# Mitigating Object Dependencies: Improving Point Cloud Self-Supervised Learning through Object Exchange

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.07504 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07504/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [Random Erasing Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04896/) (2017)
- [4D Spatio-Temporal ConvNets: Minkowski Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08755/) (2019)
- [Simple Copy-Paste is a Strong Data Augmentation Method for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07177/) (2020)
- [PointContrast: Unsupervised Pre-training for 3D Point Cloud Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10985/) (2020)
- [Searching Efficient 3D Architectures with Sparse Point-Voxel Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.16100/) (2020)
- [In-Place Scene Labelling and Understanding with Implicit Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15875/) (2021)
- [PointGroup: Dual-Set Point Grouping for 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01658/) (2020)
- [Self-Supervised Pretraining of 3D Features on any Point-Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02691/) (2021)
- [Exploring Data-Efficient 3D Scene Understanding with Contrastive Scene Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09165/) (2020)
- [Cut, Paste and Learn: Surprisingly Easy Synthesis for Instance Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01642/) (2017)
- [Spatio-temporal Self-Supervised Representation Learning for 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00179/) (2021)
- [Mix3D: Out-of-Context Data Augmentation for 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02210/) (2021)
- [GridMask Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04086/) (2020)
- [OctFormer: Octree-based Transformers for 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03045/) (2023)
- [Modeling Visual Context is Key to Augmenting Object Detection Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.07428/) (2018)
- [Self-Supervised Learning for Domain Adaptation on Point-Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12641/) (2020)
- [Masked Scene Contrast: A Scalable Framework for Unsupervised 3D Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14191/) (2023)
- [4DContrast: Contrastive Learning with Dynamic Correspondences for 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02990/) (2021)
- [Learning to Generate Synthetic Data via Compositing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05475/) (2019)
- [Hide-and-Seek: A Data Augmentation Technique for Weakly-Supervised Localization and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.02545/) (2018)
- [Spatiotemporal Self-supervised Learning for Point Clouds in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16235/) (2023)
- [Self-supervised Modal and View Invariant Feature Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14169/) (2020)
- [Boosting Low-Data Instance Segmentation by Unsupervised Pre-training with Saliency Prompt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01171/) (2023)
- [Self-Improving Semantic Perception for Indoor Localisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01595/) (2021)
- [Learning Spatiotemporal Occupancy Grid Maps for Lifelong Navigation in Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10585/) (2021)

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

- [Point-JEPA: A Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture for Self-Supervised Learning on Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16432/) (2024)
- [Generalized Few-shot 3D Point Cloud Segmentation with Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16282/) (2025)
- [Refining CLIP's Spatial Awareness: A Visual-Centric Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02328/) (2025)
- [Masked Scene Modeling: Narrowing the Gap Between Supervised and Self-Supervised Learning in 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06719/) (2025)
- [PointCSP: Cross-Sample Semantic Propagation and Stability Preservation in Self-Supervised Point Cloud Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01759/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In the realm of point cloud scene understanding, particularly in indoor scenes, objects are arranged following human habits, resulting in objects of certain semantics being closely positioned and displaying notable inter-object correlations. This can create a tendency for neural networks to exploit these strong dependencies, bypassing the individual object patterns. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel self-supervised learning (SSL) strategy. Our approach leverages both object patterns and contextual cues to produce robust features. It begins with the formulation of an object-exchanging strategy, where pairs of objects with comparable sizes are exchanged across different scenes, effectively disentangling the strong contextual dependencies. Subsequently, we introduce a context-aware feature learning strategy, which encodes object patterns without relying on their specific context by aggregating object features across various scenes. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over existing SSL techniques, further showing its better robustness to environmental changes. Moreover, we showcase the applicability of our approach by transferring pre-trained models to diverse point cloud datasets.