SA-MLP: Enhancing Point Cloud Classification with Efficient Addition and Shift Operations in MLP Architectures

This study addresses the computational inefficiencies in point cloud classification by introducing novel MLP-based architectures inspired by recent advances in CNN optimization. Traditional neural networks heavily rely on multiplication operations, which are computationally expensive. To tackle this, we propose Add-MLP and Shift-MLP, which replace multiplications with addition and shift operations, respectively, significantly enhancing computational efficiency. Building on this, we introduce SA-MLP, a hybrid model that intermixes alternately distributed shift and adder layers to replace MLP layers, maintaining the original number of layers without freezing shift layer weights. This design contrasts with the ShiftAddNet model from previous literature, which replaces convolutional layers with shift and adder layers, leading to a doubling of the number of layers and limited representational capacity due to frozen shift weights. Moreover, SA-MLP optimizes learning by setting distinct learning rates and optimizers specifically for the adder and shift layers, fully leveraging their complementary strengths. Extensive experiments demonstrate that while Add-MLP and Shift-MLP achieve competitive performance, SA-MLP significantly surpasses the multiplication-based baseline MLP model and achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art MLP-based models. This study offers an efficient and effective solution for point cloud classification, balancing performance with computational efficiency.