On the Efficacy of Self-Supervised Point Cloud Encoders for Efficient 3D Large Language Models
3D point cloud-language models (3D-LLMs) enable 3D understanding by pairing point cloud encoders with large language models, but existing methods rely on costly multi-modal encoders (e.g., ULIP-2) that require image-text-point cloud alignment on 8x A100-scale compute, creating high barriers for research and deployment. In this work, we systematically investigate whether low-cost self-supervised point cloud encoders, specifically PCP-MAE and Point-MAE, can serve as effective alternatives. Using MiniGPT-3D as our testbed, we evaluate 7 encoder initialization/pre-training setups (1 multi-modal baseline, 5 self-supervised, 1 random init) under frozen and unfrozen fine-tuning (12 total groups), across 2 architectures (MaskTransformer, PointTransformer), 3 objectives (PCP-MAE, Point-MAE, random init), and 2 datasets (Objaverse 660K, ShapeNet55-34 approximately 50K). Our experiments reveal three key findings: (1) The four-stage MiniGPT-3D pipeline can effectively train a 3D encoder from random initialization: an end-to-end trained random init encoder reaches 52.50% open-vocabulary accuracy and 44.45 captioning score, approaching top pre-trained variants; (2) Architecture and pre-training objective show strong crossover interaction: PCP-MAE + MaskTransformer achieves 59.00% accuracy (best self-supervised), while Point-MAE + MaskTransformer drops to 46.50%, with the pattern reversed for PointTransformer; (3) Closed-set ModelNet40 classification remains a core weakness of purely geometric encoders, reaching only ~13-18% accuracy vs. ~62% for the multi-modal baseline, even after end-to-end fine-tuning. Our results offer practical guidelines for cost-effective 3D-LLM design and reveal interaction patterns between self-supervised objectives and encoder architectures.