Daily Papers

We present NaTex, a native texture generation framework that predicts texture color directly in 3D space. In contrast to previous approaches that rely on baking 2D multi-view images synthesized by geometry-conditioned Multi-View Diffusion models (MVDs), NaTex avoids several inherent limitations of the MVD pipeline. These include difficulties in handling occluded regions that require inpainting, achieving precise mesh-texture alignment along boundaries, and maintaining cross-view consistency and coherence in both content and color intensity. NaTex features a novel paradigm that addresses the aforementioned issues by viewing texture as a dense color point cloud. Driven by this idea, we propose latent color diffusion, which comprises a geometry-awared color point cloud VAE and a multi-control diffusion transformer (DiT), entirely trained from scratch using 3D data, for texture reconstruction and generation. To enable precise alignment, we introduce native geometry control that conditions the DiT on direct 3D spatial information via positional embeddings and geometry latents. We co-design the VAE-DiT architecture, where the geometry latents are extracted via a dedicated geometry branch tightly coupled with the color VAE, providing fine-grained surface guidance that maintains strong correspondence with the texture. With these designs, NaTex demonstrates strong performance, significantly outperforming previous methods in texture coherence and alignment. Moreover, NaTex also exhibits strong generalization capabilities, either training-free or with simple tuning, for various downstream applications, e.g., material generation, texture refinement, and part segmentation and texturing.

Latent diffusion models for image generation have crossed a quality threshold which enabled them to achieve mass adoption. Recently, a series of works have made advancements towards replicating this success in the 3D domain, introducing techniques such as point cloud VAE, triplane representation, neural implicit surfaces and differentiable rendering based training. We take another step along this direction, combining these developments in a two-step pipeline consisting of 1) a triplane VAE which can learn latent representations of textured meshes and 2) a conditional diffusion model which generates the triplane features. For the first time this architecture allows conditional and unconditional generation of high quality textured or untextured 3D meshes across multiple diverse categories in a few seconds on a single GPU. It outperforms previous work substantially on image-conditioned and unconditional generation on mesh quality as well as texture generation. Furthermore, we demonstrate the scalability of our model to large datasets for increased quality and diversity. We will release our code and trained models.

While 3D content generation has advanced significantly, existing methods still face challenges with input formats, latent space design, and output representations. This paper introduces a novel 3D generation framework that addresses these challenges, offering scalable, high-quality 3D generation with an interactive Point Cloud-structured Latent space. Our framework employs a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) with multi-view posed RGB-D(epth)-N(ormal) renderings as input, using a unique latent space design that preserves 3D shape information, and incorporates a cascaded latent diffusion model for improved shape-texture disentanglement. The proposed method, GaussianAnything, supports multi-modal conditional 3D generation, allowing for point cloud, caption, and single/multi-view image inputs. Notably, the newly proposed latent space naturally enables geometry-texture disentanglement, thus allowing 3D-aware editing. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on multiple datasets, outperforming existing methods in both text- and image-conditioned 3D generation.

Controllable and physically grounded egocentric video generation is essential for embodied agents to reason about how their own and others' actions manifest and change the world. Compared to generic video synthesis, egocentric generation is especially challenging: the camera is tightly coupled to the actor, leading to rapid viewpoint changes and frequent self-occlusions; the underlying actions are subtle, articulated, and often only partially visible; and both the people and the scene state must evolve consistently with the specified controls. We present E^3C, a controllable video diffusion framework for egocentric generation that builds structured and compact conditions disentangling persistent scene structure from human-driven dynamics. From context frames, E^3C constructs a semi-dense point cloud-based 3D memory and augments each point with appearance descriptors from video-VAE features. Rendering this memory into target viewpoints produces conditioning aligned with the target frames. Human dynamics are modeled separately. The observed people in the scene are controlled by skeleton renderings (exo human control), while the camera wearer is specified by their 3D body joints and 6DoF wrist motion (ego human control). To preserve ego human control when the wearer's body parts are invisible, we introduce an ego motion encoder that produces persistent cross-attention tokens. Experiments on Nymeria show that E^3C improves visual fidelity, camera-motion accuracy, object consistency, and ego & exo human control over strong baselines, while also enabling intuitive scene editing.

Vision-based grasping of unknown objects in unstructured environments is a key challenge for autonomous robotic manipulation. A practical grasp synthesis system is required to generate a diverse set of 6-DoF grasps from which a task-relevant grasp can be executed. Although generative models are suitable for learning such complex data distributions, existing models have limitations in grasp quality, long training times, and a lack of flexibility for task-specific generation. In this work, we present GraspLDM- a modular generative framework for 6-DoF grasp synthesis that uses diffusion models as priors in the latent space of a VAE. GraspLDM learns a generative model of object-centric SE(3) grasp poses conditioned on point clouds. GraspLDM's architecture enables us to train task-specific models efficiently by only re-training a small de-noising network in the low-dimensional latent space, as opposed to existing models that need expensive re-training. Our framework provides robust and scalable models on both full and single-view point clouds. GraspLDM models trained with simulation data transfer well to the real world and provide an 80\% success rate for 80 grasp attempts of diverse test objects, improving over existing generative models. We make our implementation available at https://github.com/kuldeepbrd1/graspldm .

Recent 3D content generation pipelines often leverage Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) to encode shapes into compact latent representations, facilitating diffusion-based generation. Efficiently compressing 3D shapes while preserving intricate geometric details remains a key challenge. Existing 3D shape VAEs often employ uniform point sampling and 1D/2D latent representations, such as vector sets or triplanes, leading to significant geometric detail loss due to inadequate surface coverage and the absence of explicit 3D representations in the latent space. Although recent work explores 3D latent representations, their large scale hinders high-resolution encoding and efficient training. Given these challenges, we introduce Hyper3D, which enhances VAE reconstruction through efficient 3D representation that integrates hybrid triplane and octree features. First, we adopt an octree-based feature representation to embed mesh information into the network, mitigating the limitations of uniform point sampling in capturing geometric distributions along the mesh surface. Furthermore, we propose a hybrid latent space representation that integrates a high-resolution triplane with a low-resolution 3D grid. This design not only compensates for the lack of explicit 3D representations but also leverages a triplane to preserve high-resolution details. Experimental results demonstrate that Hyper3D outperforms traditional representations by reconstructing 3D shapes with higher fidelity and finer details, making it well-suited for 3D generation pipelines.

