new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

Daily Papers

byAK and the research community

Dec 12

Detect Anything via Next Point Prediction

Object detection has long been dominated by traditional coordinate regression-based models, such as YOLO, DETR, and Grounding DINO. Although recent efforts have attempted to leverage MLLMs to tackle this task, they face challenges like low recall rate, duplicate predictions, coordinate misalignment, etc. In this work, we bridge this gap and propose Rex-Omni, a 3B-scale MLLM that achieves state-of-the-art object perception performance. On benchmarks like COCO and LVIS, Rex-Omni attains performance comparable to or exceeding regression-based models (e.g., DINO, Grounding DINO) in a zero-shot setting. This is enabled by three key designs: 1) Task Formulation: we use special tokens to represent quantized coordinates from 0 to 999, reducing the model's learning difficulty and improving token efficiency for coordinate prediction; 2) Data Engines: we construct multiple data engines to generate high-quality grounding, referring, and pointing data, providing semantically rich supervision for training; \3) Training Pipelines: we employ a two-stage training process, combining supervised fine-tuning on 22 million data with GRPO-based reinforcement post-training. This RL post-training leverages geometry-aware rewards to effectively bridge the discrete-to-continuous coordinate prediction gap, improve box accuracy, and mitigate undesirable behaviors like duplicate predictions that stem from the teacher-guided nature of the initial SFT stage. Beyond conventional detection, Rex-Omni's inherent language understanding enables versatile capabilities such as object referring, pointing, visual prompting, GUI grounding, spatial referring, OCR and key-pointing, all systematically evaluated on dedicated benchmarks. We believe that Rex-Omni paves the way for more versatile and language-aware visual perception systems.

Implicit Neural Spatial Representations for Time-dependent PDEs

Implicit Neural Spatial Representation (INSR) has emerged as an effective representation of spatially-dependent vector fields. This work explores solving time-dependent PDEs with INSR. Classical PDE solvers introduce both temporal and spatial discretizations. Common spatial discretizations include meshes and meshless point clouds, where each degree-of-freedom corresponds to a location in space. While these explicit spatial correspondences are intuitive to model and understand, these representations are not necessarily optimal for accuracy, memory usage, or adaptivity. Keeping the classical temporal discretization unchanged (e.g., explicit/implicit Euler), we explore INSR as an alternative spatial discretization, where spatial information is implicitly stored in the neural network weights. The network weights then evolve over time via time integration. Our approach does not require any training data generated by existing solvers because our approach is the solver itself. We validate our approach on various PDEs with examples involving large elastic deformations, turbulent fluids, and multi-scale phenomena. While slower to compute than traditional representations, our approach exhibits higher accuracy and lower memory consumption. Whereas classical solvers can dynamically adapt their spatial representation only by resorting to complex remeshing algorithms, our INSR approach is intrinsically adaptive. By tapping into the rich literature of classic time integrators, e.g., operator-splitting schemes, our method enables challenging simulations in contact mechanics and turbulent flows where previous neural-physics approaches struggle. Videos and codes are available on the project page: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/cg/INSR-PDE/

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 30, 2022

A multi-view contrastive learning framework for spatial embeddings in risk modelling

Incorporating spatial information, particularly those influenced by climate, weather, and demographic factors, is crucial for improving underwriting precision and enhancing risk management in insurance. However, spatial data are often unstructured, high-dimensional, and difficult to integrate into predictive models. Embedding methods are needed to convert spatial data into meaningful representations for modelling tasks. We propose a novel multi-view contrastive learning framework for generating spatial embeddings that combine information from multiple spatial data sources. To train the model, we construct a spatial dataset that merges satellite imagery and OpenStreetMap features across Europe. The framework aligns these spatial views with coordinate-based encodings, producing low-dimensional embeddings that capture both spatial structure and contextual similarity. Once trained, the model generates embeddings directly from latitude-longitude pairs, enabling any dataset with coordinates to be enriched with meaningful spatial features without requiring access to the original spatial inputs. In a case study on French real estate prices, we compare models trained on raw coordinates against those using our spatial embeddings as inputs. The embeddings consistently improve predictive accuracy across generalised linear, additive, and boosting models, while providing interpretable spatial effects and demonstrating transferability to unseen regions.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 22

Functional Bayesian Tucker Decomposition for Continuous-indexed Tensor Data

Tucker decomposition is a powerful tensor model to handle multi-aspect data. It demonstrates the low-rank property by decomposing the grid-structured data as interactions between a core tensor and a set of object representations (factors). A fundamental assumption of such decomposition is that there are finite objects in each aspect or mode, corresponding to discrete indexes of data entries. However, real-world data is often not naturally posed in this setting. For example, geographic data is represented as continuous indexes of latitude and longitude coordinates, and cannot fit tensor models directly. To generalize Tucker decomposition to such scenarios, we propose Functional Bayesian Tucker Decomposition (FunBaT). We treat the continuous-indexed data as the interaction between the Tucker core and a group of latent functions. We use Gaussian processes (GP) as functional priors to model the latent functions. Then, we convert each GP into a state-space prior by constructing an equivalent stochastic differential equation (SDE) to reduce computational cost. An efficient inference algorithm is developed for scalable posterior approximation based on advanced message-passing techniques. The advantage of our method is shown in both synthetic data and several real-world applications. We release the code of FunBaT at https://github.com/xuangu-fang/Functional-Bayesian-Tucker-Decomposition.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 8, 2023

GLACE: Global Local Accelerated Coordinate Encoding

Scene coordinate regression (SCR) methods are a family of visual localization methods that directly regress 2D-3D matches for camera pose estimation. They are effective in small-scale scenes but face significant challenges in large-scale scenes that are further amplified in the absence of ground truth 3D point clouds for supervision. Here, the model can only rely on reprojection constraints and needs to implicitly triangulate the points. The challenges stem from a fundamental dilemma: The network has to be invariant to observations of the same landmark at different viewpoints and lighting conditions, etc., but at the same time discriminate unrelated but similar observations. The latter becomes more relevant and severe in larger scenes. In this work, we tackle this problem by introducing the concept of co-visibility to the network. We propose GLACE, which integrates pre-trained global and local encodings and enables SCR to scale to large scenes with only a single small-sized network. Specifically, we propose a novel feature diffusion technique that implicitly groups the reprojection constraints with co-visibility and avoids overfitting to trivial solutions. Additionally, our position decoder parameterizes the output positions for large-scale scenes more effectively. Without using 3D models or depth maps for supervision, our method achieves state-of-the-art results on large-scale scenes with a low-map-size model. On Cambridge landmarks, with a single model, we achieve 17% lower median position error than Poker, the ensemble variant of the state-of-the-art SCR method ACE. Code is available at: https://github.com/cvg/glace.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 6, 2024

