# Point-Cache: Test-time Dynamic and Hierarchical Cache for Robust and Generalizable Point Cloud Analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.12150 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12150/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 76 of its 90 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 76)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Pointer Sentinel Mixture Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07843/) (2016)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [Matching Networks for One Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04080/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Do We Really Need to Access the Source Data? Source Hypothesis Transfer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08546/) (2020)
- [Generalization through Memorization: Nearest Neighbor Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00172/) (2019)
- [Objaverse-XL: A Universe of 10M+ 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05663/) (2023)
- [PointCNN: Convolution On X-Transformed Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07791/) (2018)
- [A Closer Look at Few-shot Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04232/) (2019)
- [Point-BERT: Pre-training 3D Point Cloud Transformers with Masked Point Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14819/) (2021)
- [LiT: Zero-Shot Transfer with Locked-image text Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07991/) (2021)
- [Deep Learning for 3D Point Clouds: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12033/) (2019)
- [Revisiting Point Cloud Classification: A New Benchmark Dataset and Classification Model on Real-World Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04616/) (2019)
- [PointCLIP: Point Cloud Understanding by CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02413/) (2021)
- [Pseudo-LiDAR from Visual Depth Estimation: Bridging the Gap in 3D Object Detection for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07179/) (2018)
- [Test-Time Prompt Tuning for Zero-Shot Generalization in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07511/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Network Design and Local Geometry in Point Cloud: A Simple Residual MLP Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07123/) (2022)
- [MEMO: Test Time Robustness via Adaptation and Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09506/) (2021)
- [Tip-Adapter: Training-free Adaption of CLIP for Few-shot Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09519/) (2022)
- [OmniObject3D: Large-Vocabulary 3D Object Dataset for Realistic Perception, Reconstruction and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07525/) (2023)

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

- [Multi-Cache Enhanced Prototype Learning for Test-Time Generalization of Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01225/) (2025)
- [Adapting Point Cloud Analysis via Multimodal Bayesian Distribution Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22070/) (2026)
- [Domain Generalizable Adaptation of 3D Vision-Language Models via Regularized Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.18472/) (2026)
- [Test Time Adaptation Methods for Point Cloud Registration in Laparoscopic Surgery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.02883/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper proposes a general solution to enable point cloud recognition models to handle distribution shifts at test time. Unlike prior methods, which rely heavily on training data (often inaccessible during online inference) and are limited to recognizing a fixed set of point cloud classes predefined during training, we explore a more practical and challenging scenario: adapting the model solely based on online test data to recognize both previously seen classes and novel, unseen classes at test time. To this end, we develop Point-Cache, a hierarchical cache model that captures essential clues of online test samples, particularly focusing on the global structure of point clouds and their local-part details. Point-Cache, which serves as a rich 3D knowledge base, is dynamically managed to prioritize the inclusion of high-quality samples. Designed as a plug-and-play module, our method can be flexibly integrated into large multimodal 3D models to support open-vocabulary point cloud recognition. Notably, our solution operates with efficiency comparable to zero-shot inference, as it is entirely training-free. Point-Cache demonstrates substantial gains across 8 challenging benchmarks and 4 representative large 3D models, highlighting its effectiveness. Code is available at https://github.com/auniquesun/Point-Cache.