  Generating 3D point clouds is challenging yet highly desired. This work
presents a novel autoregressive model, PointGrow, which can generate diverse
and realistic point cloud samples from scratch or conditioned on semantic
contexts. This model operates recurrently, with each point sampled according to
a conditional distribution given its previously-generated points, allowing
inter-point correlations to be well-exploited and 3D shape generative processes
to be better interpreted. Since point cloud object shapes are typically encoded
by long-range dependencies, we augment our model with dedicated self-attention
modules to capture such relations. Extensive evaluations show that PointGrow
achieves satisfying performance on both unconditional and conditional point
cloud generation tasks, with respect to realism and diversity. Several
important applications, such as unsupervised feature learning and shape
arithmetic operations, are also demonstrated.
