Organizations: Department of Computer Science, Vanderbilt University · Toyota InfoTech Labs · Department of Computer Science, University of California, Davis · Department of Mathematics, Purdue University
Flow-matching models have recently emerged as a powerful framework for generative modeling, including 3D point cloud synthesis. However, their deployment is limited by the need for multiple sequential sampling steps at inference time. MeanFlow enables single-step generation by learning an average velocity field, but its quality depends heavily on the geometry of the training pairs. In this work, we propose an Optimal Transport-enhanced MeanFlow framework (OT-MF3D) for efficient and accurate 3D point cloud generation and completion. Beyond incorporating OT into MeanFlow, our method introduces a latent-conditioned training algorithm that decouples shape-level sampling from point-level matching. This enables exact point-level OT within each conditioned shape while performing shape-level transport in a compact latent space, avoiding the expensive nested OT computation in point-cloud space. Experiments on standard benchmarks show improved generation and completion quality over fast baselines, with substantially reduced training and inference costs compared with diffusion and other flow-based models.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: One-step generated samples for SN and ModelNet-10 generated within 0.04 seconds.
Figure 2: The overall framework for our training and inference process for shape generation and completion. Shape Generation: A pre-trained Encoder is used to train the Shape Gen and Context Gen, and Context Gen is used during inference to condition the Shape Gen model and generate unseen samples. Shape completion: An Encoder is trained jointly and the latent vector is used as conditioning.
Figure 3: Qualitative comparison. Times measured on our GPUs.
Model
ST (s)
Airplane
Chair
Car
Avg
CD
EMD
CD
EMD
CD
EMD
CD
EMD
PointFlow [ 38 ]
0.27
75.68
70.74
62.84
60.57
58.10
56.25
65.54
62.52
DPF-Net [ 19 ]
0.33
75.18
65.55
62.00
58.53
62.35
54.48
66.51
59.52
SoftFlow [ 17 ]
0.12
76.05
65.80
59.21
60.05
64.77
60.09
66.68
61.98
ShapeGF [ 3 ]
0.34
80.00
76.17
68.96
65.48
63.20
56.53
70.72
66.06
DPM [ 27 ]
22.8
76.42
86.91
60.05
74.77
68.89
79.97
68.45
80.55
Table 1: ShapeNet generation results. For 1-NN-CD/EMD, values closer to 50 are better. Bottom-block methods have inference times comparable to our one-step model. Bold and underlined denote the best and second-best results per block. iMF is denoted with (imp). Our method ranks first or second among the fastest methods while training more efficiently than PSF [ 36 ] . PSF* refers to our results generated using the public code and training recipe.
Figure 4: Completion samples using our one-step completion model on the nuScenes dataset.
Method
TT (h)
Memory (GB)
PVD [ 44 ]
107
3.78
LION [ 40 ]
273
32.1
ConTiCoM-3D [ 7 ]
146
37.4
PSF [ 36 ]
85
38.8
OT-MF3D (imp)(Ours)
31
15.7
Table 2: Comparison of training time (TT) and peak GPU memory measured on our GPUs.
Figure 5: Partial point cloud, ground truth, and completed samples using our one-step completion model. Our shape completion model can successfully capture the full shape from a partial view.
EMD ↓
Model
ST (s)
Airplane
Chair
Car
SoftFlow [ 17 ]
0.12
1.198
3.295
2.789
PointFlow [ 38 ]
0.27
1.180
3.649
2.851
DPF-Net [ 19 ]
0.34
1.105
3.320
2.318
PVD [ 44 ] (N=1000)
29.98
1.030
2.939
2.146
PSF [ 36 ] (N=1)
0.03
1.004
2.937
2.194
Table 3: Point-cloud completion quality and latency. EMD is scaled by 102 . Our method achieves the best EMD and fastest inference.
B
P
CD
EMD
64
256
57.77
52.79
32
256
57.17
53.77
64
128
58.00
53.92
Table 4: Effect of varying number of point clouds (B) vs number of subsampled points (P).
Model
Outer
Inner
ST (s)
CD
EMD
MF ( N=1 )
✓
✗
0.03
97.43
93.50
MF ( N=2 )
✓
✗
0.06
62.46
63.14
OT-MF3D ( N=1 )
✓
✓
0.03
57.77
52.79
MF (imp)
✗
✗
0.03
59.96
60.42
OT-MF3D (imp)
✗
✓
0.03
59.36
55.43
OT-MF3D (imp)
✓
✗
0.03
59.06
60.57
Table 5: 1-NNA comparison on ShapeNet Chairs. Outer and Inner OT denote distribution- and point-level transport, respectively.
Appendix figures & tables8 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Component
Time / step
% of step
Notes
Point-level OT coupling
∼ 89 ms
∼ 15%
B sequential P×P solves
Total training step
∼ 577 ms
100%
fwd + OT + bwd
Appendix
Table 6: Wall-clock overhead of the point-level exact OT coupling, measured per training step on 4-GPU DDP training ( B=16 point clouds/GPU, P=256 points/cloud).
Figure 6: Some failure cases of our method across different datasets.
Model
Airplane
Chair
Car
Avg.
CD
EMD
CD
EMD
CD
EMD
CD
EMD
Decoder
71.73
93.70
57.48
77.49
57.10
84.66
62.10
85.29
OT-MF
71.60
64.07
57.40
54.08
58.81
53.98
62.60
57.38
Appendix
Table 7: Shape generation results on ShapeNet-Airplane, Chair, and Car using 1-NN accuracy. Values closer to 50 are better. Best results between the Decoder and OT-MF are shown in bold .
