GIBLy: Improving 3D Semantic Segmentation through an Architecture-Agnostic Lightweight Geometric Inductive Bias Layer

Abstract

In 3D scene understanding, deep learning models rely on large models and extensive training to capture basic geometric structures that are present in the 3D data. However, existing methods lack explicit mechanisms to incorporate geometric information, such as learnable primitive shapes, often necessitating large models and more training data which in turn increases cost and can limit generalization. We introduce GIBLy, a lightweight geometric inductive bias layer that integrates learnable geometric priors into 3D segmentation pipelines. GIBLy enhances existing architectures -- whether MLP-based, convolution-based, or transformer-based -- by providing features aligned with simple geometric shapes (and thus human-interpretable) that improve segmentation performance with minimal computational overhead. We validate our approach across multiple 3D semantic segmentation benchmarks, demonstrating consistent performance gains, including up to +11.5% mIoU on TS40K with PTV3, while adding only 58K extra parameters. Our results highlight the benefit of explicitly encoding geometric structure to support accurate and efficient 3D scene understanding, with a lightweight add-on layer