Coordinate Quantized Neural Implicit Representations for Multi-view Reconstruction

In recent years, huge progress has been made on learning neural implicit representations from multi-view images for 3D reconstruction. As an additional input complementing coordinates, using sinusoidal functions as positional encodings plays a key role in revealing high frequency details with coordinate-based neural networks. However, high frequency positional encodings make the optimization unstable, which results in noisy reconstructions and artifacts in empty space. To resolve this issue in a general sense, we introduce to learn neural implicit representations with quantized coordinates, which reduces the uncertainty and ambiguity in the field during optimization. Instead of continuous coordinates, we discretize continuous coordinates into discrete coordinates using nearest interpolation among quantized coordinates which are obtained by discretizing the field in an extremely high resolution. We use discrete coordinates and their positional encodings to learn implicit functions through volume rendering. This significantly reduces the variations in the sample space, and triggers more multi-view consistency constraints on intersections of rays from different views, which enables to infer implicit function in a more effective way. Our quantized coordinates do not bring any computational burden, and can seamlessly work upon the latest methods. Our evaluations under the widely used benchmarks show our superiority over the state-of-the-art. Our code is available at https://github.com/MachinePerceptionLab/CQ-NIR.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 21, 2023

Geography-Aware Large Language Models for Next POI Recommendation

The next Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation task aims to predict users' next destinations based on their historical movement data and plays a key role in location-based services and personalized applications. Accurate next POI recommendation depends on effectively modeling geographic information and POI transition relations, which are crucial for capturing spatial dependencies and user movement patterns. While Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong capabilities in semantic understanding and contextual reasoning, applying them to spatial tasks like next POI recommendation remains challenging. First, the infrequent nature of specific GPS coordinates makes it difficult for LLMs to model precise spatial contexts. Second, the lack of knowledge about POI transitions limits their ability to capture potential POI-POI relationships. To address these issues, we propose GA-LLM (Geography-Aware Large Language Model), a novel framework that enhances LLMs with two specialized components. The Geographic Coordinate Injection Module (GCIM) transforms GPS coordinates into spatial representations using hierarchical and Fourier-based positional encoding, enabling the model to understand geographic features from multiple perspectives. The POI Alignment Module (PAM) incorporates POI transition relations into the LLM's semantic space, allowing it to infer global POI relationships and generalize to unseen POIs. Experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of GA-LLM.

  • 7 authors
·
May 17

Efficient Encoding of Graphics Primitives with Simplex-based Structures

Grid-based structures are commonly used to encode explicit features for graphics primitives such as images, signed distance functions (SDF), and neural radiance fields (NeRF) due to their simple implementation. However, in n-dimensional space, calculating the value of a sampled point requires interpolating the values of its 2^n neighboring vertices. The exponential scaling with dimension leads to significant computational overheads. To address this issue, we propose a simplex-based approach for encoding graphics primitives. The number of vertices in a simplex-based structure increases linearly with dimension, making it a more efficient and generalizable alternative to grid-based representations. Using the non-axis-aligned simplicial structure property, we derive and prove a coordinate transformation, simplicial subdivision, and barycentric interpolation scheme for efficient sampling, which resembles transformation procedures in the simplex noise algorithm. Finally, we use hash tables to store multiresolution features of all interest points in the simplicial grid, which are passed into a tiny fully connected neural network to parameterize graphics primitives. We implemented a detailed simplex-based structure encoding algorithm in C++ and CUDA using the methods outlined in our approach. In the 2D image fitting task, the proposed method is capable of fitting a giga-pixel image with 9.4% less time compared to the baseline method proposed by instant-ngp, while maintaining the same quality and compression rate. In the volumetric rendering setup, we observe a maximum 41.2% speedup when the samples are dense enough.

  • 2 authors
·
Nov 26, 2023

Efficient Implementation of Gaussian Process Regression Accelerated Saddle Point Searches with Application to Molecular Reactions

The task of locating first order saddle points on high-dimensional surfaces describing the variation of energy as a function of atomic coordinates is an essential step for identifying the mechanism and estimating the rate of thermally activated events within the harmonic approximation of transition state theory. When combined directly with electronic structure calculations, the number of energy and atomic force evaluations needed for convergence is a primary issue. Here, we describe an efficient implementation of Gaussian process regression (GPR) acceleration of the minimum mode following method where a dimer is used to estimate the lowest eigenmode of the Hessian. A surrogate energy surface is constructed and updated after each electronic structure calculation. The method is applied to a test set of 500 molecular reactions previously generated by Hermez and coworkers [J. Chem. Theory Comput. 18, 6974 (2022)]. An order of magnitude reduction in the number of electronic structure calculations needed to reach the saddle point configurations is obtained by using the GPR compared to the dimer method. Despite the wide range in stiffness of the molecular degrees of freedom, the calculations are carried out using Cartesian coordinates and are found to require similar number of electronic structure calculations as an elaborate internal coordinate method implemented in the Sella software package. The present implementation of the GPR surrogate model in C++ is efficient enough for the wall time of the saddle point searches to be reduced in 3 out of 4 cases even though the calculations are carried out at a low Hartree-Fock level.

  • 5 authors
·
May 18

High-order finite element method for atomic structure calculations

We introduce featom, an open source code that implements a high-order finite element solver for the radial Schr\"odinger, Dirac, and Kohn-Sham equations. The formulation accommodates various mesh types, such as uniform or exponential, and the convergence can be systematically controlled by increasing the number and/or polynomial order of the finite element basis functions. The Dirac equation is solved using a squared Hamiltonian approach to eliminate spurious states. To address the slow convergence of the kappa=pm1 states due to divergent derivatives at the origin, we incorporate known asymptotic forms into the solutions. We achieve a high level of accuracy (10^{-8} Hartree) for total energies and eigenvalues of heavy atoms such as uranium in both Schr\"odinger and Dirac Kohn-Sham solutions. We provide detailed convergence studies and computational parameters required to attain commonly required accuracies. Finally, we compare our results with known analytic results as well as the results of other methods. In particular, we calculate benchmark results for atomic numbers (Z) from 1 to 92, verifying current benchmarks. We demonstrate significant speedup compared to the state-of-the-art shooting solver dftatom. An efficient, modular Fortran 2008 implementation, is provided under an open source, permissive license, including examples and tests, wherein particular emphasis is placed on the independence (no global variables), reusability, and generality of the individual routines.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 11, 2023

