Papers › Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks

Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks

5 Jun 2017arXiv:1706.01307archive 2025-07-28

Benjamin Graham, Laurens van der Maaten

Convolutional network are the de-facto standard for analysing spatio-temporal data such as images, videos, 3D shapes, etc. Whilst some of this data is naturally dense (for instance, photos), many other data sources are inherently sparse. Examples include pen-strokes forming on a piece of paper, or (colored) 3D point clouds that were obtained using a LiDAR scanner or RGB-D camera. Standard "dense" implementations of convolutional networks are very inefficient when applied on such sparse data. We introduce a sparse convolutional operation tailored to processing sparse data that differs from prior work on sparse convolutional networks in that it operates strictly on submanifolds, rather than "dilating" the observation with every layer in the network. Our empirical analysis of the resulting submanifold sparse convolutional networks shows that they perform on par with state-of-the-art methods whilst requiring substantially less computation.

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Code

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facebookresearch/SparseConvNet officialmentioned on GitHubpytorchNOASSERTION report
LONG-9621/SparseConvNet mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
ZHC1992/SparseConvNet mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
btgraham/SparseConvNet mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
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uber/sbnet mentioned on GitHubtf report

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2ran · honoured contract
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calculate_grid isl-org/Open3D-ML/ml3d/torch/models/sparseconvnet.py community (archive-listed) ran · fixture could not drive it fingerprinted licence not identified · pointer only · 5cba07500e9d8295 · report
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Tasks

3D Part Segmentation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
3D Part Segmentation ShapeNet-Part SSCN Instance Average IoU 86.0 #37 of 67 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

Sparse Convolutions

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