Point cloud learning, especially in a self-supervised way without manual labels, has gained growing attention in both vision and learning communities due to its potential utility in a wide range of applications. Most existing generative approaches for point cloud self-supervised learning focus on recovering masked points from visible ones within a single view. Recognizing that a two-view pre-training paradigm inherently introduces greater diversity and variance, it may thus enable more challenging and informative pre-training. Inspired by this, we explore the potential of two-view learning in this domain. In this paper, we propose Point-PQAE, a cross-reconstruction generative paradigm that first generates two decoupled point clouds/views and then reconstructs one from the other. To achieve this goal, we develop a crop mechanism for point cloud view generation for the first time and further propose a novel positional encoding to represent the 3D relative position between the two decoupled views. The cross-reconstruction significantly increases the difficulty of pre-training compared to self-reconstruction, which enables our method to surpass previous single-modal self-reconstruction methods in 3D self-supervised learning. Specifically, it outperforms the self-reconstruction baseline (Point-MAE) by 6.5%, 7.0%, and 6.7% in three variants of ScanObjectNN with the Mlp-Linear evaluation protocol. The code is available at https://github.com/aHapBean/Point-PQAE.

Recent 3D content generation pipelines commonly employ Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) to encode shapes into compact latent representations for diffusion-based generation. However, the widely adopted uniform point sampling strategy in Shape VAE training often leads to a significant loss of geometric details, limiting the quality of shape reconstruction and downstream generation tasks. We present Dora-VAE, a novel approach that enhances VAE reconstruction through our proposed sharp edge sampling strategy and a dual cross-attention mechanism. By identifying and prioritizing regions with high geometric complexity during training, our method significantly improves the preservation of fine-grained shape features. Such sampling strategy and the dual attention mechanism enable the VAE to focus on crucial geometric details that are typically missed by uniform sampling approaches. To systematically evaluate VAE reconstruction quality, we additionally propose Dora-bench, a benchmark that quantifies shape complexity through the density of sharp edges, introducing a new metric focused on reconstruction accuracy at these salient geometric features. Extensive experiments on the Dora-bench demonstrate that Dora-VAE achieves comparable reconstruction quality to the state-of-the-art dense XCube-VAE while requiring a latent space at least 8times smaller (1,280 vs. > 10,000 codes).

The dominant paradigm for high-fidelity 3D generation relies on a VAE-Diffusion pipeline, where the VAE's reconstruction capability sets a firm upper bound on generation quality. A fundamental challenge limiting existing VAEs is the representation mismatch between ground-truth meshes and network predictions: GT meshes have arbitrary, variable topology, while VAEs typically predict fixed-structure implicit fields (\eg, SDF on regular grids). This inherent misalignment prevents establishing explicit mesh-level correspondences, forcing prior work to rely on indirect supervision signals such as SDF or rendering losses. Consequently, fine geometric details, particularly sharp features, are poorly preserved during reconstruction. To address this, we introduce TopoMesh, a sparse voxel-based VAE that unifies both GT and predicted meshes under a shared Dual Marching Cubes (DMC) topological framework. Specifically, we convert arbitrary input meshes into DMC-compliant representations via a remeshing algorithm that preserves sharp edges using an Linfty distance metric. Our decoder outputs meshes in the same DMC format, ensuring that both predicted and target meshes share identical topological structures. This establishes explicit correspondences at the vertex and face level, allowing us to derive explicit mesh-level supervision signals for topology, vertex positions, and face orientations with clear gradients. Our sparse VAE architecture employs this unified framework and is trained with Teacher Forcing and progressive resolution training for stable and efficient convergence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TopoMesh significantly outperforms existing VAEs in reconstruction fidelity, achieving superior preservation of sharp features and geometric details.

Constructing a compressed latent space through a variational autoencoder (VAE) is the key for efficient 3D diffusion models. This paper introduces COD-VAE, a VAE that encodes 3D shapes into a COmpact set of 1D latent vectors without sacrificing quality. COD-VAE introduces a two-stage autoencoder scheme to improve compression and decoding efficiency. First, our encoder block progressively compresses point clouds into compact latent vectors via intermediate point patches. Second, our triplane-based decoder reconstructs dense triplanes from latent vectors instead of directly decoding neural fields, significantly reducing computational overhead of neural fields decoding. Finally, we propose uncertainty-guided token pruning, which allocates resources adaptively by skipping computations in simpler regions and improves the decoder efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that COD-VAE achieves 16x compression compared to the baseline while maintaining quality. This enables 20.8x speedup in generation, highlighting that a large number of latent vectors is not a prerequisite for high-quality reconstruction and generation.

We present Point-BERT, a new paradigm for learning Transformers to generalize the concept of BERT to 3D point cloud. Inspired by BERT, we devise a Masked Point Modeling (MPM) task to pre-train point cloud Transformers. Specifically, we first divide a point cloud into several local point patches, and a point cloud Tokenizer with a discrete Variational AutoEncoder (dVAE) is designed to generate discrete point tokens containing meaningful local information. Then, we randomly mask out some patches of input point clouds and feed them into the backbone Transformers. The pre-training objective is to recover the original point tokens at the masked locations under the supervision of point tokens obtained by the Tokenizer. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed BERT-style pre-training strategy significantly improves the performance of standard point cloud Transformers. Equipped with our pre-training strategy, we show that a pure Transformer architecture attains 93.8% accuracy on ModelNet40 and 83.1% accuracy on the hardest setting of ScanObjectNN, surpassing carefully designed point cloud models with much fewer hand-made designs. We also demonstrate that the representations learned by Point-BERT transfer well to new tasks and domains, where our models largely advance the state-of-the-art of few-shot point cloud classification task. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/lulutang0608/Point-BERT

The variational autoencoder (VAE) is a well-studied, deep, latent-variable model (DLVM) that efficiently optimizes the variational lower bound of the log marginal data likelihood and has a strong theoretical foundation. However, the VAE's known failure to match the aggregate posterior often results in pockets/holes in the latent distribution (i.e., a failure to match the prior) and/or posterior collapse, which is associated with a loss of information in the latent space. This paper addresses these shortcomings in VAEs by reformulating the objective function associated with VAEs in order to match the aggregate/marginal posterior distribution to the prior. We use kernel density estimate (KDE) to model the aggregate posterior in high dimensions. The proposed method is named the aggregate variational autoencoder (AVAE) and is built on the theoretical framework of the VAE. Empirical evaluation of the proposed method on multiple benchmark data sets demonstrates the effectiveness of the AVAE relative to state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods.

