Mitigating Geometric Degradation in Fast DownSampling via FastAdapter for Point Cloud Segmentation

Farthest Point Sampling (FPS) is widely used in existing point-based models because it effectively preserves structural integrity during downsampling. However, it incurs significant computational overhead, severely impacting the model's inference efficiency. Random sampling or grid sampling is considered faster downsampling methods; however, these fast downsampling methods may lead to the loss of geometric information during the downsampling process due to their overly simplistic and fixed rules, which can negatively affect model performance. To address this issue, we propose FastAdapter, which aggregates local contextual information through a small number of anchor points and facilitates interactions across spatial and layer dimensions, ultimately feeding this information back into the downsampled point cloud to mitigate the information degradation caused by fast downsampling methods. In addition to using FastAdapter to enhance model performance in methods that already employ fast downsampling, we aim to explore a more challenging yet valuable application scenario. Specifically, we focus on pre-trained models that utilize FPS, embedding FastAdapter and replacing FPS with random sampling for lightweight fine-tuning. This approach aims to significantly improve inference speed while maintaining relatively unchanged performance. Experimental results on ScanNet, S3DIS, and SemanticKITTI demonstrate that our method effectively mitigates the geometric information degradation issues caused by fast downSampling.