CLIPoint3D: Language-Grounded Few-Shot Unsupervised 3D Point Cloud Domain Adaptation
Organizations: University of Trento, Italy · MDSR Labs Adobe, India · IIT Bombay, India · Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy
Abstract
Recent vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP demonstrate impressive cross-modal reasoning, extending beyond images to 3D perception. Yet, these models remain fragile under domain shifts, especially when adapting from synthetic to real-world point clouds. Conventional 3D domain adaptation approaches rely on heavy trainable encoders, yielding strong accuracy but at the cost of efficiency. We introduce CLIPoint3D, the first framework for few-shot unsupervised 3D point cloud domain adaptation built upon CLIP. Our approach projects 3D samples into multiple depth maps and exploits the frozen CLIP backbone, refined through a knowledge-driven prompt tuning scheme that integrates high-level language priors with geometric cues from a lightweight 3D encoder. To adapt task-specific features effectively, we apply parameter-efficient fine-tuning to CLIP's encoders and design an entropy-guided view sampling strategy for selecting confident projections. Furthermore, an optimal transport-based alignment loss and an uncertainty-aware prototype alignment loss collaboratively bridge source-target distribution gaps while maintaining class separability. Extensive experiments on PointDA-10 and GraspNetPC-10 benchmarks show that CLIPoint3D achieves consistent 3-16% accuracy gains over both CLIP-based and conventional encoder-based baselines. Project page: https://sarthakm320.github.io/CLIPoint3D.
Figures & tables
| Methods | M S | M S ∗ | S M | S S ∗ | S M | S S | Avg |
| DANN [ 14 ] | 74.8 | 42.1 | 57.5 | 50.9 | 43.7 | 71.6 | 56.8 |
| PointDAN [ 45 ] | 83.9 | 44.8 | 63.3 | 45.7 | 43.6 | 56.4 | 56.3 |
| RS [ 51 ] | 79.9 | 46.7 | 75.2 | 51.4 | 71.8 | 71.2 | 66.0 |
| DAE-Global [ 20 ] | 83.5 | 42.6 | 74.8 | 45.5 | 64.9 | 67.3 | 63.1 |
| DefRec [ 2 ] | 82.7 | 43.9 | 79.8 | 48.0 | 66.0 | 67.4 | 64.6 |
| DefRec + PCM [ 2 ] | 83.3 | 53.5 | 78.5 | 53.2 | 73.7 | 75.5 | 69.6 |
| Methods | Syn. Kin. | Syn RS. | Kin. RS. | RS. Kin. | Avg |
| DANN [ 14 ] | 78.6 | 70.3 | 46.1 | 67.9 | 65.7 |
| PointDAN [ 45 ] | 77.0 | 72.5 | 65.9 | 82.3 | 74.4 |
| RS [ 51 ] | 67.3 | 58.6 | 55.7 | 69.6 | 62.8 |
| DefRec + PCM [ 2 ] | 80.7 | 70.5 | 65.1 | 77.7 | 73.5 |
| GAST [ 75 ] | 69.8 | 61.3 | 58.7 | 70.6 | 65.1 |
| GAI [ 53 ] | 81.2 | 73.1 | 66.4 | 82.6 | 75.8 |
| PEFT | PT | PEFT + PT | |||||
| Method | Text | Vision | Both | - | Text | Vision | Both |
| LoRA [ 24 ] | 80.3 | 89.2 | 90.5 | 78.9 | 90.7 | 92.2 | |
| LayerNorm [ 28 ] | 75.4 | 84.0 | 76.6 | 73.7 | 75.0 | 79.5 | 78.8 |
| BitFit [ 67 ] | 80.1 | 87.8 | 81.1 | 79.7 | 88.5 | 81.5 | |
| PointDA-10 | GraspNetPC-10 | |||||
| ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | 49.8 | 64.3 |
| ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | 58.6 | 74.9 |
| ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | 64.5 | 80.3 |
| ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | 70.4 | 85.0 |
| ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | 71.3 | 81.9 |
| ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | 71.0 | 85.8 |
