Physics-Driven Local-Whole Elastic Deformation Modeling for Point Cloud Representation Learning

Existing point cloud representation learning tend to learning the geometric distribution of objects through data-driven approaches, emphasizing structural features while overlooking the relationship between the local information and the whole structure. Local features reflect the fine-grained variations of an object, while the whole structure is determined by the interaction and combination of these local features, collectively defining the object's shape. In real-world, objects undergo elastic deformation under external forces, and this deformation gradually affects the whole structure through the propagation of forces from local regions, thereby altering the object's geometric properties. Inspired by this, we propose a physics-driven self-supervised learning method for point cloud representation, which captures the relationship between parts and the whole by constructing a local-whole force propagation mechanism. Specifically, we employ a dual-task encoder-decoder framework, integrating the geometric modeling capability of implicit fields with physics-driven elastic deformation. The encoder extracts features from the point cloud and its tetrahedral mesh representation, capturing both geometric and physical properties. These features are then fed into two decoders: one learns the whole geometric shape of the point cloud through an implicit field, while the other predicts local deformations using two specifically designed physics information loss functions, modeling the deformation relationship between local and whole shapes. Experimental results show that our method outperforms existing approaches in object classification, few-shot learning, and segmentation, demonstrating its effectiveness.

@article{chen2025_2505.13812,
  title={ Physics-Driven Local-Whole Elastic Deformation Modeling for Point Cloud Representation Learning },
  author={ Zhongyu Chen and Rong Zhao and Xie Han and Xindong Guo and Song Wang and Zherui Qiao },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.13812},
  year={ 2025 }
}