We propose NeRF-VAE, a 3D scene generative model that incorporates geometric structure via NeRF and differentiable volume rendering. In contrast to NeRF, our model takes into account shared structure across scenes, and is able to infer the structure of a novel scene -- without the need to re-train -- using amortized inference. NeRF-VAE's explicit 3D rendering process further contrasts previous generative models with convolution-based rendering which lacks geometric structure. Our model is a VAE that learns a distribution over radiance fields by conditioning them on a latent scene representation. We show that, once trained, NeRF-VAE is able to infer and render geometrically-consistent scenes from previously unseen 3D environments using very few input images. We further demonstrate that NeRF-VAE generalizes well to out-of-distribution cameras, while convolutional models do not. Finally, we introduce and study an attention-based conditioning mechanism of NeRF-VAE's decoder, which improves model performance.

The Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is a seminal approach in deep generative modeling with latent variables. Interpreting its reconstruction process as a nonlinear transformation of samples from the latent posterior distribution, we apply the Unscented Transform (UT) -- a well-known distribution approximation used in the Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) from the field of filtering. A finite set of statistics called sigma points, sampled deterministically, provides a more informative and lower-variance posterior representation than the ubiquitous noise-scaling of the reparameterization trick, while ensuring higher-quality reconstruction. We further boost the performance by replacing the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence with the Wasserstein distribution metric that allows for a sharper posterior. Inspired by the two components, we derive a novel, deterministic-sampling flavor of the VAE, the Unscented Autoencoder (UAE), trained purely with regularization-like terms on the per-sample posterior. We empirically show competitive performance in Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID) scores over closely-related models, in addition to a lower training variance than the VAE.

The variational autoencoder (VAE) is a popular, deep, latent-variable model (DLVM) due to its simple yet effective formulation for modeling the data distribution. Moreover, optimizing the VAE objective function is more manageable than other DLVMs. The bottleneck dimension of the VAE is a crucial design choice, and it has strong ramifications for the model's performance, such as finding the hidden explanatory factors of a dataset using the representations learned by the VAE. However, the size of the latent dimension of the VAE is often treated as a hyperparameter estimated empirically through trial and error. To this end, we propose a statistical formulation to discover the relevant latent factors required for modeling a dataset. In this work, we use a hierarchical prior in the latent space that estimates the variance of the latent axes using the encoded data, which identifies the relevant latent dimensions. For this, we replace the fixed prior in the VAE objective function with a hierarchical prior, keeping the remainder of the formulation unchanged. We call the proposed method the automatic relevancy detection in the variational autoencoder (ARD-VAE). We demonstrate the efficacy of the ARD-VAE on multiple benchmark datasets in finding the relevant latent dimensions and their effect on different evaluation metrics, such as FID score and disentanglement analysis.

Video Variational Autoencoder (VAE) enables latent video generative modeling by mapping the visual world into compact spatiotemporal latent spaces, improving training efficiency and stability. While existing video VAEs achieve commendable reconstruction quality, continued optimization of reconstruction does not necessarily translate into improved generative performance. How to enhance the diffusability of video latents remains a critical and unresolved challenge. In this work, inspired by principles of predictive world modeling, we investigate the potential of predictive learning to improve the video generative modeling. To this end, we introduce a simple and effective predictive reconstruction objective that unifies predictive learning with video reconstruction. Specifically, we randomly discard future frames and encode only partial past observations, while training the decoder to reconstruct the observed frames and predict future ones simultaneously. This design encourages the latent space to encode temporally predictive structures and build a more coherent understanding of video dynamics, thereby improving generation quality. Our model, termed Predictive Video VAE (PV-VAE), achieves superior performance on video generation, with 52% faster convergence and a 34.42 FVD improvement over the Wan2.2 VAE on UCF101. Furthermore, comprehensive analyses demonstrate that PV-VAE not only exhibits favorable scalability, with generative performance improving alongside VAE training, but also yields consistent gains in downstream video understanding, underscoring a latent space that effectively captures temporal coherence and motion priors.

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) compress high resolution CT volumes into compact latents while preserving clinically relevant structure. However, training CT-specific VAEs from scratch or heavily fine-tuning them incurs substantial computational and engineering cost, and often degrades under heterogeneous scanners, protocols, and diseases. This paper makes a progressive stride toward training-free medical VAEs by leveraging a critical observation: a single Foundation VAE, pretrained at scale on natural images and videos, can serve as a unified interface for CT Reconstruction, Augmentation, and Generation. With both encoder and decoder frozen, the Foundation VAE reconstructs CT volumes with preserved anatomy while suppressing acquisition noise; training segmentation models on these reconstructions improves surface accuracy by 3.9% NSD on average for pancreatic tumor and lung tumor. Within the same Foundation VAE latent space, a conditional latent diffusion model achieves 3.9% lower average FVD with 36.2% higher CT CLIP score, and improves multi-disease generation faithfulness across 18 types by 2.76% AUC. These results demonstrate Foundation VAEs as a practical interface for scalable CT representation reuse and faithful CT generation. Our code and demo are available at https://github.com/qic999/Foundation-VAE.