Model
Airplane
Chair
Car
MMD ↓
COV ↑
MMD ↓
COV ↑
MMD ↓
COV ↑
CD
EMD
CD
EMD
CD
EMD
CD
EMD
CD
EMD
CD
EMD
Decoder
0.195
0.576
47.65
26.42
2.360
1.743
45.02
33.53
0.814
0.933
42.33
28.69
OT-MF
0.229
0.370
48.40
48.15
2.539
1.487
45.62
52.11
0.910
0.736
46.02
50.57
Appendix
Table 8: Shape generation results on ShapeNet-Airplane, Chair, and Car with MMD and COV scores. CD-MMD is multiplied by 103 and EMD-MMD is multiplied by 102 , while COV is reported as a percentage. Best results between the Decoder and OT-MF are shown in bold .
Model
Airplane
Chair
Car
MMD ↓
COV ↑
MMD ↓
COV ↑
MMD ↓
COV ↑
CD
EMD
CD
EMD
CD
EMD
CD
EMD
CD
EMD
CD
EMD
1-GAN (CD) [ 1 ]
0.340
0.583
38.52
21.23
2.589
2.007
41.99
29.31
1.532
1.226
38.92
23.58
1-GAN (EMD) [ 1 ]
0.397
0.417
38.27
38.52
2.811
1.619
38.07
44.86
1.408
0.899
37.78
45.17
PointFlow [ 38 ]
0.224
0.390
47.90
46.41
2.409
1.595
42.90
50.00
0.901
0.807
46.88
50.00
SoftFlow [ 17 ]
0.231
0.375
46.91
47.90
2.528
1.682
41.39
47.43
1.187
0.859
42.90
44.60
Appendix
Table 9: Shape generation results on ShapeNet-Airplane, Chair, and Car with MMD and COV scores. CD is multiplied by 103 and EMD is multiplied by 102 .
Figure 7: Additional one-step generation samples on class Chair using our model.
Figure 8: Additional one-step generation samples on class Airplane using our model.
Figure 9: Additional one-step generation samples on class Car using our model.
Point cloud generation creates 3D point sets from noise, images, scans, or other conditions for reconstruction, simulation, and synthetic training data.
Generating high-quality 3D point clouds requires capturing both global shape topology and local geometric details. Existing flow-based methods rely on continuous normalizing flows (CNFs) that demand expensive ODE solving and trace estimation during training, while diffusion models require hundreds of iterative denoising steps. Moreover, most approaches adopt single-level generation directly in point space, disregarding the hierarchical structure natural to 3D shapes. We propose Hierarchical Flow Matching (HFM) that extends flow matching to bilevel structure for unconditional 3D point cloud generation. HFM decomposes the task into two levels via optimal-transport flow matching: a Latent Flow Matching models the global shape manifold in a compact latent space, and a Conditional Point Flow Matching reconstructs detailed point clouds conditioned on the latent code. Both flows are trained with simple MSE regression losses. The resulting straight OT paths enable efficient sampling with as few as 15 Euler steps per flow, while the structured latent space supports downstream tasks including classification. Extensive experiments on ShapeNet and ModelNet benchmarks demonstrate that HFM achieves competitive or even best performance compared with prior state-of-the-art methods.
3D point clouds generation requires capturing both part-level layout and surface detail while preserving permutation equivariance. Existing latent generative models often encode an entire shape into a single vector, which limits their ability to retain part-level structure. We propose TokenFlow, a hierarchical flow matching framework that represents each shape as a set of latent tokens and couples a rectified flow over these tokens with a conditional flow over points. A bottleneck of M≪N learnable tokens aggregates global context through cross-attention at O(NM) cost. On ShapeNet, TokenFlow achieves the best MMD and coverage across airplane, car, and chair, while obtaining 1-NNA comparable to the strongest baselines. On ModelNet, its learned latent set reaches the best reported linear-evaluation accuracy on ModelNet10. These results show that representing a shape as a set of latent tokens, aggregated at O(NM) cost, provides an effective representation for 3D point cloud generation.
Single-image point cloud reconstruction must infer complete 3D geometry, including occluded parts, from a single RGB image. While diffusion-based reconstructors achieve high accuracy, they typically require many denoising iterations, resulting in slow and expensive inference. We propose Point-MF, a Mean-Flow-based framework for low-NFE single-image point cloud reconstruction that couples a Mean-Flow-compatible architecture with an auxiliary loss. Specifically, Point-MF operates directly in point-cloud space to learn the mean velocity field and enables one-step reconstruction with a single network function evaluation (1-NFE), without relying on VAE-based latent representations. To make Mean Flow effective under large interval jumps, Point-MF employs a Diffusion Transformer tailored to the Mean-Flow setting, conditioned on frozen DINOv3 image features via a lightweight token adapter and equipped with explicit interval/time conditioning. Moreover, we introduce Denoised Space Anchor, a set-distance auxiliary loss on the denoised-space estimate xθ induced by the predicted velocity field, to stabilize large-step generation and reduce outliers and density artifacts. On ShapeNet-R2N2 and Pix3D, Point-MF strikes a strong balance between reconstruction quality and inference speed compared to multi-step diffusion baselines and competitive feedforward models, while generating high-quality point clouds with millisecond-level latency.
Yuta Baba, Keiji Yanai
The University of Electro-Communications 1-5-1 Chofugaoka, Chofu-shi, Tokyo 182-8585, Japan