Papers › PatchFormer: An Efficient Point Transformer with Patch Attention

PatchFormer: An Efficient Point Transformer with Patch Attention

30 Oct 2021CVPR 2022 1arXiv:2111.00207archive 2025-07-28

Zhang Cheng, Haocheng Wan, Xinyi Shen, Zizhao Wu

The point cloud learning community witnesses a modeling shift from CNNs to Transformers, where pure Transformer architectures have achieved top accuracy on the major learning benchmarks. However, existing point Transformers are computationally expensive since they need to generate a large attention map, which has quadratic complexity (both in space and time) with respect to input size. To solve this shortcoming, we introduce Patch ATtention (PAT) to adaptively learn a much smaller set of bases upon which the attention maps are computed. By a weighted summation upon these bases, PAT not only captures the global shape context but also achieves linear complexity to input size. In addition, we propose a lightweight Multi-Scale aTtention (MST) block to build attentions among features of different scales, providing the model with multi-scale features. Equipped with the PAT and MST, we construct our neural architecture called PatchFormer that integrates both modules into a joint framework for point cloud learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our network achieves comparable accuracy on general point cloud learning tasks with 9.2x speed-up than previous point Transformers.

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Tasks

Semantic Segmentation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Semantic Segmentation S3DIS Area5 PatchFormer Number of params N/A #40 of 61 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Segmentation S3DIS Area5 PatchFormer mIoU 67.3 #40 of 61 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Segmentation ShapeNet PatchFormer Mean IoU 86.5% #1 of 5 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformer

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