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) remain a cornerstone of generative computer vision, yet their training is often plagued by artifacts that degrade reconstruction and generation quality. This paper introduces VIVAT, a systematic approach to mitigating common artifacts in KL-VAE training without requiring radical architectural changes. We present a detailed taxonomy of five prevalent artifacts - color shift, grid patterns, blur, corner and droplet artifacts - and analyze their root causes. Through straightforward modifications, including adjustments to loss weights, padding strategies, and the integration of Spatially Conditional Normalization, we demonstrate significant improvements in VAE performance. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results in image reconstruction metrics (PSNR and SSIM) across multiple benchmarks and enhances text-to-image generation quality, as evidenced by superior CLIP scores. By preserving the simplicity of the KL-VAE framework while addressing its practical challenges, VIVAT offers actionable insights for researchers and practitioners aiming to optimize VAE training.

Contrastive Analysis VAE (CA-VAEs) is a family of Variational auto-encoders (VAEs) that aims at separating the common factors of variation between a background dataset (BG) (i.e., healthy subjects) and a target dataset (TG) (i.e., patients) from the ones that only exist in the target dataset. To do so, these methods separate the latent space into a set of salient features (i.e., proper to the target dataset) and a set of common features (i.e., exist in both datasets). Currently, all models fail to prevent the sharing of information between latent spaces effectively and to capture all salient factors of variation. To this end, we introduce two crucial regularization losses: a disentangling term between common and salient representations and a classification term between background and target samples in the salient space. We show a better performance than previous CA-VAEs methods on three medical applications and a natural images dataset (CelebA). Code and datasets are available on GitHub https://github.com/neurospin-projects/2023_rlouiset_sepvae.

Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoder (VQ-VAE) has become a fundamental framework for learning discrete representations in image modeling. However, VQ-VAE models must tokenize entire images using a finite set of codebook vectors, and this capacity limitation restricts their ability to capture rich and diverse representations. In this paper, we propose ArcCosine Additive Margin VQ-VAE (ArcVQ-VAE), a novel vector quantization framework that introduces a spherical angular-margin prior (SAMP) for the codebook of a conventional VQ-VAE. The proposed SAMP consists of Ball-Bounded Norm Regularization, which constrains all codebook vectors within a time-dependent Euclidean ball, and ArcCosine Additive Margin Loss, which encourages greater angular separability among latent vectors. This formulation promotes more discriminative and uniformly dispersed latent representations within the constrained space, thereby improving effective latent-space coverage and leading to improved codebook utilization. Experimental results on standard image reconstruction and generation tasks show that ArcVQ-VAE achieves competitive performance against baseline models in terms of reconstruction accuracy, representation diversity, and sample quality. The code is available at: https://github.com/goals4292/ArcVQ-VAE

The variational autoencoder (VAE) framework is a popular option for training unsupervised generative models, featuring ease of training and latent representation of data. The objective function of VAE does not guarantee to achieve the latter, however, and failure to do so leads to a frequent failure mode called posterior collapse. Even in successful cases, VAEs often result in low-precision reconstructions and generated samples. The introduction of the KL-divergence weight beta can help steer the model clear of posterior collapse, but its tuning is often a trial-and-error process with no guiding metrics. Here we test the idea of using the total VAE loss of generated samples (generated loss) as the proxy metric for generation quality, the related hypothesis that VAE reconstruction from the mean latent vector tends to be a more typical example of its class than the original, and the idea of exploiting this property by augmenting training data with generated variants (augmented training). The results are mixed, but repeated encoding and decoding indeed result in qualitatively and quantitatively more typical examples from both convolutional and fully-connected MNIST VAEs, suggesting that it may be an inherent property of the VAE framework.

Spatio-temporal compression of videos, utilizing networks such as Variational Autoencoders (VAE), plays a crucial role in OpenAI's SORA and numerous other video generative models. For instance, many LLM-like video models learn the distribution of discrete tokens derived from 3D VAEs within the VQVAE framework, while most diffusion-based video models capture the distribution of continuous latent extracted by 2D VAEs without quantization. The temporal compression is simply realized by uniform frame sampling which results in unsmooth motion between consecutive frames. Currently, there lacks of a commonly used continuous video (3D) VAE for latent diffusion-based video models in the research community. Moreover, since current diffusion-based approaches are often implemented using pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) models, directly training a video VAE without considering the compatibility with existing T2I models will result in a latent space gap between them, which will take huge computational resources for training to bridge the gap even with the T2I models as initialization. To address this issue, we propose a method for training a video VAE of latent video models, namely CV-VAE, whose latent space is compatible with that of a given image VAE, e.g., image VAE of Stable Diffusion (SD). The compatibility is achieved by the proposed novel latent space regularization, which involves formulating a regularization loss using the image VAE. Benefiting from the latent space compatibility, video models can be trained seamlessly from pre-trained T2I or video models in a truly spatio-temporally compressed latent space, rather than simply sampling video frames at equal intervals. With our CV-VAE, existing video models can generate four times more frames with minimal finetuning. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed video VAE.

Vector Quantized Variational AutoEncoders (VQ-VAEs) are designed to compress a continuous input to a discrete latent space and reconstruct it with minimal distortion. They operate by maintaining a set of vectors -- often referred to as the codebook -- and quantizing each encoder output to the nearest vector in the codebook. However, as vector quantization is non-differentiable, the gradient to the encoder flows around the vector quantization layer rather than through it in a straight-through approximation. This approximation may be undesirable as all information from the vector quantization operation is lost. In this work, we propose a way to propagate gradients through the vector quantization layer of VQ-VAEs. We smoothly transform each encoder output into its corresponding codebook vector via a rotation and rescaling linear transformation that is treated as a constant during backpropagation. As a result, the relative magnitude and angle between encoder output and codebook vector becomes encoded into the gradient as it propagates through the vector quantization layer and back to the encoder. Across 11 different VQ-VAE training paradigms, we find this restructuring improves reconstruction metrics, codebook utilization, and quantization error. Our code is available at https://github.com/cfifty/rotation_trick.

