PointConvFormer: Revenge of the Point-based Convolution

We introduce PointConvFormer, a novel building block for point cloud based deep network architectures. Inspired by generalization theory, PointConvFormer combines ideas from point convolution, where filter weights are only based on relative position, and Transformers which utilize feature-based attention. In PointConvFormer, attention computed from feature difference between points in the neighborhood is used to modify the convolutional weights at each point. Hence, we preserved the invariances from point convolution, whereas attention helps to select relevant points in the neighborhood for…Apple Machine Learning Research