HPR3D: Hierarchical Proxy Representation for High-Fidelity 3D Reconstruction and Controllable Editing

Current 3D representations like meshes, voxels, point clouds, and NeRF-based neural implicit fields exhibit significant limitations: they are often task-specific, lacking universal applicability across reconstruction, generation, editing, and driving. While meshes offer high precision, their dense vertex data complicates editing; NeRFs deliver excellent rendering but suffer from structural ambiguity, hindering animation and manipulation; all representations inherently struggle with the trade-off between data complexity and fidelity. To overcome these issues, we introduce a novel 3D Hierarchical Proxy Node representation. Its core innovation lies in representing an object's shape and texture via a sparse set of hierarchically organized (tree-structured) proxy nodes distributed on its surface and interior. Each node stores local shape and texture information (implicitly encoded by a small MLP) within its neighborhood. Querying any 3D coordinate's properties involves efficient neural interpolation and lightweight decoding from relevant nearby and parent nodes. This framework yields a highly compact representation where nodes align with local semantics, enabling direct drag-and-edit manipulation, and offers scalable quality-complexity control. Extensive experiments across 3D reconstruction and editing demonstrate our method's expressive efficiency, high-fidelity rendering quality, and superior editability.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 16

Geographic Location Encoding with Spherical Harmonics and Sinusoidal Representation Networks

Learning feature representations of geographical space is vital for any machine learning model that integrates geolocated data, spanning application domains such as remote sensing, ecology, or epidemiology. Recent work mostly embeds coordinates using sine and cosine projections based on Double Fourier Sphere (DFS) features -- these embeddings assume a rectangular data domain even on global data, which can lead to artifacts, especially at the poles. At the same time, relatively little attention has been paid to the exact design of the neural network architectures these functional embeddings are combined with. This work proposes a novel location encoder for globally distributed geographic data that combines spherical harmonic basis functions, natively defined on spherical surfaces, with sinusoidal representation networks (SirenNets) that can be interpreted as learned Double Fourier Sphere embedding. We systematically evaluate the cross-product of positional embeddings and neural network architectures across various classification and regression benchmarks and synthetic evaluation datasets. In contrast to previous approaches that require the combination of both positional encoding and neural networks to learn meaningful representations, we show that both spherical harmonics and sinusoidal representation networks are competitive on their own but set state-of-the-art performances across tasks when combined. We provide source code at www.github.com/marccoru/locationencoder

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 10, 2023

CAD-GPT: Synthesising CAD Construction Sequence with Spatial Reasoning-Enhanced Multimodal LLMs

Computer-aided design (CAD) significantly enhances the efficiency, accuracy, and innovation of design processes by enabling precise 2D and 3D modeling, extensive analysis, and optimization. Existing methods for creating CAD models rely on latent vectors or point clouds, which are difficult to obtain and costly to store. Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have inspired researchers to use natural language instructions and images for CAD model construction. However, these models still struggle with inferring accurate 3D spatial location and orientation, leading to inaccuracies in determining the spatial 3D starting points and extrusion directions for constructing geometries. This work introduces CAD-GPT, a CAD synthesis method with spatial reasoning-enhanced MLLM that takes either a single image or a textual description as input. To achieve precise spatial inference, our approach introduces a 3D Modeling Spatial Mechanism. This method maps 3D spatial positions and 3D sketch plane rotation angles into a 1D linguistic feature space using a specialized spatial unfolding mechanism, while discretizing 2D sketch coordinates into an appropriate planar space to enable precise determination of spatial starting position, sketch orientation, and 2D sketch coordinate translations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CAD-GPT consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in CAD model synthesis, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 27, 2024

Spherical convolutions on molecular graphs for protein model quality assessment

Processing information on 3D objects requires methods stable to rigid-body transformations, in particular rotations, of the input data. In image processing tasks, convolutional neural networks achieve this property using rotation-equivariant operations. However, contrary to images, graphs generally have irregular topology. This makes it challenging to define a rotation-equivariant convolution operation on these structures. In this work, we propose Spherical Graph Convolutional Network (S-GCN) that processes 3D models of proteins represented as molecular graphs. In a protein molecule, individual amino acids have common topological elements. This allows us to unambiguously associate each amino acid with a local coordinate system and construct rotation-equivariant spherical filters that operate on angular information between graph nodes. Within the framework of the protein model quality assessment problem, we demonstrate that the proposed spherical convolution method significantly improves the quality of model assessment compared to the standard message-passing approach. It is also comparable to state-of-the-art methods, as we demonstrate on Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP) benchmarks. The proposed technique operates only on geometric features of protein 3D models. This makes it universal and applicable to any other geometric-learning task where the graph structure allows constructing local coordinate systems.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 16, 2020

Space and Time Continuous Physics Simulation From Partial Observations

Modern techniques for physical simulations rely on numerical schemes and mesh-refinement methods to address trade-offs between precision and complexity, but these handcrafted solutions are tedious and require high computational power. Data-driven methods based on large-scale machine learning promise high adaptivity by integrating long-range dependencies more directly and efficiently. In this work, we focus on fluid dynamics and address the shortcomings of a large part of the literature, which are based on fixed support for computations and predictions in the form of regular or irregular grids. We propose a novel setup to perform predictions in a continuous spatial and temporal domain while being trained on sparse observations. We formulate the task as a double observation problem and propose a solution with two interlinked dynamical systems defined on, respectively, the sparse positions and the continuous domain, which allows to forecast and interpolate a solution from the initial condition. Our practical implementation involves recurrent GNNs and a spatio-temporal attention observer capable of interpolating the solution at arbitrary locations. Our model not only generalizes to new initial conditions (as standard auto-regressive models do) but also performs evaluation at arbitrary space and time locations. We evaluate on three standard datasets in fluid dynamics and compare to strong baselines, which are outperformed both in classical settings and in the extended new task requiring continuous predictions.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 17, 2024

A Vector-Based Algorithm for Generating Complete Balanced Reaction Sets with Arbitrary Numbers of Reagents