State-of-the-art generative image and video models rely heavily on tokenizers that compress high-dimensional inputs into more efficient latent representations. While this paradigm has revolutionized RGB generation, Earth observation (EO) data presents unique challenges due to diverse sensor specifications and variable spectral channels. We propose EO-VAE, a multi-sensor variational autoencoder designed to serve as a foundational tokenizer for the EO domain. Unlike prior approaches that train separate tokenizers for each modality, EO-VAE utilizes a single model to encode and reconstruct flexible channel combinations via dynamic hypernetworks. Our experiments on the TerraMesh dataset demonstrate that EO-VAE achieves superior reconstruction fidelity compared to the TerraMind tokenizers, establishing a robust baseline for latent generative modeling in remote sensing.

Despite remarkable advancements in video depth estimation, existing methods exhibit inherent limitations in achieving geometric fidelity through the affine-invariant predictions, limiting their applicability in reconstruction and other metrically grounded downstream tasks. We propose GeometryCrafter, a novel framework that recovers high-fidelity point map sequences with temporal coherence from open-world videos, enabling accurate 3D/4D reconstruction, camera parameter estimation, and other depth-based applications. At the core of our approach lies a point map Variational Autoencoder (VAE) that learns a latent space agnostic to video latent distributions for effective point map encoding and decoding. Leveraging the VAE, we train a video diffusion model to model the distribution of point map sequences conditioned on the input videos. Extensive evaluations on diverse datasets demonstrate that GeometryCrafter achieves state-of-the-art 3D accuracy, temporal consistency, and generalization capability.

Recent advances in Latent Video Diffusion Models (LVDMs) have revolutionized video generation by leveraging Video Variational Autoencoders (Video VAEs) to compress intricate video data into a compact latent space. However, as LVDM training scales, the computational overhead of Video VAEs becomes a critical bottleneck, particularly for encoding high-resolution videos. To address this, we propose LeanVAE, a novel and ultra-efficient Video VAE framework that introduces two key innovations: (1) a lightweight architecture based on a Neighborhood-Aware Feedforward (NAF) module and non-overlapping patch operations, drastically reducing computational cost, and (2) the integration of wavelet transforms and compressed sensing techniques to enhance reconstruction quality. Extensive experiments validate LeanVAE's superiority in video reconstruction and generation, particularly in enhancing efficiency over existing Video VAEs. Our model offers up to 50x fewer FLOPs and 44x faster inference speed while maintaining competitive reconstruction quality, providing insights for scalable, efficient video generation. Our models and code are available at https://github.com/westlake-repl/LeanVAE

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are one of the deep generative models that have experienced enormous success over the past decades. However, in practice, they suffer from a problem called posterior collapse, which occurs when the encoder coincides, or collapses, with the prior taking no information from the latent structure of the input data into consideration. In this work, we introduce an inverse Lipschitz neural network into the decoder and, based on this architecture, provide a new method that can control in a simple and clear manner the degree of posterior collapse for a wide range of VAE models equipped with a concrete theoretical guarantee. We also illustrate the effectiveness of our method through several numerical experiments.

Lung cancer is responsible for 21% of cancer deaths in the UK and five-year survival rates are heavily influenced by the stage the cancer was identified at. Recent studies have demonstrated the capability of AI methods for accurate and early diagnosis of lung cancer from routine scans. However, this evidence has not translated into clinical practice with one barrier being a lack of interpretable models. This study investigates the application Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), a type of generative AI model, to lung cancer lesions. Proposed models were trained on lesions extracted from 3D CT scans in the LIDC-IDRI public dataset. Latent vector representations of 2D slices produced by the VAEs were explored through clustering to justify their quality and used in an MLP classifier model for lung cancer diagnosis, the best model achieved state-of-the-art metrics of AUC 0.98 and 93.1% accuracy. Cluster analysis shows the VAE latent space separates the dataset of malignant and benign lesions based on meaningful feature components including tumour size, shape, patient and malignancy class. We also include a comparative analysis of the standard Gaussian VAE (GVAE) and the more recent Dirichlet VAE (DirVAE), which replaces the prior with a Dirichlet distribution to encourage a more explainable latent space with disentangled feature representation. Finally, we demonstrate the potential for latent space traversals corresponding to clinically meaningful feature changes.

Vector quantized variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE) is a discrete auto-encoder that compresses images into discrete tokens. It is difficult to train due to discretization. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective technique, dubbed Gaussian Quant (GQ), that converts a Gaussian VAE with certain constraint into a VQ-VAE without training. GQ generates random Gaussian noise as a codebook and finds the closest noise to the posterior mean. Theoretically, we prove that when the logarithm of the codebook size exceeds the bits-back coding rate of the Gaussian VAE, a small quantization error is guaranteed. Practically, we propose a heuristic to train Gaussian VAE for effective GQ, named target divergence constraint (TDC). Empirically, we show that GQ outperforms previous VQ-VAEs, such as VQGAN, FSQ, LFQ, and BSQ, on both UNet and ViT architectures. Furthermore, TDC also improves upon previous Gaussian VAE discretization methods, such as TokenBridge. The source code is provided in https://github.com/tongdaxu/VQ-VAE-from-Gaussian-VAE.

Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoders (VQ-VAEs) are fundamental models that compress continuous visual data into discrete tokens. Existing methods have tried to improve the quantization strategy for better reconstruction quality, however, there still exists a large gap between VQ-VAEs and VAEs. To narrow this gap, we propose MGVQ, a novel method to augment the representation capability of discrete codebooks, facilitating easier optimization for codebooks and minimizing information loss, thereby enhancing reconstruction quality. Specifically, we propose to retain the latent dimension to preserve encoded features and incorporate a set of sub-codebooks for quantization. Furthermore, we construct comprehensive zero-shot benchmarks featuring resolutions of 512p and 2k to evaluate the reconstruction performance of existing methods rigorously. MGVQ achieves the state-of-the-art performance on both ImageNet and 8 zero-shot benchmarks across all VQ-VAEs. Notably, compared with SD-VAE, we outperform them on ImageNet significantly, with rFID 0.49 v.s. 0.91, and achieve superior PSNR on all zero-shot benchmarks. These results highlight the superiority of MGVQ in reconstruction and pave the way for preserving fidelity in HD image processing tasks. Code will be publicly available at https://github.com/MKJia/MGVQ.

