# Contrastive Predictive Autoencoders for Dynamic Point Cloud Self-Supervised Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.12959 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12959/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [Barlow Twins: Self-Supervised Learning via Redundancy Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03230/) (2021)
- [VideoMAE: Masked Autoencoders are Data-Efficient Learners for Self-Supervised Video Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12602/) (2022)
- [4D Spatio-Temporal ConvNets: Minkowski Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08755/) (2019)
- [SimMIM: A Simple Framework for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09886/) (2021)
- [NTU RGB+D: A Large Scale Dataset for 3D Human Activity Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02808/) (2016)
- [Point-BERT: Pre-training 3D Point Cloud Transformers with Masked Point Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14819/) (2021)
- [PointContrast: Unsupervised Pre-training for 3D Point Cloud Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10985/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders for Point Cloud Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06604/) (2022)
- [Spatiotemporal Contrastive Video Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03800/) (2020)
- [Self-supervised Co-training for Video Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09709/) (2020)
- [Actional-Structural Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12659/) (2019)
- [BEVT: BERT Pretraining of Video Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01529/) (2021)
- [Masked Discrimination for Self-Supervised Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11183/) (2022)
- [VideoMoCo: Contrastive Video Representation Learning with Temporally Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05905/) (2021)
- [An Attention Enhanced Graph Convolutional LSTM Network for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09130/) (2019)
- [Memory-augmented Dense Predictive Coding for Video Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01065/) (2020)
- [MeteorNet: Deep Learning on Dynamic 3D Point Cloud Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09165/) (2019)
- [View Adaptive Neural Networks for High Performance Skeleton-based Human Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07453/) (2018)
- [Rethinking Minimal Sufficient Representation in Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07004/) (2022)
- [PSTNet: Point Spatio-Temporal Convolution on Point Cloud Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13713/) (2022)
- [Skeleton Cloud Colorization for Unsupervised 3D Action Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01959/) (2021)
- [3DV: 3D Dynamic Voxel for Action Recognition in Depth Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.05501/) (2020)
- [Point Primitive Transformer for Long-Term 4D Point Cloud Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00281/) (2022)
- [No Pain, Big Gain: Classify Dynamic Point Cloud Sequences with Static Models by Fitting Feature-level Space-time Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11113/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Masked Spatio-Temporal Structure Prediction for Self-supervised Learning on Point Cloud Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09245/) (2023)
- [Align then Adapt: Rethinking Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning in 4D Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23069/) (2026)
- [Point Contrastive Prediction with Semantic Clustering for Self-Supervised Learning on Point Cloud Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09247/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Masked Pretraining for Dynamic Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03639/) (2026)
- [Tri-Efficient Transfer Learning for Point Cloud Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24175/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a new self-supervised paradigm on point cloud sequence understanding. Inspired by the discriminative and generative self-supervised methods, we design two tasks, namely point cloud sequence based Contrastive Prediction and Reconstruction (CPR), to collaboratively learn more comprehensive spatiotemporal representations. Specifically, dense point cloud segments are first input into an encoder to extract embeddings. All but the last ones are then aggregated by a context-aware autoregressor to make predictions for the last target segment. Towards the goal of modeling multi-granularity structures, local and global contrastive learning are performed between predictions and targets. To further improve the generalization of representations, the predictions are also utilized to reconstruct raw point cloud sequences by a decoder, where point cloud colorization is employed to discriminate against different frames. By combining classic contrast and reconstruction paradigms, it makes the learned representations with both global discrimination and local perception. We conduct experiments on four point cloud sequence benchmarks, and report the results on action recognition and gesture recognition under multiple experimental settings. The performances are comparable with supervised methods and show powerful transferability.