Tabulated MLP for Fast Point Feature Embedding

Abstract: Aiming at a drastic speedup for point-data embeddings at test time, we propose a new framework that uses a pair of multi-layer perceptron (MLP) and look-up table (LUT) to transform point-coordinate inputs into high-dimensional features. When compared with PointNet's feature embedding part realized by MLP that requires millions of dot products, ours at test time requires no such layers of matrix-vector products but requires only looking up the nearest entities followed by interpolation, from the tabulated MLP defined over discrete inputs on a 3D lattice. We call this framework as "LUTI-MLP: LUT Interpolation MLP" that provides a way to train end-to-end tabulated MLP coupled to a LUT in a specific manner without the need for any approximation at test time. LUTI-MLP also provides significant speedup for Jacobian computation of the embedding function wrt global pose coordinate on Lie algebra $\mathfrak{se}(3)$ at test time, which could be used for point-set registration problems. After extensive architectural analysis using ModelNet40 dataset, we confirmed that our LUTI-MLP even with a small-sized table ($8\times 8\times 8$) yields performance comparable to that of MLP while achieving significant speedup: $80\times$ for embedding, $12\times$ for approximate Jacobian, and $860\times$ for canonical Jacobian.