There is a growing demand for deploying large generative AI models on mobile devices. For recent popular video generative models, however, the Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) represents one of the major computational bottlenecks. Both large parameter sizes and mismatched kernels cause out-of-memory errors or extremely slow inference on mobile devices. To address this, we propose a low-cost solution that efficiently transfers widely used video VAEs to mobile devices. (1) We analyze redundancy in existing VAE architectures and get empirical design insights. By integrating 3D depthwise separable convolutions into our model, we significantly reduce the number of parameters. (2) We observe that the upsampling techniques in mainstream video VAEs are poorly suited to mobile hardware and form the main bottleneck. In response, we propose a decoupled 3D pixel shuffle scheme that slashes end-to-end delay. Building upon these, we develop a universal mobile-oriented VAE decoder, Turbo-VAED. (3) We propose an efficient VAE decoder training method. Since only the decoder is used during deployment, we distill it to Turbo-VAED instead of retraining the full VAE, enabling fast mobile adaptation with minimal performance loss. To our knowledge, our method enables real-time 720p video VAE decoding on mobile devices for the first time. This approach is widely applicable to most video VAEs. When integrated into four representative models, with training cost as low as $95, it accelerates original VAEs by up to 84.5x at 720p resolution on GPUs, uses as low as 17.5% of original parameter count, and retains 96.9% of the original reconstruction quality. Compared to mobile-optimized VAEs, Turbo-VAED achieves a 2.9x speedup in FPS and better reconstruction quality on the iPhone 16 Pro. The code and models will soon be available at https://github.com/hustvl/Turbo-VAED.

Density estimation, compression and data generation are crucial tasks in artificial intelligence. Variational Auto-Encoders (VAEs) constitute a single framework to achieve these goals. Here, we present a novel class of generative models, called self-supervised Variational Auto-Encoder (selfVAE), that utilizes deterministic and discrete variational posteriors. This class of models allows to perform both conditional and unconditional sampling, while simplifying the objective function. First, we use a single self-supervised transformation as a latent variable, where a transformation is either downscaling or edge detection. Next, we consider a hierarchical architecture, i.e., multiple transformations, and we show its benefits compared to the VAE. The flexibility of selfVAE in data reconstruction finds a particularly interesting use case in data compression tasks, where we can trade-off memory for better data quality, and vice-versa. We present performance of our approach on three benchmark image data (Cifar10, Imagenette64, and CelebA).

Radiance field representations have recently been explored in the latent space of VAEs that are commonly used by diffusion models. This direction offers efficient rendering and seamless integration with diffusion-based pipelines. However, these methods face a fundamental limitation: The VAE latent space lacks multi-view consistency, leading to blurred textures and missing details during 3D reconstruction. Existing approaches attempt to address this by fine-tuning the VAE, at the cost of reconstruction quality, or by relying on pre-trained diffusion models to recover fine-grained details, at the risk of some hallucinations. We present Splatent, a diffusion-based enhancement framework designed to operate on top of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) in the latent space of VAEs. Our key insight departs from the conventional 3D-centric view: rather than reconstructing fine-grained details in 3D space, we recover them in 2D from input views through multi-view attention mechanisms. This approach preserves the reconstruction quality of pretrained VAEs while achieving faithful detail recovery. Evaluated across multiple benchmarks, Splatent establishes a new state-of-the-art for VAE latent radiance field reconstruction. We further demonstrate that integrating our method with existing feed-forward frameworks, consistently improves detail preservation, opening new possibilities for high-quality sparse-view 3D reconstruction.

Normalizing flows, autoregressive models, variational autoencoders (VAEs), and deep energy-based models are among competing likelihood-based frameworks for deep generative learning. Among them, VAEs have the advantage of fast and tractable sampling and easy-to-access encoding networks. However, they are currently outperformed by other models such as normalizing flows and autoregressive models. While the majority of the research in VAEs is focused on the statistical challenges, we explore the orthogonal direction of carefully designing neural architectures for hierarchical VAEs. We propose Nouveau VAE (NVAE), a deep hierarchical VAE built for image generation using depth-wise separable convolutions and batch normalization. NVAE is equipped with a residual parameterization of Normal distributions and its training is stabilized by spectral regularization. We show that NVAE achieves state-of-the-art results among non-autoregressive likelihood-based models on the MNIST, CIFAR-10, CelebA 64, and CelebA HQ datasets and it provides a strong baseline on FFHQ. For example, on CIFAR-10, NVAE pushes the state-of-the-art from 2.98 to 2.91 bits per dimension, and it produces high-quality images on CelebA HQ. To the best of our knowledge, NVAE is the first successful VAE applied to natural images as large as 256times256 pixels. The source code is available at https://github.com/NVlabs/NVAE .

This paper proposes a general solution to enable point cloud recognition models to handle distribution shifts at test time. Unlike prior methods, which rely heavily on training data (often inaccessible during online inference) and are limited to recognizing a fixed set of point cloud classes predefined during training, we explore a more practical and challenging scenario: adapting the model solely based on online test data to recognize both previously seen classes and novel, unseen classes at test time. To this end, we develop Point-Cache, a hierarchical cache model that captures essential clues of online test samples, particularly focusing on the global structure of point clouds and their local-part details. Point-Cache, which serves as a rich 3D knowledge base, is dynamically managed to prioritize the inclusion of high-quality samples. Designed as a plug-and-play module, our method can be flexibly integrated into large multimodal 3D models to support open-vocabulary point cloud recognition. Notably, our solution operates with efficiency comparable to zero-shot inference, as it is entirely training-free. Point-Cache demonstrates substantial gains across 8 challenging benchmarks and 4 representative large 3D models, highlighting its effectiveness. Code is available at https://github.com/auniquesun/Point-Cache.

