Daily Papers

Large-scale pre-trained models have shown promising open-world performance for both vision and language tasks. However, their transferred capacity on 3D point clouds is still limited and only constrained to the classification task. In this paper, we first collaborate CLIP and GPT to be a unified 3D open-world learner, named as PointCLIP V2, which fully unleashes their potential for zero-shot 3D classification, segmentation, and detection. To better align 3D data with the pre-trained language knowledge, PointCLIP V2 contains two key designs. For the visual end, we prompt CLIP via a shape projection module to generate more realistic depth maps, narrowing the domain gap between projected point clouds with natural images. For the textual end, we prompt the GPT model to generate 3D-specific text as the input of CLIP's textual encoder. Without any training in 3D domains, our approach significantly surpasses PointCLIP by +42.90%, +40.44%, and +28.75% accuracy on three datasets for zero-shot 3D classification. On top of that, V2 can be extended to few-shot 3D classification, zero-shot 3D part segmentation, and 3D object detection in a simple manner, demonstrating our generalization ability for unified 3D open-world learning.

Pre-training across 3D vision and language remains under development because of limited training data. Recent works attempt to transfer vision-language pre-training models to 3D vision. PointCLIP converts point cloud data to multi-view depth maps, adopting CLIP for shape classification. However, its performance is restricted by the domain gap between rendered depth maps and images, as well as the diversity of depth distributions. To address this issue, we propose CLIP2Point, an image-depth pre-training method by contrastive learning to transfer CLIP to the 3D domain, and adapt it to point cloud classification. We introduce a new depth rendering setting that forms a better visual effect, and then render 52,460 pairs of images and depth maps from ShapeNet for pre-training. The pre-training scheme of CLIP2Point combines cross-modality learning to enforce the depth features for capturing expressive visual and textual features and intra-modality learning to enhance the invariance of depth aggregation. Additionally, we propose a novel Dual-Path Adapter (DPA) module, i.e., a dual-path structure with simplified adapters for few-shot learning. The dual-path structure allows the joint use of CLIP and CLIP2Point, and the simplified adapter can well fit few-shot tasks without post-search. Experimental results show that CLIP2Point is effective in transferring CLIP knowledge to 3D vision. Our CLIP2Point outperforms PointCLIP and other self-supervised 3D networks, achieving state-of-the-art results on zero-shot and few-shot classification.

The recognition capabilities of current state-of-the-art 3D models are limited by datasets with a small number of annotated data and a pre-defined set of categories. In its 2D counterpart, recent advances have shown that similar problems can be significantly alleviated by employing knowledge from other modalities, such as language. Inspired by this, leveraging multimodal information for 3D modality could be promising to improve 3D understanding under the restricted data regime, but this line of research is not well studied. Therefore, we introduce ULIP to learn a unified representation of images, texts, and 3D point clouds by pre-training with object triplets from the three modalities. To overcome the shortage of training triplets, ULIP leverages a pre-trained vision-language model that has already learned a common visual and textual space by training with massive image-text pairs. Then, ULIP learns a 3D representation space aligned with the common image-text space, using a small number of automatically synthesized triplets. ULIP is agnostic to 3D backbone networks and can easily be integrated into any 3D architecture. Experiments show that ULIP effectively improves the performance of multiple recent 3D backbones by simply pre-training them on ShapeNet55 using our framework, achieving state-of-the-art performance in both standard 3D classification and zero-shot 3D classification on ModelNet40 and ScanObjectNN. ULIP also improves the performance of PointMLP by around 3% in 3D classification on ScanObjectNN, and outperforms PointCLIP by 28.8% on top-1 accuracy for zero-shot 3D classification on ModelNet40. Our code and pre-trained models are released at https://github.com/salesforce/ULIP.