# PointTPA: Dynamic Network Parameter Adaptation for 3D Scene Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04933 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04933/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 64 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 64)

- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [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)
- [BitFit: Simple Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning for Transformer-based Masked Language-models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10199/) (2021)
- [4D Spatio-Temporal ConvNets: Minkowski Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08755/) (2019)
- [ScanNet++: A High-Fidelity Dataset of 3D Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11417/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Deep Learning for 3D Point Clouds: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12033/) (2019)
- [PointContrast: Unsupervised Pre-training for 3D Point Cloud Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10985/) (2020)
- [PointCLIP: Point Cloud Understanding by CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02413/) (2021)
- [Masked Autoencoders for Point Cloud Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06604/) (2022)
- [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)
- [PointGroup: Dual-Set Point Grouping for 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01658/) (2020)
- [VeRA: Vector-based Random Matrix Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11454/) (2023)
- [Point-M2AE: Multi-scale Masked Autoencoders for Hierarchical Point Cloud Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14401/) (2022)
- [Voxel Transformer for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02497/) (2021)
- [Language-Grounded Indoor 3D Semantic Segmentation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07761/) (2022)
- [DyLoRA: Parameter Efficient Tuning of Pre-trained Models using Dynamic Search-Free Low-Rank Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07558/) (2022)
- [VoxelNeXt: Fully Sparse VoxelNet for 3D Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11301/) (2023)
- [Exploring Data-Efficient 3D Scene Understanding with Contrastive Scene Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09165/) (2020)
- [CrossPoint: Self-Supervised Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning for 3D Point Cloud Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00680/) (2022)

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

- [Point Ladder Tuning: Parameter-Efficient Hierarchical Adaptation for 3D Point Cloud Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19171/) (2026)
- [Partition-Invariant Tuning for 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.12473/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Scene-level point cloud understanding remains challenging due to diverse geometries, imbalanced category distributions, and highly varied spatial layouts. Existing methods improve object-level performance but rely on static network parameters during inference, limiting their adaptability to dynamic scene data. We propose PointTPA, a Test-time Parameter Adaptation framework that generates input-aware network parameters for scene-level point clouds. PointTPA adopts a Serialization-based Neighborhood Grouping (SNG) to form locally coherent patches and a Dynamic Parameter Projector (DPP) to produce patch-wise adaptive weights, enabling the backbone to adjust its behavior according to scene-specific variations while maintaining a low parameter overhead. Integrated into the PTv3 structure, PointTPA demonstrates strong parameter efficiency by introducing two lightweight modules of less than 2% of the backbone's parameters. Despite this minimal parameter overhead, PointTPA achieves 78.4% mIoU on ScanNet validation, surpassing existing parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods across multiple benchmarks, highlighting the efficacy of our test-time dynamic network parameter adaptation mechanism in enhancing 3D scene understanding. The code is available at https://github.com/H-EmbodVis/PointTPA.
