# Exploring Semantic Masked Autoencoder for Self-supervised Point Cloud Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21957 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21957/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (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)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [A Point Set Generation Network for 3D Object Reconstruction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00603/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Relation-Shape Convolutional Neural Network for Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07601/) (2019)
- [Point-M2AE: Multi-scale Masked Autoencoders for Hierarchical Point Cloud Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14401/) (2022)
- [Self-Supervised Pretraining of 3D Features on any Point-Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02691/) (2021)
- [CrossPoint: Self-Supervised Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning for 3D Point Cloud Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00680/) (2022)
- [PointMamba: A Simple State Space Model for Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10739/) (2024)
- [Contrast with Reconstruct: Contrastive 3D Representation Learning Guided by Generative Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02318/) (2023)
- [Masked Discrimination for Self-Supervised Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11183/) (2022)
- [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)
- [GD-MAE: Generative Decoder for MAE Pre-training on LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03010/) (2022)
- [PiMAE: Point Cloud and Image Interactive Masked Autoencoders for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08129/) (2023)
- [GeoMAE: Masked Geometric Target Prediction for Self-supervised Point Cloud Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08808/) (2023)
- [Parameter is Not All You Need: Starting from Non-Parametric Networks for 3D Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08134/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [FS-I2P:A Hierarchical Focus-Sweep Registration Network with Dynamically Allocated Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07607/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Point cloud understanding aims to acquire robust and general feature representations from unlabeled data. Masked point modeling-based methods have recently shown significant performance across various downstream tasks. These pre-training methods rely on random masking strategies to establish the perception of point clouds by restoring corrupted point cloud inputs, which leads to the failure of capturing reasonable semantic relationships by the self-supervised models. To address this issue, we propose Semantic Masked Autoencoder, which comprises two main components: a prototype-based component semantic modeling module and a component semantic-enhanced masking strategy. Specifically, in the component semantic modeling module, we design a component semantic guidance mechanism to direct a set of learnable prototypes in capturing the semantics of different components from objects. Leveraging these prototypes, we develop a component semantic-enhanced masking strategy that addresses the limitations of random masking in effectively covering complete component structures. Furthermore, we introduce a component semantic-enhanced prompt-tuning strategy, which further leverages these prototypes to improve the performance of pre-trained models in downstream tasks. Extensive experiments conducted on datasets such as ScanObjectNN, ModelNet40, and ShapeNetPart demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed modules.