We present a vector-based method to balance chemical reactions. The algorithm builds candidates in a deterministic way, removes duplicates, and always prints coefficients in the lowest whole-number form. For redox cases, electrons and protons/hydroxide are treated explicitly, so both mass and charge are balanced. We also outline the basic principles of the vector formulation of stoichiometry, interpreting reactions as integer vectors in composition space, this geometric view supports compact visualizations of reagent-product interactions and helps surface distinct reaction families. The method enumerates valid balances for arbitrary user-specified species lists without special-case balancing rules or symbolic tricks, and it provides a clean foundation for developing new algorithmic variants (e.g., alternative objectives or constraints). On representative examples (neutralization, double displacement, decomposition, classical redox, small multicomponent sets) and a negative control, the method produced correct integer balances. When multiple balances exist, we report a canonical one - minimizing the total coefficient sum with a simple tie-breaker - without claiming global optimality beyond the solutions the search enumerates. The procedure applies per reaction and extends to reaction networks via consistent per-reaction application. We do not report runtimes, broader benchmarking and code/data release are planned.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 29

How to Train Your HiPPO: State Space Models with Generalized Orthogonal Basis Projections

Linear time-invariant state space models (SSM) are a classical model from engineering and statistics, that have recently been shown to be very promising in machine learning through the Structured State Space sequence model (S4). A core component of S4 involves initializing the SSM state matrix to a particular matrix called a HiPPO matrix, which was empirically important for S4's ability to handle long sequences. However, the specific matrix that S4 uses was actually derived in previous work for a particular time-varying dynamical system, and the use of this matrix as a time-invariant SSM had no known mathematical interpretation. Consequently, the theoretical mechanism by which S4 models long-range dependencies actually remains unexplained. We derive a more general and intuitive formulation of the HiPPO framework, which provides a simple mathematical interpretation of S4 as a decomposition onto exponentially-warped Legendre polynomials, explaining its ability to capture long dependencies. Our generalization introduces a theoretically rich class of SSMs that also lets us derive more intuitive S4 variants for other bases such as the Fourier basis, and explains other aspects of training S4, such as how to initialize the important timescale parameter. These insights improve S4's performance to 86% on the Long Range Arena benchmark, with 96% on the most difficult Path-X task.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 23, 2022

Metatensor and metatomic: foundational libraries for interoperable atomistic machine learning

Incorporation of machine learning (ML) techniques into atomic-scale modeling has proven to be an extremely effective strategy to improve the accuracy and reduce the computational cost of simulations. It also entails conceptual and practical challenges, as it involves combining very different mathematical foundations, as well as software ecosystems that are very well developed in their own merit, but do not share many commonalities. To address these issues and facilitate the adoption of ML in atomistic simulations, we introduce two dedicated software libraries. The first one, metatensor, provides multi-platform and multi-language storage and manipulation of arrays with many potentially sparse indices, designed from the ground up for atomistic ML applications. By combining the actual values with metadata that describes their nature and that facilitates the handling of geometric information and gradients with respect to the atomic positions, metatensor provides a common framework to enable data sharing between ML software -- typically written in Python -- and established atomistic modeling tools -- typically written in Fortran, C or C++. The second library, metatomic, provides an interface to store an atomistic ML model and metadata about this model in a portable way, facilitating the implementation, training and distribution of models, and their use across different simulation packages. We showcase a growing ecosystem of tools, from low-level libraries, training utilities, to interfaces with existing software packages that demonstrate the effectiveness of metatensor and metatomic in bridging the gap between traditional simulation software and modern ML frameworks.

  • 14 authors
·
Aug 21

Molecule3D: A Benchmark for Predicting 3D Geometries from Molecular Graphs

Graph neural networks are emerging as promising methods for modeling molecular graphs, in which nodes and edges correspond to atoms and chemical bonds, respectively. Recent studies show that when 3D molecular geometries, such as bond lengths and angles, are available, molecular property prediction tasks can be made more accurate. However, computing of 3D molecular geometries requires quantum calculations that are computationally prohibitive. For example, accurate calculation of 3D geometries of a small molecule requires hours of computing time using density functional theory (DFT). Here, we propose to predict the ground-state 3D geometries from molecular graphs using machine learning methods. To make this feasible, we develop a benchmark, known as Molecule3D, that includes a dataset with precise ground-state geometries of approximately 4 million molecules derived from DFT. We also provide a set of software tools for data processing, splitting, training, and evaluation, etc. Specifically, we propose to assess the error and validity of predicted geometries using four metrics. We implement two baseline methods that either predict the pairwise distance between atoms or atom coordinates in 3D space. Experimental results show that, compared with generating 3D geometries with RDKit, our method can achieve comparable prediction accuracy but with much smaller computational costs. Our Molecule3D is available as a module of the MoleculeX software library (https://github.com/divelab/MoleculeX).

  • 10 authors
·
Sep 30, 2021

MM-Agent: LLM as Agents for Real-world Mathematical Modeling Problem

Mathematical modeling is a cornerstone of scientific discovery and engineering practice, enabling the translation of real-world problems into formal systems across domains such as physics, biology, and economics. Unlike mathematical reasoning, which assumes a predefined formulation, modeling requires open-ended problem analysis, abstraction, and principled formalization. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong reasoning capabilities, they fall short in rigorous model construction, limiting their utility in real-world problem-solving. To this end, we formalize the task of LLM-powered real-world mathematical modeling, where agents must analyze problems, construct domain-appropriate formulations, and generate complete end-to-end solutions. We introduce MM-Bench, a curated benchmark of 111 problems from the Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM/ICM), spanning the years 2000 to 2025 and across ten diverse domains such as physics, biology, and economics. To tackle this task, we propose MM-Agent, an expert-inspired framework that decomposes mathematical modeling into four stages: open-ended problem analysis, structured model formulation, computational problem solving, and report generation. Experiments on MM-Bench show that MM-Agent significantly outperforms baseline agents, achieving an 11.88\% improvement over human expert solutions while requiring only 15 minutes and \$0.88 per task using GPT-4o. Furthermore, under official MCM/ICM protocols, MM-Agent assisted two undergraduate teams in winning the Finalist Award (top 2.0\% among 27,456 teams) in MCM/ICM 2025, demonstrating its practical effectiveness as a modeling copilot. Our code is available at https://github.com/usail-hkust/LLM-MM-Agent

