Multi-modal Multi-task Pre-training for Improved Point Cloud Understanding

Recent advances in multi-modal pre-training methods have shown promising effectiveness in learning 3D representations by aligning multi-modal features between 3D shapes and their corresponding 2D counterparts. However, existing multi-modal pre-training frameworks primarily rely on a single pre-training task to gather multi-modal data in 3D applications. This limitation prevents the models from obtaining the abundant information provided by other relevant tasks, which can hinder their performance in downstream tasks, particularly in complex and diverse domains. In order to tackle this issue, we propose MMPT, a Multi-modal Multi-task Pre-training framework designed to enhance point cloud understanding. Specifically, three pre-training tasks are devised: (i) Token-level reconstruction (TLR) aims to recover masked point tokens, endowing the model with representative learning abilities. (ii) Point-level reconstruction (PLR) is integrated to predict the masked point positions directly, and the reconstructed point cloud can be considered as a transformed point cloud used in the subsequent task. (iii) Multi-modal contrastive learning (MCL) combines feature correspondences within and across modalities, thus assembling a rich learning signal from both 3D point cloud and 2D image modalities in a self-supervised manner. Moreover, this framework operates without requiring any 3D annotations, making it scalable for use with large datasets. The trained encoder can be effectively transferred to various downstream tasks. To demonstrate its effectiveness, we evaluated its performance compared to state-of-the-art methods in various discriminant and generative applications under widely-used benchmarks.

Climate Downscaling: A Deep-Learning Based Super-resolution Model of Precipitation Data with Attention Block and Skip Connections

Human activities accelerate consumption of fossil fuels and produce greenhouse gases, resulting in urgent issues today: global warming and the climate change. These indirectly cause severe natural disasters, plenty of lives suffering and huge losses of agricultural properties. To mitigate impacts on our lands, scientists are developing renewable, reusable, and clean energies and climatologists are trying to predict the extremes. Meanwhile, governments are publicizing resource-saving policies for a more eco-friendly society and arousing environment awareness. One of the most influencing factors is the precipitation, bringing condensed water vapor onto lands. Water resources are the most significant but basic needs in society, not only supporting our livings, but also economics. In Taiwan, although the average annual precipitation is up to 2,500 millimeter (mm), the water allocation for each person is lower than the global average due to drastically geographical elevation changes and uneven distribution through the year. Thus, it is crucial to track and predict the rainfall to make the most use of it and to prevent the floods. However, climate models have limited resolution and require intensive computational power for local-scale use. Therefore, we proposed a deep convolutional neural network with skip connections, attention blocks, and auxiliary data concatenation, in order to downscale the low-resolution precipitation data into high-resolution one. Eventually, we compare with other climate downscaling methods and show better performance in metrics of Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Pearson Correlation, structural similarity index (SSIM), and forecast indicators.

Self-supervised Learning for Pre-Training 3D Point Clouds: A Survey

Point cloud data has been extensively studied due to its compact form and flexibility in representing complex 3D structures. The ability of point cloud data to accurately capture and represent intricate 3D geometry makes it an ideal choice for a wide range of applications, including computer vision, robotics, and autonomous driving, all of which require an understanding of the underlying spatial structures. Given the challenges associated with annotating large-scale point clouds, self-supervised point cloud representation learning has attracted increasing attention in recent years. This approach aims to learn generic and useful point cloud representations from unlabeled data, circumventing the need for extensive manual annotations. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of self-supervised point cloud representation learning using DNNs. We begin by presenting the motivation and general trends in recent research. We then briefly introduce the commonly used datasets and evaluation metrics. Following that, we delve into an extensive exploration of self-supervised point cloud representation learning methods based on these techniques. Finally, we share our thoughts on some of the challenges and potential issues that future research in self-supervised learning for pre-training 3D point clouds may encounter.