# PointLAMA: Latent Attention meets Mamba for Efficient Point Cloud Pretraining

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.17296 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17296/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Point clouds, detection and remote sensing, one of 10 directions in State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba).
- Builds on 26 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jul 2025.

## Placed in

- State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba) / [Point clouds, detection and remote sensing](https://mlsanity.com/ssm/point-clouds-detection-and-remote-sensing/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00396/) (2021)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Perceiver: General Perception with Iterative Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03206/) (2021)
- [A Point Set Generation Network for 3D Object Reconstruction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00603/) (2016)
- [PointCNN: Convolution On X-Transformed Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07791/) (2018)
- [PCT: Point cloud transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09688/) (2020)
- [Point-BERT: Pre-training 3D Point Cloud Transformers with Masked Point Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14819/) (2021)
- [Transformer in Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00112/) (2021)
- [Revisiting Point Cloud Classification: A New Benchmark Dataset and Classification Model on Real-World Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04616/) (2019)
- [3D Shape Generation and Completion through Point-Voxel Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03670/) (2021)
- [Diagonal State Spaces are as Effective as Structured State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14343/) (2022)
- [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)
- [How to Train Your HiPPO: State Space Models with Generalized Orthogonal Basis Projections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.12037/) (2022)
- [Autoencoders as Cross-Modal Teachers: Can Pretrained 2D Image Transformers Help 3D Representation Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08320/) (2022)
- [PointGPT: Auto-regressively Generative Pre-training from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11487/) (2023)
- [Self-supervised Learning of Point Clouds via Orientation Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00305/) (2020)
- [Instance-aware Dynamic Prompt Tuning for Pre-trained Point Cloud Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07221/) (2023)
- [Joint-MAE: 2D-3D Joint Masked Autoencoders for 3D Point Cloud Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14007/) (2023)
- [Point Cloud Pre-training with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14960/) (2023)

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

- [Dual-Branch Center-Surrounding Contrast: Rethinking Contrastive Learning for 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08673/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Mamba has recently gained widespread attention as a backbone model for point cloud modeling, leveraging a state-space architecture that enables efficient global sequence modeling with linear complexity. However, its lack of local inductive bias limits its capacity to capture fine-grained geometric structures in 3D data. To address this limitation, we propose PointLAMA, a point cloud pretraining framework that combines task-aware point cloud serialization, a hybrid encoder with integrated Latent Attention and Mamba blocks, and a conditional diffusion mechanism built upon the Mamba backbone. Specifically, the task-aware point cloud serialization employs Hilbert/Trans-Hilbert space-filling curves and axis-wise sorting to structurally align point tokens for classification and segmentation tasks, respectively. Our lightweight Latent Attention block features a Point-wise Multi-head Latent Attention (PMLA) module, which is specifically designed to align with the Mamba architecture by leveraging the shared latent space characteristics of PMLA and Mamba. This enables enhanced local context modeling while preserving overall efficiency. To further enhance representation learning, we incorporate a conditional diffusion mechanism during pretraining, which denoises perturbed feature sequences without relying on explicit point-wise reconstruction. Experimental results demonstrate that PointLAMA achieves competitive performance on multiple benchmark datasets with minimal parameter count and FLOPs, validating its effectiveness for efficient point cloud pretraining.