# VSFormer: Mining Correlations in Flexible View Set for Multi-view 3D Shape Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.09254 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09254/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 80 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [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)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3555/) (2014)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Objaverse: A Universe of Annotated 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08051/) (2022)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [VoxelNet: End-to-End Learning for Point Cloud Based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06396/) (2017)
- [KPConv: Flexible and Deformable Convolution for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08889/) (2019)
- [An overview of gradient descent optimization algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04747/) (2016)
- [PointCNN: Convolution On X-Transformed Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07791/) (2018)
- [PointConv: Deep Convolutional Networks on 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07246/) (2018)
- [Multi-view Convolutional Neural Networks for 3D Shape Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00880/) (2015)
- [Hypergraph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09401/) (2018)
- [Rethinking Network Design and Local Geometry in Point Cloud: A Simple Residual MLP Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07123/) (2022)
- [Relation-Shape Convolutional Neural Network for Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07601/) (2019)
- [OmniObject3D: Large-Vocabulary 3D Object Dataset for Realistic Perception, Reconstruction and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07525/) (2023)
- [SpiderCNN: Deep Learning on Point Sets with Parameterized Convolutional Filters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11527/) (2018)
- [Volumetric and Multi-View CNNs for Object Classification on 3D Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03265/) (2016)
- [PointASNL: Robust Point Clouds Processing using Nonlocal Neural Networks with Adaptive Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00492/) (2020)
- [Walk in the Cloud: Learning Curves for Point Clouds Shape Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01288/) (2021)
- [Revisiting Point Cloud Shape Classification with a Simple and Effective Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05304/) (2021)
- [MVTN: Multi-View Transformation Network for 3D Shape Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13244/) (2020)
- [Generative and Discriminative Voxel Modeling with Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04236/) (2016)
- [A Rotation-Invariant Framework for Deep Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07238/) (2020)
- [Equivariant Multi-View Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00993/) (2019)
- [PVNet: A Joint Convolutional Network of Point Cloud and Multi-View for 3D Shape Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07659/) (2018)

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

- [Proto-FG3D: Prototype-based Interpretable Fine-Grained 3D Shape Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17666/) (2025)
- [CityGuard: Graph-Aware Private Descriptors for Bias-Resilient Identity Search Across Urban Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18047/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

View-based methods have demonstrated promising performance in 3D shape understanding. However, they tend to make strong assumptions about the relations between views or learn the multi-view correlations indirectly, which limits the flexibility of exploring inter-view correlations and the effectiveness of target tasks. To overcome the above problems, this paper investigates flexible organization and explicit correlation learning for multiple views. In particular, we propose to incorporate different views of a 3D shape into a permutation-invariant set, referred to as View Set, which removes rigid relation assumptions and facilitates adequate information exchange and fusion among views. Based on that, we devise a nimble Transformer model, named VSFormer, to explicitly capture pairwise and higher-order correlations of all elements in the set. Meanwhile, we theoretically reveal a natural correspondence between the Cartesian product of a view set and the correlation matrix in the attention mechanism, which supports our model design. Comprehensive experiments suggest that VSFormer has better flexibility, efficient inference efficiency and superior performance. Notably, VSFormer reaches state-of-the-art results on various 3d recognition datasets, including ModelNet40, ScanObjectNN and RGBD. It also establishes new records on the SHREC'17 retrieval benchmark. The code and datasets are available at urlhttps://github.com/auniquesun/VSFormer.
