Sneha Paul

Sneha Paul, Zachary Patterson, Nizar Bouguila

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable progress in integrating visual and linguistic understanding. Recent efforts have extended these capabilities to 3D understanding through encoder-based architectures that rely on pre-trained 3D encoders to extract geometric features. However, such approaches suffer from semantic misalignment between geometric and linguistic spaces, resolution sensitivity, and substantial computational overhead. In this work, we present SAGE, the first end-to-end 3D MLLM that directly processes raw point clouds without relying on a pre-trained 3D encoder. Our approach introduces a lightweight 3D tokenizer that combines geometric sampling and neighbourhood aggregation with vector quantization to convert point clouds into discrete tokens--treating 3D data as a foreign language that naturally extends the LLM's vocabulary. Furthermore, to enhance the model's reasoning capability on complex 3D tasks, we propose a preference optimization training strategy with a semantic alignment-based reward, specifically designed for open-ended 3D question answering where responses are descriptive. Extensive experiments across diverse 3D understanding benchmarks demonstrate that our end-to-end approach outperforms existing encoder-based methods while offering significant advantages in computational efficiency, generalization across LLM backbones, and robustness to input resolution variations. Code is available at: github.com/snehaputul/SAGE3D.

Sneha Paul, Zachary Patterson, Nizar Bouguila

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has shown its effectiveness in learning effective 3D representation from a small amount of labelled data while utilizing large unlabelled data. Traditional semi-supervised approaches rely on the fundamental concept of predicting pseudo-labels for unlabelled data and incorporating them into the learning process. However, we identify that the existing methods do not fully utilize all the unlabelled samples and consequently limit their potential performance. To address this issue, we propose AllMatch, a novel SSL-based 3D classification framework that effectively utilizes all the unlabelled samples. AllMatch comprises three modules: (1) an adaptive hard augmentation module that applies relatively hard augmentations to the high-confident unlabelled samples with lower loss values, thereby enhancing the contribution of such samples, (2) an inverse learning module that further improves the utilization of unlabelled data by learning what not to learn, and (3) a contrastive learning module that ensures learning from all the samples in both supervised and unsupervised settings. Comprehensive experiments on two popular 3D datasets demonstrate a performance improvement of up to 11.2% with 1% labelled data, surpassing the SOTA by a significant margin. Furthermore, AllMatch exhibits its efficiency in effectively leveraging all the unlabelled data, demonstrated by the fact that only 10% of labelled data reaches nearly the same performance as fully-supervised learning with all labelled data. The code of our work is available at: https://github.com/snehaputul/AllMatch.

Sneha Paul, Zachary Patterson, Nizar Bouguila

Point cloud foundation models demonstrate strong generalization, yet adapting them to downstream tasks remains challenging in low-data regimes. Full fine-tuning often leads to overfitting and significant drift from pre-trained representations, while existing parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods mitigate this issue by introducing additional trainable components at the cost of increased inference-time latency. We propose Momentum-Consistency Fine-Tuning (MCFT), an adapter-free approach that bridges the gap between full and parameter-efficient fine-tuning. MCFT selectively fine-tunes a portion of the pre-trained encoder while enforcing a momentum-based consistency constraint to preserve task-agnostic representations. Unlike PEFT methods, MCFT introduces no additional representation learning parameters beyond a standard task head, maintaining the original model's parameter count and inference efficiency. We further extend MCFT with two variants: a semi-supervised framework that leverages abundant unlabeled data to enhance few-shot performance, and a pruning-based variant that improves computational efficiency through structured layer removal. Extensive experiments on object recognition and part segmentation benchmarks demonstrate that MCFT consistently outperforms prior methods, achieving a 3.30% gain in 5-shot settings and up to a 6.13% improvement with semi-supervised learning, while remaining well-suited for resource-constrained deployment.

Sneha Paul, Zachary Patterson, Nizar Bouguila

Domain adaptation remains a central challenge in 3D vision, especially for multimodal foundation models that align 3D point clouds with visual and textual data. While these models demonstrate strong general capabilities, adapting them to downstream domains with limited data often leads to overfitting and catastrophic forgetting. To address this, we introduce ReFine3D, a regularized fine-tuning framework designed for domain-generalizable tuning of 3D large multimodal models (LMMs). ReFine3D combines selective layer tuning with two targeted regularization strategies: multi-view consistency across augmented point clouds and text diversity through synonym-based prompts generated by large language models. Additionally, we incorporate point-rendered vision supervision and a test-time augmentation mechanism with confidence-based aggregation to further enhance robustness. Extensive experiments across different 3D domain generalization benchmarks show that ReFine3D improves base-to-novel class generalization by 1.36%, cross-dataset transfer by 2.43%, robustness to corruption by 1.80%, and few-shot accuracy by up to 3.11%, outperforming prior state-of-the-art methods with minimal added computational overhead.