# CompetitorFormer: Competitor Transformer for 3D Instance Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.14179 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14179/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [DINO: DETR with Improved DeNoising Anchor Boxes for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03605/) (2022)
- [4D Spatio-Temporal ConvNets: Minkowski Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08755/) (2019)
- [GroupViT: Semantic Segmentation Emerges from Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11094/) (2022)
- [Generalized Focal Loss: Learning Qualified and Distributed Bounding Boxes for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04388/) (2020)
- [Large-scale Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation with Superpoint Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09869/) (2017)
- [PointGroup: Dual-Set Point Grouping for 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01658/) (2020)
- [Mask3D: Mask Transformer for 3D Semantic Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03105/) (2022)
- [Language-Grounded Indoor 3D Semantic Segmentation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07761/) (2022)
- [VarifocalNet: An IoU-aware Dense Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.13367/) (2020)
- [TOOD: Task-aligned One-stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07755/) (2021)
- [3D-SIS: 3D Semantic Instance Segmentation of RGB-D Scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07003/) (2018)
- [SoftGroup for 3D Instance Segmentation on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01509/) (2022)
- [Learning Object Bounding Boxes for 3D Instance Segmentation on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01140/) (2019)
- [GSPN: Generative Shape Proposal Network for 3D Instance Segmentation in Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03320/) (2018)
- [3D-MPA: Multi Proposal Aggregation for 3D Semantic Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13867/) (2020)
- [Hierarchical Aggregation for 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02350/) (2021)
- [Superpoint Transformer for 3D Scene Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15766/) (2022)
- [Instance Segmentation in 3D Scenes using Semantic Superpoint Tree Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07478/) (2021)
- [OneFormer3D: One Transformer for Unified Point Cloud Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14405/) (2023)
- [DyCo3D: Robust Instance Segmentation of 3D Point Clouds through Dynamic Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13328/) (2020)
- [CMT-DeepLab: Clustering Mask Transformers for Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08948/) (2022)
- [STPLS3D: A Large-Scale Synthetic and Real Aerial Photogrammetry 3D Point Cloud Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09065/) (2022)
- [ISBNet: a 3D Point Cloud Instance Segmentation Network with Instance-aware Sampling and Box-aware Dynamic Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00246/) (2023)
- [Rank-DETR for High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08854/) (2023)
- [Mask-Attention-Free Transformer for 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01692/) (2023)
- [Top-Down Beats Bottom-Up in 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02871/) (2023)
- [MaskGroup: Hierarchical Point Grouping and Masking for 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14662/) (2022)
- [Spherical Mask: Coarse-to-Fine 3D Point Cloud Instance Segmentation with Spherical Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11269/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [SegDINO3D: 3D Instance Segmentation Empowered by Both Image-Level and Object-Level 2D Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16098/) (2025)
- [SegVGGT: Joint 3D Reconstruction and Instance Segmentation from Multi-View Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19926/) (2026)
- [ReScene4D: Temporally Consistent Semantic Instance Segmentation of Evolving Indoor 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.11508/) (2026)
- [AQ3D: Adaptive Query Transformer for 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.30618/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Transformer-based methods have become the dominant approach for 3D instance segmentation. These methods predict instance masks via instance queries, ranking them by classification confidence and IoU scores to select the top prediction as the final outcome. However, it has been observed that the current models employ a fixed and higher number of queries than the instances present within a scene. In such instances, multiple queries predict the same instance, yet only a single query is ultimately optimized. The close scores of queries in the lower-level decoders make it challenging for the dominant query to distinguish itself rapidly, which ultimately impairs the model's accuracy and convergence efficiency. This phenomenon is referred to as inter-query competition. To address this challenge, we put forth a series of plug-and-play competition-oriented designs, collectively designated as the CompetitorFormer, with the aim of reducing competition and facilitating a dominant query. Experiments showed that integrating our designs with state-of-the-art frameworks consistently resulted in significant performance improvements in 3D instance segmentation across a range of datasets.