importantly, DSVT can be easily deployed by TensorRT with real-time inference speed (27Hz). Code will be available at urlhttps://github.com/Haiyang-W/DSVT.