Point cloud processing methods leverage local and global point features to cater to downstream tasks, yet they often overlook the task-level context inherent in point clouds during the encoding stage. We argue that integrating task-level information into the encoding stage significantly enhances performance. To that end, we propose SMTransformer which incorporates task-level information into a vector-based transformer by utilizing a soft mask generated from task-level queries and keys to learn the attention weights. Additionally, to facilitate effective communication between features from the encoding and decoding layers in high-level tasks such as segmentation, we introduce a skip-attention-based up-sampling block. This block dynamically fuses features from various resolution points across the encoding and decoding layers. To mitigate the increase in network parameters and training time resulting from the complexity of the aforementioned blocks, we propose a novel shared point position encoding strategy. This strategy allows various transformer blocks to share the same position information over the same resolution points, thereby reducing network parameters and training time without compromising accuracy. Experimental comparisons with existing methods on multiple datasets demonstrate the efficacy of SMTransformer and skip-attention-based up-sampling for semantic segmentation task. In particular, we achieve state-of-the-art semantic segmentation results of 73.9% mIoU on S3DIS Area 5 and 62.4% mIoU on SWAN dataset. Note to Practitioners—Point cloud processing underpins automation tasks such as robotic perception, navigation, and inspection, where accurate 3D understanding is essential. Existing methods often prioritize vision benchmarks while overlooking automation needs like efficiency on limited hardware and robustness in real-world environments. The proposed SMTransformer embeds task-level guidance into feature learning and employs skip-attention up-sampling to improve segmentation accuracy with practical efficiency. It is well-suited for robotic manipulation, autonomous driving, and inspection applications. Current limitations include reliance on GPUs and sensitivity to extreme density variations. Future work will target edge-device deployment and multi-task extensions.

We introduce Motion-Grounded Video Reasoning, a new motion understanding task that requires generating visual answers (video segmentation masks) according to the input question, and hence needs implicit spatiotemporal reasoning and grounding. It extends existing spatiotemporal grounding work focusing on explicit action/motion grounding, to a more general format by enabling implicit reasoning via questions. To facilitate the development of the new task, we collect a large-scale dataset called GroundMoRe, which comprises 1,715 video clips, 249K object masks that are deliberately designed with 4 question types for benchmarking deep and comprehensive motion reasoning abilities. GroundMoRe uniquely requires models to generate visual answers, providing a more concrete and visually interpretable response than plain texts. It evaluates models on both spatiotemporal grounding and reasoning, fostering to address complex challenges in motion-related video reasoning, temporal perception, and pixel-level understanding. Furthermore, we introduce a novel baseline model named MoRA, which achieves respectable performance on GroundMoRe outperforming the best existing visual grounding baseline model by an average of 21.5% relatively. We hope this novel and challenging task will pave the way for future advancements in robust and general motion understanding via video reasoning segmentation. Project available at: https://groundmore.github.io/