# PointCNN++: Performant Convolution on Native Points

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.23227 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.23227/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [VoxelNet: End-to-End Learning for Point Cloud Based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06396/) (2017)
- [4D Spatio-Temporal ConvNets: Minkowski Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08755/) (2019)
- [KPConv: Flexible and Deformable Convolution for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08889/) (2019)
- [PointCNN: Convolution On X-Transformed Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07791/) (2018)
- [Open3D: A Modern Library for 3D Data Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09847/) (2018)
- [PointConv: Deep Convolutional Networks on 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07246/) (2018)
- [RandLA-Net: Efficient Semantic Segmentation of Large-Scale Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11236/) (2019)
- [3DMatch: Learning Local Geometric Descriptors from RGB-D Reconstructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08182/) (2016)
- [PREDATOR: Registration of 3D Point Clouds with Low Overlap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13005/) (2020)
- [Caffe: Convolutional Architecture for Fast Feature Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1408.5093/) (2014)
- [cuDNN: Efficient Primitives for Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1410.0759/) (2014)
- [Deep Global Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11540/) (2020)
- [Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.01307/) (2017)
- [TPU v4: An Optically Reconfigurable Supercomputer for Machine Learning with Hardware Support for Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01433/) (2023)
- [CoFiNet: Reliable Coarse-to-fine Correspondences for Robust Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14076/) (2021)
- [CenterFormer: Center-based Transformer for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05588/) (2022)
- [Visual Point Cloud Forecasting enables Scalable Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17655/) (2023)
- [GeoTransformer: Fast and Robust Point Cloud Registration with Geometric Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03768/) (2023)
- [TorchSparse: Efficient Point Cloud Inference Engine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10319/) (2022)
- [FlatFormer: Flattened Window Attention for Efficient Point Cloud Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08739/) (2023)
- [Point Cloud Matters: Rethinking the Impact of Different Observation Spaces on Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02500/) (2024)
- [RegFormer: An Efficient Projection-Aware Transformer Network for Large-Scale Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12384/) (2023)
- [TorchSparse++: Efficient Training and Inference Framework for Sparse Convolution on GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12862/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing convolutional learning methods for 3D point cloud data are divided into two paradigms: point-based methods that preserve geometric precision but often face performance challenges, and voxel-based methods that achieve high efficiency through quantization at the cost of geometric fidelity. This loss of precision is a critical bottleneck for tasks such as point cloud registration. We propose PointCNN++, a novel architectural design that fundamentally mitigates this precision-performance trade-off. It generalizes sparse convolution from voxels to points, treating voxel-based convolution as a specialized, degraded case of our more general point-based convolution. First, we introduce a point-centric convolution where the receptive field is centered on the original, high-precision point coordinates. Second, to make this high-fidelity operation performant, we design a computational strategy that operates natively on points. We formulate the convolution on native points as a Matrix-Vector Multiplication and Reduction (MVMR) problem, for which we develop a dedicated, highly-optimized GPU kernel. Experiments demonstrate that PointCNN++ uses an order of magnitude less memory and is several times faster than representative point-based methods. Furthermore, when used as a simple replacement for the voxel-based backbones it generalizes, it significantly improves point cloud registration accuracies while proving both more memory-efficient and faster. PointCNN++ shows that preserving geometric detail and achieving high performance are not mutually exclusive, paving the way for a new class of 3D learning with high fidelity and efficiency. Our code will be open sourced.