SIEVE: Overcoming Topological Obstruction in Equivariant Self-Supervised Learning
Read the original on arXiv AI →The paper identifies a theoretical incompatibility between 3D point cloud masked autoencoding and SE(3)-equivariant networks, showing that standard masking causes a topological collapse that forces models to hallucinate orientation. To address this, the authors introduce SIEVE, an SE(3)-equivariant self-supervised framework that compresses point cloud geometry into invariant scalar embeddings using a spherical projection mask that preserves global pose while obfuscating local semantics. Experiments demonstrate that SIEVE avoids the predicted collapse where constant and noise masks fail, and its embeddings outperform coordinate-based baselines and hand-crafted geometric descriptors on downstream point cloud tasks, especially in generalization to unseen shape categories.
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