Although multi-modal learning has advanced point cloud completion, the theoretical mechanisms remain unclear. Recent works attribute success to the connection between modalities, yet we identify that standard hard projection severs this connection: projecting a sparse point cloud onto the image plane yields an extremely sparse support, which hinders visual prior propagation, a failure mode we term Cross-Modal Entropy Collapse. To address this practical limitation, we propose SplAttN, which replaces hard projection with Differentiable Gaussian Splatting to produce a dense, continuous image-plane representation. By reformulating projection as continuous density estimation, SplAttN avoids collapsed sparse support, facilitates gradient flow, and improves cross-modal connection learnability. Extensive experiments show that SplAttN achieves state-of-the-art performance on PCN and ShapeNet-55/34. Crucially, we utilize the real-world KITTI benchmark as a stress test for multi-modal reliance. Counter-factual evaluation reveals that while baselines degenerate into unimodal template retrievers insensitive to visual removal, SplAttN maintains a robust dependency on visual cues, validating that our method establishes an effective cross-modal connection. Code is available at https://github.com/zay002/SplAttN.
We present an image-conditioned point cloud completion approach that treats images as the primary geometric source rather than a secondary guide. To this end, we introduce an Image-to-Point (I2P) module that can reconstruct complete point clouds directly from a single RGB image, with no need for 3D inputs. Additionally, we introduce a transformer-based Point-to-Point (P2P) refinement module that uses self- and cross-attention between point tokens and image features to iteratively refine the coarse I2P output. The I2P module enables the image encoder to learn rich geometric representations, while the P2P module progressively recovers fine-grained details. Unlike existing multimodal methods that rely on auxiliary losses or fusion modules, our explicit I2P task provides a strong, geometry-aware prior based on images alone. Extensive experiments on ShapeNet-ViPC demonstrate state-of-the-art completion performance with a 12.3% relative Chamfer Distance improvement over prior methods. Code is available at: https://github.com/AzharSindhi/I2PRef.git
View-based point cloud completion aims to recover a complete 3D shape from a partial point cloud, guided by a single-view image. However, existing approaches often suffer from limited performance due to weak modality alignment and limited self-geometry enhancement. To overcome these challenges, we propose a unified geometry-aware framework that integrates efficient modality alignment and adaptive geometry enhancement, mainly to address cross-modal geometric inconsistency of view-guided point cloud completion. Specifically, we propose a geometry-aware modality alignment by integrating a shared self-attention Transformer and cross-modality reconstruction supervision, which aims to bring features of the image and point cloud close to each other in a shared latent space describing the 3D object. To enhance the perception of global shape and local geometric details, we propose an adaptive geometry-aware self-attention module, which simultaneously considers local geometry-aware attention computation and the spatially-variant feature fusion. In addition, we apply a geometry-perceptive anchor refinement module to reorganize the anchor points (representing a local region of the shape) under appropriate supervision, further boosting the completion performance of our method. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance over existing approaches. Our code will be available at https://github.com/weizequan/MAGE.
Point cloud completion aims to infer a complete 3D shape from a partial point cloud and serves as a fundamental building block for downstream tasks such as reconstruction, editing, and simulation. Despite the recent progress, existing learning-based methods often implicitly rely on access to the ground-truth shape scale (GT-scale) during both training- and testing-time normalization, assuming privileged information that is unavailable in real-world inference. This hidden assumption limits practical deployment and can lead to severe completion artifacts, e.g., over- or under-completion and nested shells, once the oracle GT-scale cue is removed. We observe that the recent foundation image generation models exhibit a strong capability of understanding objects and geometries, and producing multi-view consistent renderings, making them promising priors for GT-scale-free 3D completion. Motivated by this insight, we propose ScaleBlind, a novel framework that leverages foundation-model-based image completion to recover global scale directly from partial inputs and then faithfully produces the 3D completion. Specifically, ScaleBlind dreams out complete multi-view appearances from rendered partial views, lifts the inferred missing regions back into 3D to obtain a geometry-aware coarse completion, and further refines it via a powerful cross-modal fusion network with the original partial point cloud. By harnessing 2D foundation priors, our method eliminates the need for accessing GT-scale information at inference. Moreover, it provides a principled bridge between 2D generative priors and 3D point cloud completion. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our framework, making ScaleBlind the new state-of-the-art for the point cloud completion task.