# CLIPoint3D: Language-Grounded Few-Shot Unsupervised 3D Point Cloud Domain Adaptation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20409 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20409/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Embodied and 3D vision-language models, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 50 of its 85 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Feb 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Embodied and 3D vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/embodied-and-3d-vision-language-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [Learning Transferable Features with Deep Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02791/) (2015)
- [Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05464/) (2017)
- [BitFit: Simple Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning for Transformer-based Masked Language-models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10199/) (2021)
- [CLIP-Adapter: Better Vision-Language Models with Feature Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04544/) (2021)
- [Phi-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08905/) (2024)
- [MaPLe: Multi-modal Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03117/) (2022)
- [Multi-view Convolutional Neural Networks for 3D Shape Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00880/) (2015)
- [Can Spatiotemporal 3D CNNs Retrace the History of 2D CNNs and ImageNet?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09577/) (2017)
- [PointCLIP: Point Cloud Understanding by CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02413/) (2021)
- [Test-Time Prompt Tuning for Zero-Shot Generalization in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07511/) (2022)
- [Visual Classification via Description from Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07183/) (2022)
- [Factual Probing Is [MASK]: Learning vs. Learning to Recall](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05240/) (2021)
- [PointCLIP V2: Prompting CLIP and GPT for Powerful 3D Open-world Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11682/) (2022)
- [Scaling Down to Scale Up: A Guide to Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15647/) (2023)
- [CLIP2Point: Transfer CLIP to Point Cloud Classification with Image-Depth Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01055/) (2022)
- [Revisiting Point Cloud Shape Classification with a Simple and Effective Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05304/) (2021)
- [Domain Adaptation via Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06687/) (2022)

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

- [BioVLM: Routing Prompts, Not Parameters, for Cross-Modality Generalization in Biomedical VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17629/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP demonstrate impressive cross-modal reasoning, extending beyond images to 3D perception. Yet, these models remain fragile under domain shifts, especially when adapting from synthetic to real-world point clouds. Conventional 3D domain adaptation approaches rely on heavy trainable encoders, yielding strong accuracy but at the cost of efficiency. We introduce CLIPoint3D, the first framework for few-shot unsupervised 3D point cloud domain adaptation built upon CLIP. Our approach projects 3D samples into multiple depth maps and exploits the frozen CLIP backbone, refined through a knowledge-driven prompt tuning scheme that integrates high-level language priors with geometric cues from a lightweight 3D encoder. To adapt task-specific features effectively, we apply parameter-efficient fine-tuning to CLIP's encoders and design an entropy-guided view sampling strategy for selecting confident projections. Furthermore, an optimal transport-based alignment loss and an uncertainty-aware prototype alignment loss collaboratively bridge source-target distribution gaps while maintaining class separability. Extensive experiments on PointDA-10 and GraspNetPC-10 benchmarks show that CLIPoint3D achieves consistent 3-16% accuracy gains over both CLIP-based and conventional encoder-based baselines. Project page: https://sarthakm320.github.io/CLIPoint3D.