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.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: TokenFlow pipeline. The prior flow transports Gaussian noise to a set of latent tokens over a Transformer encoder with several layers whose output is rescaled by a time-conditioned γ . The conditional point flow then decodes those tokens into a point cloud. A shared per-point MLP embeds each point and feeds two separately projected branches that are added, a code path in which the pooled token set and the time embedding give the scale and shift of an adaptive layer normalization over the point features, and a token path that cross-attends from the points to the latent tokens.
Figure 2: Qualitative comparisons against previous state-of-the-art methods.
Figure 3: Interpolation and extrapolation in the latent space.
Context module
Time
Memory
Transformer [ 48 ]
O(N2C)
O(N2)
PointTransformer [ 66 ]
O(NkC)
O(Nk)
Performer [ 11 ]
O(NC2)
O(NC)
CBA (ours)
O(NMC)
O(NM)
Table 1: Complexity of context aggregation over N points with C channels. CBA uses M≪N latent tokens, so both time and memory are linear in N .
Figure 4: Illustration of CBA block. ”TE” means token embeddings while ”PE” represents point embeddings.
Method
Chair
Airplane
Car
MMD ↓
COV(%) ↑
JSD ↓
MMD ↓
COV(%) ↑
JSD ↓
MMD ↓
COV(%) ↑
JSD ↓
CD
EMD
CD
EMD
–
CD
EMD
CD
EMD
–
CD
EMD
CD
EMD
–
r-GAN
2.57
12.80
33.99
9.97
11.50
0.261
5.47
42.72
18.02
7.44
1.27
8.74
15.06
9.38
12.80
l-GAN (CD)
2.46
8.91
41.39
25.68
4.59
0.239
4.27
43.21
21.23
4.62
1.55
6.25
38.64
18.47
4.43
l-GAN (EMD)
2.61
7.85
40.79
41.69
2.27
0.269
3.29
47.90
50.62
3.61
1.48
5.43
39.20
39.77
2.21
PVD
2.62
–
48.84
50.60
–
0.224
–
48.88
52.09
–
1.10
–
41.19
50.56
–
Table 2: Generation results using MMD, COV and JSD ( ↑ / ↓ as marked). MMD-CD and MMD-EMD are scaled by 103 and 102 ; JSD by 102 . “–” marks unreported entries.
Model
MN10 (%)
MN40 (%)
SPH
68.2
79.8
LFD
75.5
79.9
T-L Network
74.4
–
Vconv-DAE
75.5
80.5
PointGrow
85.7
–
3D-GAN
83.3
91.0
Table 3: Classification results on ModelNet10 (MN10) and ModelNet40 (MN40) datasets. Missing entries are denoted as “–”.
Method
Airplane
Car
Chair
CD
EMD
CD
EMD
CD
EMD
r-GAN
98.40
96.79
94.46
99.01
83.69
99.70
l-GAN (CD)
87.30
93.95
66.49
88.78
68.58
83.84
l-GAN (EMD)
89.49
76.91
71.16
66.19
71.90
64.65
PC-GAN
94.35
92.32
92.19
90.87
76.03
78.37
PointFlow
75.68
70.74
60.65
62.36
62.84
60.57
Table 4: Generation results on Airplane, Car, and Chair compared with baselines using 1-NNA as the metric. Lower is better. For clarity, the table is divided into two splits: the bottom corresponds to results from the past three years while the top corresponds to the earlier methods.
Figure 5: Multi-class results generated by TokenFlow.
Context module
1-NNA-CD ↓
1-NNA-EMD ↓
Transformer [ 48 ]
72.43
68.91
PointTransformer [ 66 ]
71.54
67.96
Performer [ 11 ]
76.23
75.60
CBA (ours)
66.65
60.55
Table 5: Context module ablation on the Airplane category, reported as 1-NNA (%). Lower is better. Only the context module of the encoder is replaced, and everything else is held fixed.
Latent Tokens
1-NNA-CD ↓
1-NNA-EMD ↓
M=1
81.59
80.72
M=8
76.57
73.68
M=32
72.30
67.84
M=64
66.65
60.55
M=128
70.03
66.49
Table 6: Effect of the number of latent tokens M on the Airplane category, reported as 1-NNA (%). Lower is better. M=64 is the default used in the main results.
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.
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.
Elaheh Akbari, Shansita Sharma, Ping He +5
Department of Computer Science, Vanderbilt University · Toyota InfoTech Labs · Department of Computer Science, University of California, Davis +1
Tokenization is a fundamental technique in the generative modeling of various modalities. In particular, it plays a critical role in autoregressive (AR) models, which have recently emerged as a compelling option for 3D generation. However, optimal tokenization of 3D shapes remains an open question. State-of-the-art (SOTA) methods primarily rely on geometric level-of-detail (LoD) hierarchies, originally designed for rendering and compression. These spatial hierarchies are often token-inefficient and lack semantic coherence for AR modeling. We propose Level-of-Semantics Tokenization (LoST), which orders tokens by semantic salience, such that early prefixes decode into complete, plausible shapes that possess principal semantics, while subsequent tokens refine instance-specific geometric and semantic details. To train LoST, we introduce Relational Inter-Distance Alignment (RIDA), a novel 3D semantic alignment loss that aligns the relational structure of the 3D shape latent space with that of the semantic DINO feature space. Experiments show that LoST achieves SOTA reconstruction, surpassing previous LoD-based 3D shape tokenizers by large margins on both geometric and semantic reconstruction metrics. Moreover, LoST achieves efficient, high-quality AR 3D generation and enables downstream tasks like semantic retrieval, while using only 0.1%-10% of the tokens needed by prior AR models.