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arXiv · 2608.21380

RoboShape: Information-Theoretic Point Cloud Representations for Privacy-Aware Robot Perception

Oguzhan Baser·Mirac Sozen·Kaan Kale·Sandeep Chinchali·Sriram Vishwanath
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Abstract

With the increased adoption of robotic agents operating in human environments by scanning and sharing 3D representations (e.g., for fleet learning, cloud-based planning, or collaborative mapping), collected point clouds reveal not just the objects in a scene but also sensitive spatial context, such as room function or information that occupants never consented to disclose. Traditional point cloud encoders offer no principled control over this: either all is preserved, or none. Hence, we introduce RoboShape, an information theory guided compression head following the frozen {\tt Sonata} encoder. We project voxel-level embeddings using the Donsker-Varadhan formulation of mutual information (MI). Specifically, we maximize the MI between embeddings and object-level understanding while minimizing it for private attributes. RoboShape leads to 87.5\% smaller embeddings that retain 98.7\% of object classification utility while collapsing sensitive attribute predictions by 39.3\% across the three real-world indoor LiDAR datasets. Its privacy-preserving embeddings are cheaper to transmit over the network or to train a model for any downstream tasks. We release the RoboShape codebase to give the robotics community a practical, encoder-agnostic tool for building perception pipelines that are compact, privacy-aware, and deployment-ready.

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Oguzhan Baser, Mirac Sozen, Kaan Kale, Sandeep Chinchali, Sriram Vishwanath. 2026-07-16. RoboShape: Information-Theoretic Point Cloud Representations for Privacy-Aware Robot Perception. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21380

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