  • 6 authors
·
May 20

ObjectReact: Learning Object-Relative Control for Visual Navigation

Visual navigation using only a single camera and a topological map has recently become an appealing alternative to methods that require additional sensors and 3D maps. This is typically achieved through an "image-relative" approach to estimating control from a given pair of current observation and subgoal image. However, image-level representations of the world have limitations because images are strictly tied to the agent's pose and embodiment. In contrast, objects, being a property of the map, offer an embodiment- and trajectory-invariant world representation. In this work, we present a new paradigm of learning "object-relative" control that exhibits several desirable characteristics: a) new routes can be traversed without strictly requiring to imitate prior experience, b) the control prediction problem can be decoupled from solving the image matching problem, and c) high invariance can be achieved in cross-embodiment deployment for variations across both training-testing and mapping-execution settings. We propose a topometric map representation in the form of a "relative" 3D scene graph, which is used to obtain more informative object-level global path planning costs. We train a local controller, dubbed "ObjectReact", conditioned directly on a high-level "WayObject Costmap" representation that eliminates the need for an explicit RGB input. We demonstrate the advantages of learning object-relative control over its image-relative counterpart across sensor height variations and multiple navigation tasks that challenge the underlying spatial understanding capability, e.g., navigating a map trajectory in the reverse direction. We further show that our sim-only policy is able to generalize well to real-world indoor environments. Code and supplementary material are accessible via project page: https://object-react.github.io/

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 11 1

MMGP: a Mesh Morphing Gaussian Process-based machine learning method for regression of physical problems under non-parameterized geometrical variability

When learning simulations for modeling physical phenomena in industrial designs, geometrical variabilities are of prime interest. While classical regression techniques prove effective for parameterized geometries, practical scenarios often involve the absence of shape parametrization during the inference stage, leaving us with only mesh discretizations as available data. Learning simulations from such mesh-based representations poses significant challenges, with recent advances relying heavily on deep graph neural networks to overcome the limitations of conventional machine learning approaches. Despite their promising results, graph neural networks exhibit certain drawbacks, including their dependency on extensive datasets and limitations in providing built-in predictive uncertainties or handling large meshes. In this work, we propose a machine learning method that do not rely on graph neural networks. Complex geometrical shapes and variations with fixed topology are dealt with using well-known mesh morphing onto a common support, combined with classical dimensionality reduction techniques and Gaussian processes. The proposed methodology can easily deal with large meshes without the need for explicit shape parameterization and provides crucial predictive uncertainties, which are essential for informed decision-making. In the considered numerical experiments, the proposed method is competitive with respect to existing graph neural networks, regarding training efficiency and accuracy of the predictions.

  • 3 authors
·
May 22, 2023

From Graphs to Hypergraphs: Hypergraph Projection and its Remediation

We study the implications of the modeling choice to use a graph, instead of a hypergraph, to represent real-world interconnected systems whose constituent relationships are of higher order by nature. Such a modeling choice typically involves an underlying projection process that maps the original hypergraph onto a graph, and is common in graph-based analysis. While hypergraph projection can potentially lead to loss of higher-order relations, there exists very limited studies on the consequences of doing so, as well as its remediation. This work fills this gap by doing two things: (1) we develop analysis based on graph and set theory, showing two ubiquitous patterns of hyperedges that are root to structural information loss in all hypergraph projections; we also quantify the combinatorial impossibility of recovering the lost higher-order structures if no extra help is provided; (2) we still seek to recover the lost higher-order structures in hypergraph projection, and in light of (1)'s findings we propose to relax the problem into a learning-based setting. Under this setting, we develop a learning-based hypergraph reconstruction method based on an important statistic of hyperedge distributions that we find. Our reconstruction method is evaluated on 8 real-world datasets under different settings, and exhibits consistently good performance. We also demonstrate benefits of the reconstructed hypergraphs via use cases of protein rankings and link predictions.

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 16, 2024

GaussianProperty: Integrating Physical Properties to 3D Gaussians with LMMs

Estimating physical properties for visual data is a crucial task in computer vision, graphics, and robotics, underpinning applications such as augmented reality, physical simulation, and robotic grasping. However, this area remains under-explored due to the inherent ambiguities in physical property estimation. To address these challenges, we introduce GaussianProperty, a training-free framework that assigns physical properties of materials to 3D Gaussians. Specifically, we integrate the segmentation capability of SAM with the recognition capability of GPT-4V(ision) to formulate a global-local physical property reasoning module for 2D images. Then we project the physical properties from multi-view 2D images to 3D Gaussians using a voting strategy. We demonstrate that 3D Gaussians with physical property annotations enable applications in physics-based dynamic simulation and robotic grasping. For physics-based dynamic simulation, we leverage the Material Point Method (MPM) for realistic dynamic simulation. For robot grasping, we develop a grasping force prediction strategy that estimates a safe force range required for object grasping based on the estimated physical properties. Extensive experiments on material segmentation, physics-based dynamic simulation, and robotic grasping validate the effectiveness of our proposed method, highlighting its crucial role in understanding physical properties from visual data. Online demo, code, more cases and annotated datasets are available on https://Gaussian-Property.github.io{this https URL}.

  • 11 authors
·
Dec 15, 2024 2

The Gauss-Markov Adjunction: Categorical Semantics of Residuals in Supervised Learning

Enhancing the intelligibility and interpretability of machine learning is a crucial task in responding to the demand for Explicability as an AI principle, and in promoting the better social implementation of AI. The aim of our research is to contribute to this improvement by reformulating machine learning models through the lens of category theory, thereby developing a semantic framework for structuring and understanding AI systems. Our categorical modeling in this paper clarifies and formalizes the structural interplay between residuals and parameters in supervised learning. The present paper focuses on the multiple linear regression model, which represents the most basic form of supervised learning. By defining two concrete categories corresponding to parameters and data, along with an adjoint pair of functors between them, we introduce our categorical formulation of supervised learning. We show that the essential structure of this framework is captured by what we call the Gauss-Markov Adjunction. Within this setting, the dual flow of information can be explicitly described as a correspondence between variations in parameters and residuals. The ordinary least squares estimator for the parameters and the minimum residual are related via the preservation of limits by the right adjoint functor. Furthermore, we position this formulation as an instance of extended denotational semantics for supervised learning, and propose applying a semantic perspective developed in theoretical computer science as a formal foundation for Explicability in AI.

