Unlocking Hidden Potential in Point Cloud Networks with Attention-Guided Grouping-Feature Coordination

Abstract: Point cloud analysis has evolved with diverse network architectures, while existing works predominantly focus on introducing novel structural designs. However, conventional point-based architectures - processing raw points through sequential sampling, grouping, and feature extraction layers - demonstrate underutilized potential. We notice that substantial performance gains can be unlocked through strategic module integration rather than structural modifications. In this paper, we propose the Grouping-Feature Coordination Module (GF-Core), a lightweight separable component that simultaneously regulates both grouping layer and feature extraction layer to enable more nuanced feature aggregation. Besides, we introduce a self-supervised pretraining strategy specifically tailored for point-based inputs to enhance model robustness in complex point cloud analysis scenarios. On ModelNet40 dataset, our method elevates baseline networks to 94.0% accuracy, matching advanced frameworks' performance while preserving architectural simplicity. On three variants of the ScanObjectNN dataset, we obtain improvements of 2.96%, 6.34%, and 6.32% respectively.