# EZ-SP: Fast and Lightweight Superpoint-Based 3D Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.00385 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00385/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Fast Graph Representation Learning with PyTorch Geometric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02428/) (2019)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [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)
- [3D Semantic Segmentation with Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10275/) (2017)
- [PCT: Point cloud transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09688/) (2020)
- [Point Transformer V3: Simpler, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10035/) (2023)
- [KITTI-360: A Novel Dataset and Benchmarks for Urban Scene Understanding in 2D and 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13410/) (2021)
- [PointNeXt: Revisiting PointNet++ with Improved Training and Scaling Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04670/) (2022)
- [Point Transformer V2: Grouped Vector Attention and Partition-based Pooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05666/) (2022)
- [Large-scale Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation with Superpoint Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09869/) (2017)
- [OccuSeg: Occupancy-aware 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06537/) (2020)
- [Stratified Transformer for 3D Point Cloud Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14508/) (2022)
- [SAM3D: Segment Anything in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03908/) (2023)
- [Superpoint Transformer for 3D Scene Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15766/) (2022)
- [Instance Segmentation in 3D Scenes using Semantic Superpoint Tree Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07478/) (2021)
- [REGTR: End-to-end Point Cloud Correspondences with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14517/) (2022)
- [One Thing One Click: A Self-Training Approach for Weakly Supervised 3D Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02246/) (2021)
- [DALES: A Large-scale Aerial LiDAR Data Set for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11985/) (2020)
- [Efficient 3D Semantic Segmentation with Superpoint Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08045/) (2023)
- [Point Cloud Oversegmentation with Graph-Structured Deep Metric Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02113/) (2019)
- [TorchSparse++: Efficient Training and Inference Framework for Sparse Convolution on GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12862/) (2023)
- [SAM-guided Graph Cut for 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08372/) (2023)
- [GrowSP: Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation of 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16404/) (2023)
- [Torch-Points3D: A Modular Multi-Task Frameworkfor Reproducible Deep Learning on 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04642/) (2020)
- [U3DS3: Unsupervised 3D Semantic Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06018/) (2023)
- [Online Segmentation of LiDAR Sequences: Dataset and Algorithm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08194/) (2022)
- [Scalable 3D Panoptic Segmentation As Superpoint Graph Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06704/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [FLORA: A deep learning approach to predict forest attributes from heterogeneous LiDAR data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.32023/) (2026)
- [Toward a foundation model for forest point clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.24787/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Superpoint-based pipelines provide an efficient alternative to point- or voxel-based 3D semantic segmentation, but are often bottlenecked by their CPU-bound partition step. We propose a learnable, fully GPU partitioning algorithm that generates geometrically and semantically coherent superpoints 13× faster than prior methods. Our module is compact (under 60k parameters), trains in under 20 minutes with a differentiable surrogate loss, and requires no handcrafted features. Combine with a lightweight superpoint classifier, the full pipeline fits in <2 MB of VRAM, scales to multi-million-point scenes, and supports real-time inference. With 72× faster inference and 120× fewer parameters, EZ-SP matches the accuracy of point-based SOTA models across three domains: indoor scans (S3DIS), autonomous driving (KITTI-360), and aerial LiDAR (DALES). Code and pretrained models are accessible at github.com/drprojects/superpointtransformer.