English

PointTransformerX: Portable and Efficient 3D Point Cloud Processing without Sparse Algorithms

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-04-30 v2

Abstract

3D point cloud perception remains tightly coupled to custom CUDA operators for spatial operations, limiting portability and efficiency on non-NVIDIA, AMD, and embedded hardware. We introduce PointTransformerX (PTX), a fully PyTorch-native vision transformer backbone for 3D point clouds, removing all custom CUDA operators and external libraries while retaining competitive accuracy. PTX introduces 3D-GS-RoPE, a rotary positional embedding that encodes 3D spatial relationships directly in self-attention without neighborhood construction, and further replaces sparse convolutional patch embedding with a linear projection. PTX explores inference-time scaling of attention windows to improve accuracy without retraining. With a redesigned feed-forward network, PTX achieves 98.7\% of PointTransformer V3's accuracy on ScanNet with 79.2\% fewer parameters and executing 1.6\times faster while requiring just 253 MB memory. PTX runs natively on NVIDIA GPUs, AMD GPUs (ROCm), and CPUs, providing an efficient and portable foundation for point cloud perception.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.24169,
  title  = {PointTransformerX: Portable and Efficient 3D Point Cloud Processing without Sparse Algorithms},
  author = {Laurenz Reichardt and Nikolas Ebert and Oliver Wasenmüller},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.24169},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

This paper has been accepted at IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (CVPRW), 2026

R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:36:36.812Z