# PMT-MAE: Dual-Branch Self-Supervised Learning with Distillation for Efficient Point Cloud Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.02007 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02007/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Detection and dense prediction distillation, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 28 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Sep 2024.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [Detection and dense prediction distillation](https://mlsanity.com/distill/detection-and-dense-prediction-distillation/)

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

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [PointCNN: Convolution On X-Transformed Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07791/) (2018)
- [data2vec: A General Framework for Self-supervised Learning in Speech, Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03555/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Point Transformer V2: Grouped Vector Attention and Partition-based Pooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05666/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Network Design and Local Geometry in Point Cloud: A Simple Residual MLP Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07123/) (2022)
- [Point-M2AE: Multi-scale Masked Autoencoders for Hierarchical Point Cloud Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14401/) (2022)
- [CrossPoint: Self-Supervised Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning for 3D Point Cloud Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00680/) (2022)
- [Deep Parametric Continuous Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06742/) (2021)
- [Learning 3D Representations from 2D Pre-trained Models via Image-to-Point Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06785/) (2022)
- [Autoencoders as Cross-Modal Teachers: Can Pretrained 2D Image Transformers Help 3D Representation Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08320/) (2022)
- [Adaptive Graph Convolution for Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08035/) (2021)
- [Joint-MAE: 2D-3D Joint Masked Autoencoders for 3D Point Cloud Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14007/) (2023)
- [Towards Compact 3D Representations via Point Feature Enhancement Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10726/) (2023)
- [Vision-Language Pre-training with Object Contrastive Learning for 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10714/) (2023)
- [CP-Net: Contour-Perturbed Reconstruction Network for Self-Supervised Point Cloud Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08215/) (2022)
- [PointMT: Efficient Point Cloud Analysis with Hybrid MLP-Transformer Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05508/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Advances in self-supervised learning are essential for enhancing feature extraction and understanding in point cloud processing. This paper introduces PMT-MAE (Point MLP-Transformer Masked Autoencoder), a novel self-supervised learning framework for point cloud classification. PMT-MAE features a dual-branch architecture that integrates Transformer and MLP components to capture rich features. The Transformer branch leverages global self-attention for intricate feature interactions, while the parallel MLP branch processes tokens through shared fully connected layers, offering a complementary feature transformation pathway. A fusion mechanism then combines these features, enhancing the model's capacity to learn comprehensive 3D representations. Guided by the sophisticated teacher model Point-M2AE, PMT-MAE employs a distillation strategy that includes feature distillation during pre-training and logit distillation during fine-tuning, ensuring effective knowledge transfer. On the ModelNet40 classification task, achieving an accuracy of 93.6% without employing voting strategy, PMT-MAE surpasses the baseline Point-MAE (93.2%) and the teacher Point-M2AE (93.4%), underscoring its ability to learn discriminative 3D point cloud representations. Additionally, this framework demonstrates high efficiency, requiring only 40 epochs for both pre-training and fine-tuning. PMT-MAE's effectiveness and efficiency render it well-suited for scenarios with limited computational resources, positioning it as a promising solution for practical point cloud analysis.