P3T: Prototypical Point-level Prompt Tuning with Enhanced Generalization for 3D Vision-Language Models
Authors: Geunyoung Jung, Soohong Kim, Kyungwoo Song, Jiyoung Jung
Organizations: Department of Artificial Intelligence, University of Seoul, South Korea · Department of Applied Statistics, Yonsei University, South Korea
With the rise of pre-trained models in the 3D point cloud domain for a wide range of real-world applications, adapting them to downstream tasks has become increasingly important. However, conventional full fine-tuning methods are computationally expensive and storage-intensive. Although prompt tuning has emerged as an efficient alternative, it often suffers from overfitting, thereby compromising generalization capability. To address this issue, we propose Prototypical Point-level Prompt Tuning (P3T), a parameter-efficient prompt tuning method designed for pre-trained 3D vision-language models (VLMs). P3T consists of two components: 1) \textit{Point Prompter}, which generates instance-aware point-level prompts for the input point cloud, and 2) \textit{Text Prompter}, which employs learnable prompts into the input text instead of hand-crafted ones. Since both prompters operate directly on input data, P3T enables task-specific adaptation of 3D VLMs without sacrificing generalizability. Furthermore, to enhance embedding space alignment, which is key to fine-tuning 3D VLMs, we introduce a prototypical loss that reduces intra-category variance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method matches or outperforms full fine-tuning in classification and few-shot learning, and further exhibits robust generalization under data shift in the cross-dataset setting. The code is available at \textcolor{violet}{https://github.com/gyjung975/P3T}.
Pre-trained 3D vision models have substantially advanced point cloud analysis, yet adapting them to downstream tasks via full fine-tuning is computationally expensive and storage-intensive. Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) offers a promising alternative by reducing both adaptation cost and storage burden. However, existing prompting-based approaches ignore the intrinsic geometric structures of point clouds, thereby limiting their adaptation capability. This limitation stems from their inability to encode both fine-grained geometric cues and coarse-grained structural semantics, as well as failing to propagate such information effectively through the model hierarchy. To address these challenges, we propose GAPrompt++, a multi-granular geometry-aware prompting method that provides richer geometric guidance for efficient 3D task adaptation. Specifically, we introduce a Point Shift Prompter that extracts multi-granular geometric features across different scales, enabling instance-specific geometric adjustments during adaptation. Next, a Keypoint Prompter adaptively generates point-level prompts to highlight local geometric saliency and fine-grained structural details. Furthermore, a Prompt Propagation mechanism injects these multi-granular geometric cues throughout the feature extraction hierarchy, strengthening the ability to capture essential geometric characteristics. Extensive experiments show that GAPrompt++ achieves state-of-the-art performance among prompting-based PEFT methods and even surpasses full fine-tuning across diverse benchmarks, while requiring less than 2% trainable parameters. In addition, to address the saturation of existing evaluation datasets, we construct two more challenging benchmarks derived from 3D Gaussian Splatting and Multi-View Stereo reconstruction, offering diverse and realistic point cloud scenarios to promote future research.
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.
Understanding 3D point clouds through language remains a fundamental challenge in computer graphics and visual computing, due to the irregular structure of point cloud data and the lack of explicit reasoning in existing 3D multimodal models. While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has shown strong effectiveness in LLMs and image-based MLLMs, its extension to 3D understanding remains largely underexplored. In this paper, we propose a data-centric framework for constructing large-scale CoT supervision tailored to 3D point cloud understanding. Our framework consists of a two-stage pipeline that first refines point-text instruction data via vision-language-model-based quality evaluation and reference-guided refinement, and then synthesizes high-quality reasoning paths through Human-in-the-Loop Prompt Optimization (HiLPO). Using this approach, we build PoCoTI, a CoT-enhanced point-text instruction-following dataset containing 55K samples with explicit reasoning paths. Fine-tuning PointLLM on PoCoTI yields PointLLM-R, a reasoning-capable 3D multimodal language model. Extensive experiments on generative 3D classification and captioning demonstrate that PointLLM-R achieves state-of-the-art performance and generalizes robustly to real-world scanned point clouds and multi-turn dialogue scenarios.