AdvectiveNet: An Eulerian-Lagrangian Fluidic Reservoir for Point Cloud Processing     
Authors: Xingzhe He, Helen Lu Cao, Bo Zhu
Keywords: Point Cloud Processing, Physical Reservoir Learning, Eulerian-Lagrangian Method, PIC/FLIP
TL;DR: We present a new grid-particle learning method to process point clouds motivated by computational fluid dynamics.
Abstract: This paper presents a novel physics-inspired deep learning approach for point cloud processing motivated by the natural flow phenomena in fluid mechanics.  Our learning architecture jointly defines data in an Eulerian world space, using a static background grid, and a Lagrangian material space, using moving particles. By introducing this Eulerian-Lagrangian representation, we are able to naturally evolve and accumulate particle features using flow velocities generated from a generalized, high-dimensional force field.  We demonstrate the efficacy of this system by solving various point cloud classification and segmentation problems with state-of-the-art performance. The entire geometric reservoir and data flow mimic the pipeline of the classic PIC/FLIP scheme in modeling natural flow, bridging the disciplines of geometric machine learning and physical simulation.