# Spherical Transformer for LiDAR-based 3D Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12766 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12766/

## Key facts

- Cited by 125 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 78 of its 90 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 78)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Going deeper with Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17239/) (2021)
- [PVT v2: Improved Baselines with Pyramid Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13797/) (2021)
- [3D Semantic Segmentation with Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10275/) (2017)
- [RandLA-Net: Efficient Semantic Segmentation of Large-Scale Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11236/) (2019)
- [Twins: Revisiting the Design of Spatial Attention in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13840/) (2021)
- [Understanding the Effective Receptive Field in Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.04128/) (2017)
- [CSWin Transformer: A General Vision Transformer Backbone with Cross-Shaped Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00652/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 125)

- [Point Transformer V3: Simpler, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10035/) (2023)
- [Towards Large-scale 3D Representation Learning with Multi-dataset Point Prompt Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09718/) (2023)
- [UniPAD: A Universal Pre-training Paradigm for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08370/) (2023)
- [PonderV2: Pave the Way for 3D Foundation Model with A Universal Pre-training Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08586/) (2023)
- [PointOcc: Cylindrical Tri-Perspective View for Point-based 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16896/) (2023)
- [FRNet: Frustum-Range Networks for Scalable LiDAR Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04484/) (2023)
- [Mask-Attention-Free Transformer for 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01692/) (2023)
- [Three Pillars improving Vision Foundation Model Distillation for Lidar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17504/) (2023)
- [OA-CNNs: Omni-Adaptive Sparse CNNs for 3D Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14418/) (2024)
- [IST-Net: Prior-free Category-level Pose Estimation with Implicit Space Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13479/) (2023)
- [DINO in the Room: Leveraging 2D Foundation Models for 3D Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18944/) (2025)
- [Multi-Space Alignments Towards Universal LiDAR Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01538/) (2024)
- [RadarPillars: Efficient Object Detection from 4D Radar Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05020/) (2024)
- [An End-to-End Robust Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation Network with Single-Step Conditional Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16308/) (2024)
- [HEAL-SWIN: A Vision Transformer On The Sphere](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07313/) (2023)
- [Position: Beyond Euclidean -- Foundation Models Should Embrace Non-Euclidean Geometries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08896/) (2025)
- [WildScenes: A Benchmark for 2D and 3D Semantic Segmentation in Large-scale Natural Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15364/) (2023)
- [LitePT: Lighter Yet Stronger Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13689/) (2025)
- [ConDaFormer: Disassembled Transformer with Local Structure Enhancement for 3D Point Cloud Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11112/) (2023)
- [MCD: Diverse Large-Scale Multi-Campus Dataset for Robot Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11496/) (2024)
- [LSK3DNet: Towards Effective and Efficient 3D Perception with Large Sparse Kernels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15173/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Data Augmentation for Robust LiDAR Semantic Segmentation in Adverse Weather](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02286/) (2024)
- [TASeg: Temporal Aggregation Network for LiDAR Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09751/) (2024)
- [SFPNet: Sparse Focal Point Network for Semantic Segmentation on General LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11569/) (2024)
- [Efficient 3D Recognition with Event-driven Spike Sparse Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07360/) (2024)
- [A Point-Based Approach to Efficient LiDAR Multi-Task Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12798/) (2024)
- [Label-Efficient LiDAR Semantic Segmentation with 2D-3D Vision Transformer Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03299/) (2025)
- [Building a Strong Pre-Training Baseline for Universal 3D Large-Scale Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07201/) (2024)
- [LeAP: Consistent multi-domain 3D labeling using Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03901/) (2025)
- [PeP: a Point enhanced Painting method for unified point cloud tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07591/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

LiDAR-based 3D point cloud recognition has benefited various applications. Without specially considering the LiDAR point distribution, most current methods suffer from information disconnection and limited receptive field, especially for the sparse distant points. In this work, we study the varying-sparsity distribution of LiDAR points and present SphereFormer to directly aggregate information from dense close points to the sparse distant ones. We design radial window self-attention that partitions the space into multiple non-overlapping narrow and long windows. It overcomes the disconnection issue and enlarges the receptive field smoothly and dramatically, which significantly boosts the performance of sparse distant points. Moreover, to fit the narrow and long windows, we propose exponential splitting to yield fine-grained position encoding and dynamic feature selection to increase model representation ability. Notably, our method ranks 1st on both nuScenes and SemanticKITTI semantic segmentation benchmarks with 81.9% and 74.8% mIoU, respectively. Also, we achieve the 3rd place on nuScenes object detection benchmark with 72.8% NDS and 68.5% mAP. Code is available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/SphereFormer.git.