2024/04/19 by Christopher Lang, Alexander Braun, Lang, Christopher +5 · 2 citations
Computer Science · Engineering · #Advanced Neural Network Applications #Advanced Vision and Imaging #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Robotics and Sensor-Based Localization
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2404.12798
openalex publication_date 2024/04/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Multi-task networks can potentially improve performance and computational efficiency compared to single-task networks, facilitating online deployment. However, current multi-task architectures in point cloud perception combine multiple task-specific point cloud representations, each requiring a separate feature encoder and making the network structures bulky and slow. We propose PAttFormer, an efficient multi-task architecture for joint semantic segmentation and object detection in point clouds that only relies on a point-based representation. The network builds on transformer-based feature encoders using neighborhood attention and grid-pooling and a query-based detection decoder using a novel 3D deformable-attention detection head design. Unlike other LiDAR-based multi-task architectures, our proposed PAttFormer does not require separate feature encoders for multiple task-specific point cloud representations, resulting in a network that is 3x smaller and 1.4x faster while achieving competitive performance on the nuScenes and KITTI benchmarks for autonomous driving perception. Our extensive evaluations show substantial gains from multi-task learning, improving LiDAR semantic segmentation by +1.7% in mIou and 3D object detection by +1.7% in mAP on the nuScenes benchmark compared to the single-task models.