# PCPNet: An Efficient and Semantic-Enhanced Transformer Network for Point Cloud Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.07773 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07773/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [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)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [VoxelNet: End-to-End Learning for Point Cloud Based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06396/) (2017)
- [A Point Set Generation Network for 3D Object Reconstruction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00603/) (2016)
- [PCT: Point cloud transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09688/) (2020)
- [ECA-Net: Efficient Channel Attention for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03151/) (2019)
- [LIO-SAM: Tightly-coupled Lidar Inertial Odometry via Smoothing and Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00258/) (2020)
- [MeteorNet: Deep Learning on Dynamic 3D Point Cloud Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09165/) (2019)
- [OverlapTransformer: An Efficient and Rotation-Invariant Transformer Network for LiDAR-Based Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03397/) (2022)
- [MPPNet: Multi-Frame Feature Intertwining with Proxy Points for 3D Temporal Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05979/) (2022)
- [Moving Object Segmentation in 3D LiDAR Data: A Learning-based Approach Exploiting Sequential Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08971/) (2021)
- [MotionRNN: A Flexible Model for Video Prediction with Spacetime-Varying Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02243/) (2021)
- [Exploring Spatial-Temporal Multi-Frequency Analysis for High-Fidelity and Temporal-Consistency Video Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.09905/) (2020)
- [Self-supervised Point Cloud Prediction Using 3D Spatio-temporal Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04076/) (2021)
- [PointRNN: Point Recurrent Neural Network for Moving Point Cloud Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.08287/) (2019)
- [Efficient Spatial-Temporal Information Fusion for LiDAR-Based 3D Moving Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02201/) (2022)
- [SeqOT: A Spatial-Temporal Transformer Network for Place Recognition Using Sequential LiDAR Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07951/) (2022)
- [CloudLSTM: A Recurrent Neural Model for Spatiotemporal Point-cloud Stream Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.12410/) (2019)
- [MoNet: Motion-based Point Cloud Prediction Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10812/) (2020)
- [Temporal LiDAR Frame Prediction for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09409/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Driving in the Occupancy World: Vision-Centric 4D Occupancy Forecasting and Planning via World Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14197/) (2024)
- [A Survey of World Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11260/) (2025)
- [Cam4DOcc: Benchmark for Camera-Only 4D Occupancy Forecasting in Autonomous Driving Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17663/) (2023)
- [OccProphet: Pushing Efficiency Frontier of Camera-Only 4D Occupancy Forecasting with Observer-Forecaster-Refiner Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15180/) (2025)
- [Towards foundational LiDAR world models with efficient latent flow matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23434/) (2025)
- [Spatiotemporal Decoupling for Efficient Vision-Based Occupancy Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14169/) (2024)
- [Vision-Centric 4D Occupancy Forecasting and Planning via Implicit Residual World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16729/) (2025)
- [RegFormer++: An Efficient Large-Scale 3D LiDAR Point Registration Network with Projection-Aware 2D Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14290/) (2026)
- [LaGen: Towards Autoregressive LiDAR Scene Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21256/) (2025)
- [NV3D: Leveraging Spatial Shape Through Normal Vector-based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11632/) (2025)
- [InterOCF: Spatio-Temporal 2D-3D Interaction for Camera-Only 4D Occupancy Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24431/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The ability to predict future structure features of environments based on past perception information is extremely needed by autonomous vehicles, which helps to make the following decision-making and path planning more reasonable. Recently, point cloud prediction (PCP) is utilized to predict and describe future environmental structures by the point cloud form. In this letter, we propose a novel efficient Transformer-based network to predict the future LiDAR point clouds exploiting the past point cloud sequences. We also design a semantic auxiliary training strategy to make the predicted LiDAR point cloud sequence semantically similar to the ground truth and thus improves the significance of the deployment for more tasks in real-vehicle applications. Our approach is completely self-supervised, which means it does not require any manual labeling and has a solid generalization ability toward different environments. The experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art PCP methods on the prediction results and semantic similarity, and has a good real-time performance. Our open-source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/Blurryface0814/PCPNet.