CO-Net: Learning Multiple Point Cloud Tasks at Once with A Cohesive Network

Abstract

We present CO-Net, a cohesive framework that optimizes multiple point cloud tasks collectively across heterogeneous dataset domains. CO-Net maintains the characteristics of high storage efficiency since models with the preponderance of shared parameters can be assembled into a single model. Specifically, we leverage residual MLP (Res-MLP) block for effective feature extraction and scale it gracefully along the depth and width of the network to meet the demands of different tasks. Based on the block, we propose a novel nested layer-wise processing policy, which identifies the optimal architecture for each task while provides partial sharing parameters and partial non-sharing parameters inside each layer of the block. Such policy tackles the inherent challenges of multi-task learning on point cloud, e.g., diverse model topologies resulting from task skew and conflicting gradients induced by heterogeneous dataset domains. Finally, we propose a sign-based gradient surgery to promote the training of CO-Net, thereby emphasizing the usage of task-shared parameters and guaranteeing that each task can be thoroughly optimized. Experimental results reveal that models optimized by CO-Net jointly for all point cloud tasks maintain much fewer computation cost and overall storage cost yet outpace prior methods by a significant margin. We also demonstrate that CO-Net allows incremental learning and prevents catastrophic amnesia when adapting to a new point cloud task.