# 3D Gaussian Point Encoders

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04797 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04797/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [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)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [Transformers are SSMs: Generalized Models and Efficient Algorithms Through Structured State Space Duality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21060/) (2024)
- [VoxelNet: End-to-End Learning for Point Cloud Based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06396/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Point Transformer V3: Simpler, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10035/) (2023)
- [Revisiting Point Cloud Classification: A New Benchmark Dataset and Classification Model on Real-World Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04616/) (2019)
- [PointNeXt: Revisiting PointNet++ with Improved Training and Scaling Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04670/) (2022)
- [LightGaussian: Unbounded 3D Gaussian Compression with 15x Reduction and 200+ FPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17245/) (2023)
- [Shampoo: Preconditioned Stochastic Tensor Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.09568/) (2018)
- [Point Transformer V2: Grouped Vector Attention and Partition-based Pooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05666/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Network Design and Local Geometry in Point Cloud: A Simple Residual MLP Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07123/) (2022)
- [Mini-Splatting: Representing Scenes with a Constrained Number of Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14166/) (2024)
- [SOAP: Improving and Stabilizing Shampoo using Adam](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11321/) (2024)
- [PointMamba: A Simple State Space Model for Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10739/) (2024)
- [Revisiting Point Cloud Shape Classification with a Simple and Effective Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05304/) (2021)
- [RadSplat: Radiance Field-Informed Gaussian Splatting for Robust Real-Time Rendering with 900+ FPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13806/) (2024)
- [PUP 3D-GS: Principled Uncertainty Pruning for 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10219/) (2024)
- [Speedy-Splat: Fast 3D Gaussian Splatting with Sparse Pixels and Sparse Primitives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00578/) (2024)
- [Point Cloud Mamba: Point Cloud Learning via State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00762/) (2024)
- [Mamba3D: Enhancing Local Features for 3D Point Cloud Analysis via State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14966/) (2024)
- [N-Dimensional Gaussians for Fitting of High Dimensional Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20067/) (2024)
- [Decoupled Local Aggregation for Point Cloud Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16532/) (2023)
- [A Linear Time and Space Local Point Cloud Geometry Encoder via Vectorized Kernel Mixture (VecKM)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01568/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this work, we introduce the 3D Gaussian Point Encoder, an explicit per-point embedding built on mixtures of learned 3D Gaussians. This explicit geometric representation for 3D recognition tasks is a departure from widely used implicit representations such as PointNet. However, it is difficult to learn 3D Gaussian encoders in end-to-end fashion with standard optimizers. We develop optimization techniques based on natural gradients and distillation from PointNets to find a Gaussian Basis that can reconstruct PointNet activations. The resulting 3D Gaussian Point Encoders are faster and more parameter efficient than traditional PointNets. As in the 3D reconstruction literature where there has been considerable interest in the move from implicit (e.g., NeRF) to explicit (e.g., Gaussian Splatting) representations, we can take advantage of computational geometry heuristics to accelerate 3D Gaussian Point Encoders further. We extend filtering techniques from 3D Gaussian Splatting to construct encoders that run 2.7 times faster as a comparable accuracy PointNet while using 46% less memory and 88% fewer FLOPs. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of 3D Gaussian Point Encoders as a component in Mamba3D, running 1.27 times faster and achieving a reduction in memory and FLOPs by 42% and 54% respectively. 3D Gaussian Point Encoders are lightweight enough to achieve high framerates on CPU-only devices.