| Strategy | M S | M S ∗ | S M | S S ∗ | S M | S S | Avg |
| only | 80.1 | 45.6 | 84.4 | 44.3 | 81.5 | 72.3 | 68.0 |
| only | 82.1 | 48.9 | 85.7 | 48.1 | 82.1 | 71.7 | 69.8 |
| + | 85.4 | 50.8 | 90.8 | 48.4 | 87.5 | 71.3 | 72.4 |
| + | 83.2 | 49.5 | 91.2 | 48.9 | 83.9 | 71.1 | 71.3 |
| + | 81.4 | 52.3 | 91.2 | 49.2 | 84.5 | 89.2 | 74.6 |
| + | 84.6 | 53.5 | 91.6 | 55.3 | 87.9 | 81.3 | 75.7 |
| Method | Avg. | W. Avg | Random | Max Sim. | Entropy-guided |
| CLIPoint3D-T | 82.5 | 77.7 | 51.4 | 80.1 | 78.9 |
| CLIPoint3D-V | 91.5 | 86.5 | 71.5 | 86.3 | 90.7 |
| CLIPoint3D-B | 92.0 | 91.1 | 70.9 | 85.4 | 92.2 |
| Methods | DANN | PointDAN | DAE-Global | DefRec+PCM | GAST |
| Train params. (M) | 2.50 | 11.26 | 12.60 | 2.50 | 161.09 |
| PointDA-10 (%) | 56.8 | 56.3 | 63.1 | 69.6 | 69.5 |
| GraspNetPC-10 (%) | 65.7 | 74.4 | - | 73.5 | 65.1 |
| Methods | GAI | MLSP | Ours-T | Ours-V | Ours-B |
| Train params. (M) | 22.02 | 28.0 | 9.24 | 9.83 | 11.00 |
| PointDA-10 (%) | 70.0 | 71.0 | 50.7 | 75.7 | 73.6 |
Appendix figures & tables9 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Dataset | Domains | Common Classes | # Samples | # Training / Test |
| PointDA-10 [ 45 ] | ModelNet [ 63 ] | Bathtub, Bed, Bookshelf, | 5039 | 4183 / 856 |
| ShapeNet [ 6 ] | Cabinet, Chair, Lamp, | 19870 | 17378 / 2492 | |
| ScanNet [ 8 ] | Monitor, Plant, Sofa, Table | 7879 | 6110 / 1769 | |
| GraspNetPC-10 [ 11 , 53 ] | Synthetic | Banana, Box, Can, | 12,000 | 12,000 / - |
| Kinect | Camel, Dish, Drill, Mouse, | 13,533 | 10,973 / 2560 | |
| Realsense | Pear, Scissors, Shampoo | 13,258 | 10,698 / 2560 |
| Methods | M S | M S ∗ | S M | S S ∗ | S M | S S | Avg |
| ZS-CLIP [ 46 ] | 46.1 | 17.0 | 52.0 | 17.0 | 52.0 | 46.1 | 38.4 |
| CLIP [ 46 ] + DANN [ 14 ] | 62.0 | 8.6 | 77.3 | 10.5 | 56.7 | 50.4 | 44.3 |
| CLIP + CDAN [ 38 ] | 60.9 | 7.0 | 76.5 | 11.0 | 56.7 | 50.0 | 43.7 |
| CLIP + SCDA [ 32 ] | 46.5 | 16.2 | 51.2 | 17.0 | 51.8 | 46.2 | 38.2 |
| PointCLIP [ 71 ] | 50.8 | 20.9 | 50.1 | 20.9 | 50.1 | 50.8 | 40.6 |
| PointCLIP [ 71 ] + DANN | 55.3 | 9.8 | 74.2 | 14.3 | 50.4 | 49.7 | 42.3 |
| Methods | ViT-B/16 | ViT-B/32 | ViT-L/14 |
| ModelNet ShapeNet | 84.6 | 82.4 | 85.7 |
| ModelNet ScanNet | 53.5 | 42.7 | 54.4 |
| ShapeNet ModelNet | 91.6 | 88.3 | 92.1 |
| ShapeNet ScanNet | 55.3 | 36.9 | 59.5 |
| ScanNet ModelNet | 87.9 | 88.2 | 88.5 |
| ScanNet ShapeNet | 81.3 | 73.7 | 82.3 |
| Methods | Attributes Snippet | Syn. Kin. | Syn RS. | Kin. RS. | RS. Kin. | Avg |
| Handcrafted | “A point cloud object of” | 93.5 | 81.6 | 77.9 | 94.8 | 87.0 |
| Llama-3.2-3B [ 18 ] | “Compact, rectangular structure with a flat surface” | 95.5 | 84.1 | 84.3 | 95.6 | 89.9 |
| Qwen2.5-14B [ 66 ] | “Cylindrical main body with handle and trigger” | 95.0 | 87.5 | 83.2 | 95.4 | 90.3 |
| Phi-4 [ 1 ] | “Irregular mechanical shape” | 95.8 | 83.2 | 79.6 | 92.3 | 87.7 |
| GPT-5 [ 42 ] | “Elongated body with a cylindrical or pistol-like grip” | 96.5 | 89.3 | 86.8 | 96.2 | 92.2 |
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
Unsupervised domain adaptation transfers models from labeled source data to unlabeled target domains with different data distributions.
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