Generative Data Augmentation for Object Point Cloud Segmentation

Data augmentation is widely used to train deep learning models to address data scarcity. However, traditional data augmentation (TDA) typically relies on simple geometric transformation, such as random rotation and rescaling, resulting in minimal data diversity enrichment and limited model performance improvement. State-of-the-art generative models for 3D shape generation rely on the denoising diffusion probabilistic models and manage to generate realistic novel point clouds for 3D content creation and manipulation. Nevertheless, the generated 3D shapes lack associated point-wise semantic labels, restricting their usage in enlarging the training data for point cloud segmentation tasks. To bridge the gap between data augmentation techniques and the advanced diffusion models, we extend the state-of-the-art 3D diffusion model, Lion, to a part-aware generative model that can generate high-quality point clouds conditioned on given segmentation masks. Leveraging the novel generative model, we introduce a 3-step generative data augmentation (GDA) pipeline for point cloud segmentation training. Our GDA approach requires only a small amount of labeled samples but enriches the training data with generated variants and pseudo-labeled samples, which are validated by a novel diffusion-based pseudo-label filtering method. Extensive experiments on two large-scale synthetic datasets and a real-world medical dataset demonstrate that our GDA method outperforms TDA approach and related semi-supervised and self-supervised methods.

SeaLion: Semantic Part-Aware Latent Point Diffusion Models for 3D Generation

Denoising diffusion probabilistic models have achieved significant success in point cloud generation, enabling numerous downstream applications, such as generative data augmentation and 3D model editing. However, little attention has been given to generating point clouds with point-wise segmentation labels, as well as to developing evaluation metrics for this task. Therefore, in this paper, we present SeaLion, a novel diffusion model designed to generate high-quality and diverse point clouds with fine-grained segmentation labels. Specifically, we introduce the semantic part-aware latent point diffusion technique, which leverages the intermediate features of the generative models to jointly predict the noise for perturbed latent points and associated part segmentation labels during the denoising process, and subsequently decodes the latent points to point clouds conditioned on part segmentation labels. To effectively evaluate the quality of generated point clouds, we introduce a novel point cloud pairwise distance calculation method named part-aware Chamfer distance (p-CD). This method enables existing metrics, such as 1-NNA, to measure both the local structural quality and inter-part coherence of generated point clouds. Experiments on the large-scale synthetic dataset ShapeNet and real-world medical dataset IntrA demonstrate that SeaLion achieves remarkable performance in generation quality and diversity, outperforming the existing state-of-the-art model, DiffFacto, by 13.33% and 6.52% on 1-NNA (p-CD) across the two datasets. Experimental analysis shows that SeaLion can be trained semi-supervised, thereby reducing the demand for labeling efforts. Lastly, we validate the applicability of SeaLion in generative data augmentation for training segmentation models and the capability of SeaLion to serve as a tool for part-aware 3D shape editing.

Transported Memory Networks accelerating Computational Fluid Dynamics

In recent years, augmentation of differentiable PDE solvers with neural networks has shown promising results, particularly in fluid simulations. However, most approaches rely on convolutional neural networks and custom solvers operating on Cartesian grids with efficient access to cell data. This particular choice poses challenges for industrial-grade solvers that operate on unstructured meshes, where access is restricted to neighboring cells only. In this work, we address this limitation using a novel architecture, named Transported Memory Networks. The architecture draws inspiration from both traditional turbulence models and recurrent neural networks, and it is fully compatible with generic discretizations. Our results show that it is point-wise and statistically comparable to, or improves upon, previous methods in terms of both accuracy and computational efficiency.