A micro Lie theory for state estimation in robotics

A Lie group is an old mathematical abstract object dating back to the XIX century, when mathematician Sophus Lie laid the foundations of the theory of continuous transformation groups. As it often happens, its usage has spread over diverse areas of science and technology many years later. In robotics, we are recently experiencing an important trend in its usage, at least in the fields of estimation, and particularly in motion estimation for navigation. Yet for a vast majority of roboticians, Lie groups are highly abstract constructions and therefore difficult to understand and to use. This may be due to the fact that most of the literature on Lie theory is written by and for mathematicians and physicists, who might be more used than us to the deep abstractions this theory deals with. In estimation for robotics it is often not necessary to exploit the full capacity of the theory, and therefore an effort of selection of materials is required. In this paper, we will walk through the most basic principles of the Lie theory, with the aim of conveying clear and useful ideas, and leave a significant corpus of the Lie theory behind. Even with this mutilation, the material included here has proven to be extremely useful in modern estimation algorithms for robotics, especially in the fields of SLAM, visual odometry, and the like. Alongside this micro Lie theory, we provide a chapter with a few application examples, and a vast reference of formulas for the major Lie groups used in robotics, including most jacobian matrices and the way to easily manipulate them. We also present a new C++ template-only library implementing all the functionality described here.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 4, 2018

Fast, Expressive SE(n) Equivariant Networks through Weight-Sharing in Position-Orientation Space

Based on the theory of homogeneous spaces we derive geometrically optimal edge attributes to be used within the flexible message-passing framework. We formalize the notion of weight sharing in convolutional networks as the sharing of message functions over point-pairs that should be treated equally. We define equivalence classes of point-pairs that are identical up to a transformation in the group and derive attributes that uniquely identify these classes. Weight sharing is then obtained by conditioning message functions on these attributes. As an application of the theory, we develop an efficient equivariant group convolutional network for processing 3D point clouds. The theory of homogeneous spaces tells us how to do group convolutions with feature maps over the homogeneous space of positions R^3, position and orientations R^3 {times} S^2, and the group SE(3) itself. Among these, R^3 {times} S^2 is an optimal choice due to the ability to represent directional information, which R^3 methods cannot, and it significantly enhances computational efficiency compared to indexing features on the full SE(3) group. We support this claim with state-of-the-art results -- in accuracy and speed -- on five different benchmarks in 2D and 3D, including interatomic potential energy prediction, trajectory forecasting in N-body systems, and generating molecules via equivariant diffusion models.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 4, 2023

One-connection rule for structural equation models

Linear structural equation models are multivariate statistical models encoded by mixed graphs. In particular, the set of covariance matrices for distributions belonging to a linear structural equation model for a fixed mixed graph G=(V, D,B) is parameterized by a rational function with parameters for each vertex and edge in G. This rational parametrization naturally allows for the study of these models from an algebraic and combinatorial point of view. Indeed, this point of view has led to a collection of results in the literature, mainly focusing on questions related to identifiability and determining relationships between covariances (i.e., finding polynomials in the Gaussian vanishing ideal). So far, a large proportion of these results has focused on the case when D, the directed part of the mixed graph G, is acyclic. This is due to the fact that in the acyclic case, the parametrization becomes polynomial and there is a description of the entries of the covariance matrices in terms of a finite sum. We move beyond the acyclic case and give a closed form expression for the entries of the covariance matrices in terms of the one-connections in a graph obtained from D through some small operations. This closed form expression then allows us to show that if G is simple, then the parametrization map is generically finite-to-one. Finally, having a closed form expression for the covariance matrices allows for the development of an algorithm for systematically exploring possible polynomials in the Gaussian vanishing ideal.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 1, 2022

Splat the Net: Radiance Fields with Splattable Neural Primitives

Radiance fields have emerged as a predominant representation for modeling 3D scene appearance. Neural formulations such as Neural Radiance Fields provide high expressivity but require costly ray marching for rendering, whereas primitive-based methods such as 3D Gaussian Splatting offer real-time efficiency through splatting, yet at the expense of representational power. Inspired by advances in both these directions, we introduce splattable neural primitives, a new volumetric representation that reconciles the expressivity of neural models with the efficiency of primitive-based splatting. Each primitive encodes a bounded neural density field parameterized by a shallow neural network. Our formulation admits an exact analytical solution for line integrals, enabling efficient computation of perspectively accurate splatting kernels. As a result, our representation supports integration along view rays without the need for costly ray marching. The primitives flexibly adapt to scene geometry and, being larger than prior analytic primitives, reduce the number required per scene. On novel-view synthesis benchmarks, our approach matches the quality and speed of 3D Gaussian Splatting while using 10times fewer primitives and 6times fewer parameters. These advantages arise directly from the representation itself, without reliance on complex control or adaptation frameworks. The project page is https://vcai.mpi-inf.mpg.de/projects/SplatNet/.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 9

Physically Embodied Gaussian Splatting: A Realtime Correctable World Model for Robotics

For robots to robustly understand and interact with the physical world, it is highly beneficial to have a comprehensive representation - modelling geometry, physics, and visual observations - that informs perception, planning, and control algorithms. We propose a novel dual Gaussian-Particle representation that models the physical world while (i) enabling predictive simulation of future states and (ii) allowing online correction from visual observations in a dynamic world. Our representation comprises particles that capture the geometrical aspect of objects in the world and can be used alongside a particle-based physics system to anticipate physically plausible future states. Attached to these particles are 3D Gaussians that render images from any viewpoint through a splatting process thus capturing the visual state. By comparing the predicted and observed images, our approach generates visual forces that correct the particle positions while respecting known physical constraints. By integrating predictive physical modelling with continuous visually-derived corrections, our unified representation reasons about the present and future while synchronizing with reality. Our system runs in realtime at 30Hz using only 3 cameras. We validate our approach on 2D and 3D tracking tasks as well as photometric reconstruction quality. Videos are found at https://embodied-gaussians.github.io/.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 15, 2024

Geometric Trajectory Diffusion Models

Generative models have shown great promise in generating 3D geometric systems, which is a fundamental problem in many natural science domains such as molecule and protein design. However, existing approaches only operate on static structures, neglecting the fact that physical systems are always dynamic in nature. In this work, we propose geometric trajectory diffusion models (GeoTDM), the first diffusion model for modeling the temporal distribution of 3D geometric trajectories. Modeling such distribution is challenging as it requires capturing both the complex spatial interactions with physical symmetries and temporal correspondence encapsulated in the dynamics. We theoretically justify that diffusion models with equivariant temporal kernels can lead to density with desired symmetry, and develop a novel transition kernel leveraging SE(3)-equivariant spatial convolution and temporal attention. Furthermore, to induce an expressive trajectory distribution for conditional generation, we introduce a generalized learnable geometric prior into the forward diffusion process to enhance temporal conditioning. We conduct extensive experiments on both unconditional and conditional generation in various scenarios, including physical simulation, molecular dynamics, and pedestrian motion. Empirical results on a wide suite of metrics demonstrate that GeoTDM can generate realistic geometric trajectories with significantly higher quality.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 16, 2024

MetricGrids: Arbitrary Nonlinear Approximation with Elementary Metric Grids based Implicit Neural Representation