Variational Autoencoder (VAE), compressing videos into latent representations, is a crucial preceding component of Latent Video Diffusion Models (LVDMs). With the same reconstruction quality, the more sufficient the VAE's compression for videos is, the more efficient the LVDMs are. However, most LVDMs utilize 2D image VAE, whose compression for videos is only in the spatial dimension and often ignored in the temporal dimension. How to conduct temporal compression for videos in a VAE to obtain more concise latent representations while promising accurate reconstruction is seldom explored. To fill this gap, we propose an omni-dimension compression VAE, named OD-VAE, which can temporally and spatially compress videos. Although OD-VAE's more sufficient compression brings a great challenge to video reconstruction, it can still achieve high reconstructed accuracy by our fine design. To obtain a better trade-off between video reconstruction quality and compression speed, four variants of OD-VAE are introduced and analyzed. In addition, a novel tail initialization is designed to train OD-VAE more efficiently, and a novel inference strategy is proposed to enable OD-VAE to handle videos of arbitrary length with limited GPU memory. Comprehensive experiments on video reconstruction and LVDM-based video generation demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed methods.

Variational AutoEncoders (VAEs) are powerful generative models that merge elements from statistics and information theory with the flexibility offered by deep neural networks to efficiently solve the generation problem for high dimensional data. The key insight of VAEs is to learn the latent distribution of data in such a way that new meaningful samples can be generated from it. This approach led to tremendous research and variations in the architectural design of VAEs, nourishing the recent field of research known as unsupervised representation learning. In this article, we provide a comparative evaluation of some of the most successful, recent variations of VAEs. We particularly focus the analysis on the energetic efficiency of the different models, in the spirit of the so called Green AI, aiming both to reduce the carbon footprint and the financial cost of generative techniques. For each architecture we provide its mathematical formulation, the ideas underlying its design, a detailed model description, a running implementation and quantitative results.

Encoding videos into discrete tokens could align with text tokens to facilitate concise and unified multi-modal LLMs, yet introducing significant spatiotemporal compression compared to continuous video representation. Previous discrete video VAEs experienced unstable training, long training time, and degraded reconstruction quality. Given the easier training and superior performance of continuous VAEs, an intuitive idea is to enhance discrete video VAEs by leveraging continuous VAEs. After rethinking the intrinsic link between discrete and continuous representations, we found that FSQ could effectively preserve pre-trained continuous VAE priors compared to other quantization methods. By leveraging continuous VAE priors, it converges several times faster than training from scratch and achieves superior performance at convergence. Meanwhile, two structural improvements are proposed. First, inspired by how continuous VAEs enhance reconstruction via enlarged latent dimensions, we introduce a multi-token quantization mechanism, which achieves nearly a 1 dB improvement in PSNR without compromising the token compression ratio. Second, to tackle reconstruction challenges in high-compression video VAEs, we strengthen first-frame reconstruction, enabling the causal VAE to leverage this information in subsequent frames and markedly improving the performance of 4 x 16 x 16 discrete VAEs. Furthermore, we propose a joint discrete-continuous optimization scheme that unifies the two paradigms and, for the first time, achieves competitive performance on both continuous and discrete representations within a single network. We name our method OneVAE to reflect this connection.

Contrastive learning (CL) for Vision Transformers (ViTs) in image domains has achieved performance comparable to CL for traditional convolutional backbones. However, in 3D point cloud pretraining with ViTs, masked autoencoder (MAE) modeling remains dominant. This raises the question: Can we take the best of both worlds? To answer this question, we first empirically validate that integrating MAE-based point cloud pre-training with the standard contrastive learning paradigm, even with meticulous design, can lead to a decrease in performance. To address this limitation, we reintroduce CL into the MAE-based point cloud pre-training paradigm by leveraging the inherent contrastive properties of MAE. Specifically, rather than relying on extensive data augmentation as commonly used in the image domain, we randomly mask the input tokens twice to generate contrastive input pairs. Subsequently, a weight-sharing encoder and two identically structured decoders are utilized to perform masked token reconstruction. Additionally, we propose that for an input token masked by both masks simultaneously, the reconstructed features should be as similar as possible. This naturally establishes an explicit contrastive constraint within the generative MAE-based pre-training paradigm, resulting in our proposed method, Point-CMAE. Consequently, Point-CMAE effectively enhances the representation quality and transfer performance compared to its MAE counterpart. Experimental evaluations across various downstream applications, including classification, part segmentation, and few-shot learning, demonstrate the efficacy of our framework in surpassing state-of-the-art techniques under standard ViTs and single-modal settings. The source code and trained models are available at: https://github.com/Amazingren/Point-CMAE.

Recent advancements in self-supervised learning in the point cloud domain have demonstrated significant potential. However, these methods often suffer from drawbacks, including lengthy pre-training time, the necessity of reconstruction in the input space, or the necessity of additional modalities. In order to address these issues, we introduce Point-JEPA, a joint embedding predictive architecture designed specifically for point cloud data. To this end, we introduce a sequencer that orders point cloud patch embeddings to efficiently compute and utilize their proximity based on the indices during target and context selection. The sequencer also allows shared computations of the patch embeddings' proximity between context and target selection, further improving the efficiency. Experimentally, our method achieves competitive results with state-of-the-art methods while avoiding the reconstruction in the input space or additional modality.

Generating high-fidelity 3D contents remains a fundamental challenge due to the complexity of representing arbitrary topologies-such as open surfaces and intricate internal structures-while preserving geometric details. Prevailing methods based on signed distance fields (SDFs) are hampered by costly watertight preprocessing and struggle with non-manifold geometries, while point-cloud representations often suffer from sampling artifacts and surface discontinuities. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel 3D variational autoencoder (VAE) framework built upon unsigned distance fields (UDFs)-a more robust and computationally efficient representation that naturally handles complex and incomplete shapes. Our core innovation is a local-to-global (LoG) architecture that processes the UDF by partitioning it into uniform subvolumes, termed UBlocks. This architecture couples 3D convolutions for capturing local detail with sparse transformers for enforcing global coherence. A Pad-Average strategy further ensures smooth transitions at subvolume boundaries during reconstruction. This modular design enables seamless scaling to ultra-high resolutions up to 2048^3-a regime previously unattainable for 3D VAEs. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in both reconstruction accuracy and generative quality, yielding superior surface smoothness and geometric flexibility.

