Mainstream 3D representation learning approaches are built upon contrastive or generative modeling pretext tasks, where great improvements in performance on various downstream tasks have been achieved. However, by investigating the methods of these two paradigms, we find that (i) contrastive models are data-hungry that suffer from a representation over-fitting issue; (ii) generative models have a data filling issue that shows inferior data scaling capacity compared to contrastive models. This motivates us to learn 3D representations by sharing the merits of both paradigms, which is non-trivial due to the pattern difference between the two paradigms. In this paper, we propose contrast with reconstruct (RECON) that unifies these two paradigms. RECON is trained to learn from both generative modeling teachers and cross-modal contrastive teachers through ensemble distillation, where the generative student guides the contrastive student. An encoder-decoder style RECON-block is proposed that transfers knowledge through cross attention with stop-gradient, which avoids pretraining over-fitting and pattern difference issues. RECON achieves a new state-of-the-art in 3D representation learning, e.g., 91.26% accuracy on ScanObjectNN. Codes will be released at https://github.com/qizekun/ReCon.

Learning descriptive 3D features is crucial for understanding 3D scenes with diverse objects and complex structures. However, it is usually unknown whether important geometric attributes and scene context obtain enough emphasis in an end-to-end trained 3D scene understanding network. To guide 3D feature learning toward important geometric attributes and scene context, we explore the help of textual scene descriptions. Given some free-form descriptions paired with 3D scenes, we extract the knowledge regarding the object relationships and object attributes. We then inject the knowledge to 3D feature learning through three classification-based auxiliary tasks. This language-assisted training can be combined with modern object detection and instance segmentation methods to promote 3D semantic scene understanding, especially in a label-deficient regime. Moreover, the 3D feature learned with language assistance is better aligned with the language features, which can benefit various 3D-language multimodal tasks. Experiments on several benchmarks of 3D-only and 3D-language tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our language-assisted 3D feature learning. Code is available at https://github.com/Asterisci/Language-Assisted-3D.