This paper presents MetricGrids, a novel grid-based neural representation that combines elementary metric grids in various metric spaces to approximate complex nonlinear signals. While grid-based representations are widely adopted for their efficiency and scalability, the existing feature grids with linear indexing for continuous-space points can only provide degenerate linear latent space representations, and such representations cannot be adequately compensated to represent complex nonlinear signals by the following compact decoder. To address this problem while keeping the simplicity of a regular grid structure, our approach builds upon the standard grid-based paradigm by constructing multiple elementary metric grids as high-order terms to approximate complex nonlinearities, following the Taylor expansion principle. Furthermore, we enhance model compactness with hash encoding based on different sparsities of the grids to prevent detrimental hash collisions, and a high-order extrapolation decoder to reduce explicit grid storage requirements. experimental results on both 2D and 3D reconstructions demonstrate the superior fitting and rendering accuracy of the proposed method across diverse signal types, validating its robustness and generalizability. Code is available at https://github.com/wangshu31/MetricGrids}{https://github.com/wangshu31/MetricGrids.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 12

Flexible Isosurface Extraction for Gradient-Based Mesh Optimization

This work considers gradient-based mesh optimization, where we iteratively optimize for a 3D surface mesh by representing it as the isosurface of a scalar field, an increasingly common paradigm in applications including photogrammetry, generative modeling, and inverse physics. Existing implementations adapt classic isosurface extraction algorithms like Marching Cubes or Dual Contouring; these techniques were designed to extract meshes from fixed, known fields, and in the optimization setting they lack the degrees of freedom to represent high-quality feature-preserving meshes, or suffer from numerical instabilities. We introduce FlexiCubes, an isosurface representation specifically designed for optimizing an unknown mesh with respect to geometric, visual, or even physical objectives. Our main insight is to introduce additional carefully-chosen parameters into the representation, which allow local flexible adjustments to the extracted mesh geometry and connectivity. These parameters are updated along with the underlying scalar field via automatic differentiation when optimizing for a downstream task. We base our extraction scheme on Dual Marching Cubes for improved topological properties, and present extensions to optionally generate tetrahedral and hierarchically-adaptive meshes. Extensive experiments validate FlexiCubes on both synthetic benchmarks and real-world applications, showing that it offers significant improvements in mesh quality and geometric fidelity.

  • 10 authors
·
Aug 10, 2023

GASP: Gaussian Splatting for Physic-Based Simulations

Physics simulation is paramount for modeling and utilizing 3D scenes in various real-world applications. However, integrating with state-of-the-art 3D scene rendering techniques such as Gaussian Splatting (GS) remains challenging. Existing models use additional meshing mechanisms, including triangle or tetrahedron meshing, marching cubes, or cage meshes. Alternatively, we can modify the physics-grounded Newtonian dynamics to align with 3D Gaussian components. Current models take the first-order approximation of a deformation map, which locally approximates the dynamics by linear transformations. In contrast, our GS for Physics-Based Simulations (GASP) pipeline uses parametrized flat Gaussian distributions. Consequently, the problem of modeling Gaussian components using the physics engine is reduced to working with 3D points. In our work, we present additional rules for manipulating Gaussians, demonstrating how to adapt the pipeline to incorporate meshes, control Gaussian sizes during simulations, and enhance simulation efficiency. This is achieved through the Gaussian grouping strategy, which implements hierarchical structuring and enables simulations to be performed exclusively on selected Gaussians. The resulting solution can be integrated into any physics engine that can be treated as a black box. As demonstrated in our studies, the proposed pipeline exhibits superior performance on a diverse range of benchmark datasets designed for 3D object rendering. The project webpage, which includes additional visualizations, can be found at https://waczjoan.github.io/GASP.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 9, 2024

Incorporating Riemannian Geometric Features for Learning Coefficient of Pressure Distributions on Airplane Wings

The aerodynamic coefficients of aircrafts are significantly impacted by its geometry, especially when the angle of attack (AoA) is large. In the field of aerodynamics, traditional polynomial-based parameterization uses as few parameters as possible to describe the geometry of an airfoil. However, because the 3D geometry of a wing is more complicated than the 2D airfoil, polynomial-based parameterizations have difficulty in accurately representing the entire shape of a wing in 3D space. Existing deep learning-based methods can extract massive latent neural representations for the shape of 2D airfoils or 2D slices of wings. Recent studies highlight that directly taking geometric features as inputs to the neural networks can improve the accuracy of predicted aerodynamic coefficients. Motivated by geometry theory, we propose to incorporate Riemannian geometric features for learning Coefficient of Pressure (CP) distributions on wing surfaces. Our method calculates geometric features (Riemannian metric, connection, and curvature) and further inputs the geometric features, coordinates and flight conditions into a deep learning model to predict the CP distribution. Experimental results show that our method, compared to state-of-the-art Deep Attention Network (DAN), reduces the predicted mean square error (MSE) of CP by an average of 8.41% for the DLR-F11 aircraft test set.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 22, 2023

Implicit Gaussian process representation of vector fields over arbitrary latent manifolds

Gaussian processes (GPs) are popular nonparametric statistical models for learning unknown functions and quantifying the spatiotemporal uncertainty in data. Recent works have extended GPs to model scalar and vector quantities distributed over non-Euclidean domains, including smooth manifolds appearing in numerous fields such as computer vision, dynamical systems, and neuroscience. However, these approaches assume that the manifold underlying the data is known, limiting their practical utility. We introduce RVGP, a generalisation of GPs for learning vector signals over latent Riemannian manifolds. Our method uses positional encoding with eigenfunctions of the connection Laplacian, associated with the tangent bundle, readily derived from common graph-based approximation of data. We demonstrate that RVGP possesses global regularity over the manifold, which allows it to super-resolve and inpaint vector fields while preserving singularities. Furthermore, we use RVGP to reconstruct high-density neural dynamics derived from low-density EEG recordings in healthy individuals and Alzheimer's patients. We show that vector field singularities are important disease markers and that their reconstruction leads to a comparable classification accuracy of disease states to high-density recordings. Thus, our method overcomes a significant practical limitation in experimental and clinical applications.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 28, 2023

Segmentation of 3D pore space from CT images using curvilinear skeleton: application to numerical simulation of microbial decomposition

