Point Cloud Pre-Training with Diffusion Models

Pre-training a model and then fine-tuning it on down-stream tasks has demonstrated significant success in the 2D image and NLP domains. However, due to the unordered and non-uniform density characteristics of point clouds, it is non-trivial to explore the prior knowledge of point clouds and pre-train a point cloud backbone. In this paper, we propose a novel pre-training method called Point cloud Diffusion pre-training (PointDif). We consider the point cloud pre-training task as a conditional point-to-point gen-eration problem and introduce a conditional point genera-tor. This generator aggregates the features extracted by the backbone and employs them as the condition to guide the point-to-point recovery from the noisy point cloud, thereby assisting the backbone in capturing both local and global geometric priors as well as the global point density distri-bution of the object. We also present a recurrent uniform sampling optimization strategy, which enables the model to uniformly recover from various noise levels and learn from balanced supervision. Our PointDif achieves substan-tial improvement across various real-world datasets for di-verse downstream tasks such as classification, segmentation and detection. Specifically, PointDif attains 70.0% mIoU on S3DIS Area 5 for the segmentation task and achieves an average improvement of 2.4% on ScanObjectNN for the classification task compared to TAP. Furthermore, our pre-training framework can be flexibly applied to diverse point cloud backbones and bring considerable gains. Code is available at https://github.com/zhengxiaozx/PointDif.