# DM3D: Distortion-Minimized Weight Pruning for Lossless 3D Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.02098 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02098/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jul 2024.

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

- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [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)
- [SNIP: Single-shot Network Pruning based on Connection Sensitivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02340/) (2018)
- [Importance Estimation for Neural Network Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.10771/) (2019)
- [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)
- [OctNet: Learning Deep 3D Representations at High Resolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05009/) (2016)
- [Voxel Transformer for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02497/) (2021)
- [Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.01307/) (2017)
- [VoxelNeXt: Fully Sparse VoxelNet for 3D Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11301/) (2023)
- [Pruning Neural Networks at Initialization: Why are We Missing the Mark?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08576/) (2020)
- [SqueezeSegV3: Spatially-Adaptive Convolution for Efficient Point-Cloud Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01803/) (2020)
- [SpinNet: Learning a General Surface Descriptor for 3D Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12149/) (2020)
- [Focal Sparse Convolutional Networks for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12463/) (2022)
- [Layer-adaptive sparsity for the Magnitude-based Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07611/) (2020)
- [RSN: Range Sparse Net for Efficient, Accurate LiDAR 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13365/) (2021)
- [The Optimal BERT Surgeon: Scalable and Accurate Second-Order Pruning for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07259/) (2022)
- [FCAF3D: Fully Convolutional Anchor-Free 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00322/) (2021)
- [HVNet: Hybrid Voxel Network for LiDAR Based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00186/) (2020)
- [TorchSparse: Efficient Point Cloud Inference Engine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10319/) (2022)
- [Vote3Deep: Fast Object Detection in 3D Point Clouds Using Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.06666/) (2016)
- [Adaptive Quantization for Deep Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.01048/) (2017)
- [SparseViT: Revisiting Activation Sparsity for Efficient High-Resolution Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17605/) (2023)
- [TorchSparse++: Efficient Training and Inference Framework for Sparse Convolution on GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12862/) (2023)
- [Spatially-sparse convolutional neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.6070/) (2014)
- [Spatial Pruned Sparse Convolution for Efficient 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14201/) (2022)
- [SegVoxelNet: Exploring Semantic Context and Depth-aware Features for 3D Vehicle Detection from Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05316/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [A Novel Multi-layer Task-centric and Data Quality Framework for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17346/) (2025)
- [Modeling and Measuring Redundancy in Multisource Multimodal Data for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06544/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Applying deep neural networks to 3D point cloud processing has attracted increasing attention due to its advanced performance in many areas, such as AR/VR, autonomous driving, and robotics. However, as neural network models and 3D point clouds expand in size, it becomes a crucial challenge to reduce the computational and memory overhead to meet latency and energy constraints in real-world applications. Although existing approaches have proposed to reduce both computational cost and memory footprint, most of them only address the spatial redundancy in inputs, i.e. removing the redundancy of background points in 3D data. In this paper, we propose a novel post-training weight pruning scheme for 3D object detection that is (1) orthogonal to all existing point cloud sparsifying methods, which determines redundant parameters in the pretrained model that lead to minimal distortion in both locality and confidence (detection distortion); and (2) a universal plug-and-play pruning framework that works with arbitrary 3D detection model. This framework aims to minimize detection distortion of network output to maximally maintain detection precision, by identifying layer-wise sparsity based on second-order Taylor approximation of the distortion. Albeit utilizing second-order information, we introduced a lightweight scheme to efficiently acquire Hessian information, and subsequently perform dynamic programming to solve the layer-wise sparsity. Extensive experiments on KITTI, Nuscenes and ONCE datasets demonstrate that our approach is able to maintain and even boost the detection precision on pruned model under noticeable computation reduction (FLOPs). Noticeably, we achieve over 3.89x, 3.72x FLOPs reduction on CenterPoint and PVRCNN model, respectively, without mAP decrease, significantly improving the state-of-the-art.