Recent advances in 3D X-ray Computed Tomographic (CT) sensors have stimulated research efforts to unveil the extremely complex micro-scale processes that control the activity of soil microorganisms. Voxel-based description (up to hundreds millions voxels) of the pore space can be extracted, from grey level 3D CT scanner images, by means of simple image processing tools. Classical methods for numerical simulation of biological dynamics using mesh of voxels, such as Lattice Boltzmann Model (LBM), are too much time consuming. Thus, the use of more compact and reliable geometrical representations of pore space can drastically decrease the computational cost of the simulations. Several recent works propose basic analytic volume primitives (e.g. spheres, generalized cylinders, ellipsoids) to define a piece-wise approximation of pore space for numerical simulation of draining, diffusion and microbial decomposition. Such approaches work well but the drawback is that it generates approximation errors. In the present work, we study another alternative where pore space is described by means of geometrically relevant connected subsets of voxels (regions) computed from the curvilinear skeleton. Indeed, many works use the curvilinear skeleton (3D medial axis) for analyzing and partitioning 3D shapes within various domains (medicine, material sciences, petroleum engineering, etc.) but only a few ones in soil sciences. Within the context of soil sciences, most studies dealing with 3D medial axis focus on the determination of pore throats. Here, we segment pore space using curvilinear skeleton in order to achieve numerical simulation of microbial decomposition (including diffusion processes). We validate simulation outputs by comparison with other methods using different pore space geometrical representations (balls, voxels).

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 4, 2023

Direct Numerical Layout Generation for 3D Indoor Scene Synthesis via Spatial Reasoning

Realistic 3D indoor scene synthesis is vital for embodied AI and digital content creation. It can be naturally divided into two subtasks: object generation and layout generation. While recent generative models have significantly advanced object-level quality and controllability, layout generation remains challenging due to limited datasets. Existing methods either overfit to these datasets or rely on predefined constraints to optimize numerical layout that sacrifice flexibility. As a result, they fail to generate scenes that are both open-vocabulary and aligned with fine-grained user instructions. We introduce DirectLayout, a framework that directly generates numerical 3D layouts from text descriptions using generalizable spatial reasoning of large language models (LLMs). DirectLayout decomposes the generation into three stages: producing a Bird's-Eye View (BEV) layout, lifting it into 3D space, and refining object placements. To enable explicit spatial reasoning and help the model grasp basic principles of object placement, we employ Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Activation based on the 3D-Front dataset. Additionally, we design CoT-Grounded Generative Layout Reward to enhance generalization and spatial planning. During inference, DirectLayout addresses asset-layout mismatches via Iterative Asset-Layout Alignment through in-context learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DirectLayout achieves impressive semantic consistency, generalization and physical plausibility.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 5

ATLAS: Decoupling Skeletal and Shape Parameters for Expressive Parametric Human Modeling

Parametric body models offer expressive 3D representation of humans across a wide range of poses, shapes, and facial expressions, typically derived by learning a basis over registered 3D meshes. However, existing human mesh modeling approaches struggle to capture detailed variations across diverse body poses and shapes, largely due to limited training data diversity and restrictive modeling assumptions. Moreover, the common paradigm first optimizes the external body surface using a linear basis, then regresses internal skeletal joints from surface vertices. This approach introduces problematic dependencies between internal skeleton and outer soft tissue, limiting direct control over body height and bone lengths. To address these issues, we present ATLAS, a high-fidelity body model learned from 600k high-resolution scans captured using 240 synchronized cameras. Unlike previous methods, we explicitly decouple the shape and skeleton bases by grounding our mesh representation in the human skeleton. This decoupling enables enhanced shape expressivity, fine-grained customization of body attributes, and keypoint fitting independent of external soft-tissue characteristics. ATLAS outperforms existing methods by fitting unseen subjects in diverse poses more accurately, and quantitative evaluations show that our non-linear pose correctives more effectively capture complex poses compared to linear models.

Surface Representation for Point Clouds

Most prior work represents the shapes of point clouds by coordinates. However, it is insufficient to describe the local geometry directly. In this paper, we present RepSurf (representative surfaces), a novel representation of point clouds to explicitly depict the very local structure. We explore two variants of RepSurf, Triangular RepSurf and Umbrella RepSurf inspired by triangle meshes and umbrella curvature in computer graphics. We compute the representations of RepSurf by predefined geometric priors after surface reconstruction. RepSurf can be a plug-and-play module for most point cloud models thanks to its free collaboration with irregular points. Based on a simple baseline of PointNet++ (SSG version), Umbrella RepSurf surpasses the previous state-of-the-art by a large margin for classification, segmentation and detection on various benchmarks in terms of performance and efficiency. With an increase of around 0.008M number of parameters, 0.04G FLOPs, and 1.12ms inference time, our method achieves 94.7\% (+0.5\%) on ModelNet40, and 84.6\% (+1.8\%) on ScanObjectNN for classification, while 74.3\% (+0.8\%) mIoU on S3DIS 6-fold, and 70.0\% (+1.6\%) mIoU on ScanNet for segmentation. For detection, previous state-of-the-art detector with our RepSurf obtains 71.2\% (+2.1\%) mAP_{25}, 54.8\% (+2.0\%) mAP_{50} on ScanNetV2, and 64.9\% (+1.9\%) mAP_{25}, 47.7\% (+2.5\%) mAP_{50} on SUN RGB-D. Our lightweight Triangular RepSurf performs its excellence on these benchmarks as well. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/hancyran/RepSurf.

  • 3 authors
·
May 11, 2022

Real-time Photorealistic Dynamic Scene Representation and Rendering with 4D Gaussian Splatting

Reconstructing dynamic 3D scenes from 2D images and generating diverse views over time is challenging due to scene complexity and temporal dynamics. Despite advancements in neural implicit models, limitations persist: (i) Inadequate Scene Structure: Existing methods struggle to reveal the spatial and temporal structure of dynamic scenes from directly learning the complex 6D plenoptic function. (ii) Scaling Deformation Modeling: Explicitly modeling scene element deformation becomes impractical for complex dynamics. To address these issues, we consider the spacetime as an entirety and propose to approximate the underlying spatio-temporal 4D volume of a dynamic scene by optimizing a collection of 4D primitives, with explicit geometry and appearance modeling. Learning to optimize the 4D primitives enables us to synthesize novel views at any desired time with our tailored rendering routine. Our model is conceptually simple, consisting of a 4D Gaussian parameterized by anisotropic ellipses that can rotate arbitrarily in space and time, as well as view-dependent and time-evolved appearance represented by the coefficient of 4D spherindrical harmonics. This approach offers simplicity, flexibility for variable-length video and end-to-end training, and efficient real-time rendering, making it suitable for capturing complex dynamic scene motions. Experiments across various benchmarks, including monocular and multi-view scenarios, demonstrate our 4DGS model's superior visual quality and efficiency.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 16, 2023