Auto-Points: Automatic Learning for Point Cloud Analysis With Neural Architecture Search

Pure point-based neural networks have recently shown tremendous promise for point cloud tasks, including 3D object classification, 3D object part segmentation, 3D semantic segmentation, and 3D object detection. Nevertheless, it is a laborious process to construct a network for each task due to the artificial parameters and hyperparameters involved, e.g., the depths and widths of the network and the number of sampled points at each stage. In this work, we propose Auto-Points, a novel one-shot search framework that automatically seeks the optimal architecture configuration for point cloud tasks. Technically, we introduce a set abstraction mixer (SAM) layer that is capable of scaling up flexibly along the depth and width of the network. Each SAM layer consists of numerous child candidates, which simplifies architecture search and enables us to discover the optimum design for each point cloud task pursuant to resource constraint from an enormous search space. To fully optimize the child candidates, we develop a weight-entwinement neural architecture search (NAS) technique that entwines the weights of different candidates in the same layer during supernet training such that all candidates can be extremely optimized. Benefiting from the proposed techniques, the trained supernet allows the searched subnets to be exceptionally well-optimized without further retraining or finetuning. In particular, the searched models deliver superior performances on multiple extensively employed benchmarks, 93.9% overall accuracy (OA) on ModelNet40, 89.1% OA on ScanObjectNN, 87.1% instance average IoU on ShapeNetPart, 69.1% mIoU on S3DIS, 70.4% mAP@0.25 on ScanNet V2, and 64.4% mAP@0.25 on SUN RGB-D.