Poly-PC: A Polyhedral Network for Multiple Point Cloud Tasks at Once

Abstract

In this work, we show that it is feasible to perform multiple tasks concurrently on point cloud with a straightforward yet effective multi-task network. Our framework, Poly-PC, tackles the inherent obstacles (e.g., different model architectures caused by task bias and conflicting gradients caused by multiple dataset domains, etc.) of multi-task learning on point cloud. Specifically, we propose a residual set abstraction (Res-SA) layer for efficient and effective scaling in both width and depth of the network, hence accommodating the needs of various tasks. We develop a weight-entanglement- based one-shot NAS technique to find optimal architectures for all tasks. Moreover, such technique entangles the weights of multiple tasks in each layer to offer task-shared parameters for efficient storage deployment while providing ancillary task-specific parameters for learning task-related features. Finally, to facilitate the training of Poly-PC, we introduce a task-prioritization-based gradient balance algorithm that leverages task prioritization to reconcile conflicting gradients, ensuring high performance for all tasks. Benefiting from the suggested techniques, models optimized by Poly-PC collectively for all tasks keep fewer total FLOPs and parameters and outperform previous methods. We also demonstrate that Poly-PC allows incremental learning and evades catastrophic forgetting when tuned to a new task.