Point-McBert: A Multi-choice Self-supervised Framework for Point Cloud Pre-training
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Masked language modeling (MLM) has become one of the most successful self-supervised pre-training task. Inspired by its success, Point-Bert, as a pioneer work in point cloud, proposed masked point modeling (MPM) to pre-train point transformer on large scale unanotated dataset. Despite its great performance, we find inherent difference between language and point cloud tends to cause ambiguous tokenization for point cloud. For point cloud, there doesn't exist a gold standard for point cloud tokenization. Although Point-Bert introduce a discrete Variational AutoEncoder (dVAE) as tokenizer to allocate token ids to local patches, it tends to generate ambigious token ids for local patches. We find this imperfect tokenizer might generate different token ids for semantically-similar patches and same token ids for semantically-dissimilar patches. To tackle above problem, we propose our Point-McBert, a pre-training framework with eased and refined supervision signals. Specifically, we ease the previous single-choice constraint on patches, and provide multi-choice token ids for each patch as supervision. Moreover, we utilitze the high-level semantics learned by transformer to further refine our supervision signals. Extensive experiments on point cloud classification, few-shot classification and part segmentation tasks demonstrate the superiority of our method, e.g., the pre-trained transformer achieves 94.1 accuracy on the hardest setting of ScanObjectNN and new state-of-the-art performance on few-shot learning. We also demonstrate that our method not only improves the performance of Point-Bert on all downstream tasks, but also incurs almost no extra computational overhead.
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