World-action models (WAMs) predict the future to act better, but nearly all of them predict only RGB latents, trained purely for pixel reconstruction, with no explicit signal for the 3D geometry or object semantics manipulation needs. We find a surprising free lunch: the same frozen video-generation VAE that encodes RGB also encodes 3D pointmaps almost losslessly, with no pointmap-specific training at all. This lets us supervise Flex-π, a 6B-parameter WAM, on 3D geometry and object-centric DINO semantics alongside RGB, at no cost in new sensors, new pre-training, or inference latency. Every visual signal is projected into this shared latent space and denoised jointly with actions inside a Mixture-of-Transformers backbone; per-stream dropout with cross-modality forcing then lets a single trained checkpoint run on any subset of these streams, from a fast action-only mode to full joint generation. The result is a policy that is exceptionally demonstration-efficient and generalizes well, beating the strongest baselines by up to 2-7times on dexterous, precise, real-world bimanual manipulation tasks both in and out of distribution, all while running faster than π_{0.5}. Our project website: https://flex-pi.github.io/

Latent generative models have emerged as a leading approach for high-quality image synthesis. These models rely on an autoencoder to compress images into a latent space, followed by a generative model to learn the latent distribution. We identify that existing autoencoders lack equivariance to semantic-preserving transformations like scaling and rotation, resulting in complex latent spaces that hinder generative performance. To address this, we propose EQ-VAE, a simple regularization approach that enforces equivariance in the latent space, reducing its complexity without degrading reconstruction quality. By finetuning pre-trained autoencoders with EQ-VAE, we enhance the performance of several state-of-the-art generative models, including DiT, SiT, REPA and MaskGIT, achieving a 7 speedup on DiT-XL/2 with only five epochs of SD-VAE fine-tuning. EQ-VAE is compatible with both continuous and discrete autoencoders, thus offering a versatile enhancement for a wide range of latent generative models. Project page and code: https://eq-vae.github.io/.

Learning a robust video Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is essential for reducing video redundancy and facilitating efficient video generation. Directly applying image VAEs to individual frames in isolation can result in temporal inconsistencies and suboptimal compression rates due to a lack of temporal compression. Existing Video VAEs have begun to address temporal compression; however, they often suffer from inadequate reconstruction performance. In this paper, we present a novel and powerful video autoencoder capable of high-fidelity video encoding. First, we observe that entangling spatial and temporal compression by merely extending the image VAE to a 3D VAE can introduce motion blur and detail distortion artifacts. Thus, we propose temporal-aware spatial compression to better encode and decode the spatial information. Additionally, we integrate a lightweight motion compression model for further temporal compression. Second, we propose to leverage the textual information inherent in text-to-video datasets and incorporate text guidance into our model. This significantly enhances reconstruction quality, particularly in terms of detail preservation and temporal stability. Third, we further improve the versatility of our model through joint training on both images and videos, which not only enhances reconstruction quality but also enables the model to perform both image and video autoencoding. Extensive evaluations against strong recent baselines demonstrate the superior performance of our method. The project website can be found at~https://yzxing87.github.io/vae/{https://yzxing87.github.io/vae/}.

Variational auto-encoders are powerful probabilistic models in generative tasks but suffer from generating low-quality samples which are caused by the holes in the prior. We propose the Coupled Variational Auto-Encoder (C-VAE), which formulates the VAE problem as one of Optimal Transport (OT) between the prior and data distributions. The C-VAE allows greater flexibility in priors and natural resolution of the prior hole problem by enforcing coupling between the prior and the data distribution and enables flexible optimization through the primal, dual, and semi-dual formulations of entropic OT. Simulations on synthetic and real data show that the C-VAE outperforms alternatives including VAE, WAE, and InfoVAE in fidelity to the data, quality of the latent representation, and in quality of generated samples.

Recent breakthroughs in video autoencoders (Video AEs) have advanced video generation, but existing methods fail to efficiently model spatio-temporal redundancies in dynamics, resulting in suboptimal compression factors. This shortfall leads to excessive training costs for downstream tasks. To address this, we introduce Hi-VAE, an efficient video autoencoding framework that hierarchically encode coarse-to-fine motion representations of video dynamics and formulate the decoding process as a conditional generation task. Specifically, Hi-VAE decomposes video dynamics into two latent spaces: Global Motion, capturing overarching motion patterns, and Detailed Motion, encoding high-frequency spatial details. Using separate self-supervised motion encoders, we compress video latents into compact motion representations to reduce redundancy significantly. A conditional diffusion decoder then reconstructs videos by combining hierarchical global and detailed motions, enabling high-fidelity video reconstructions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Hi-VAE achieves a high compression factor of 1428times, almost 30times higher than baseline methods (e.g., Cosmos-VAE at 48times), validating the efficiency of our approach. Meanwhile, Hi-VAE maintains high reconstruction quality at such high compression rates and performs effectively in downstream generative tasks. Moreover, Hi-VAE exhibits interpretability and scalability, providing new perspectives for future exploration in video latent representation and generation.

This paper tries to address a fundamental question in point cloud self-supervised learning: what is a good signal we should leverage to learn features from point clouds without annotations? To answer that, we introduce a point cloud representation learning framework, based on geometric feature reconstruction. In contrast to recent papers that directly adopt masked autoencoder (MAE) and only predict original coordinates or occupancy from masked point clouds, our method revisits differences between images and point clouds and identifies three self-supervised learning objectives peculiar to point clouds, namely centroid prediction, normal estimation, and curvature prediction. Combined with occupancy prediction, these four objectives yield an nontrivial self-supervised learning task and mutually facilitate models to better reason fine-grained geometry of point clouds. Our pipeline is conceptually simple and it consists of two major steps: first, it randomly masks out groups of points, followed by a Transformer-based point cloud encoder; second, a lightweight Transformer decoder predicts centroid, normal, and curvature for points in each voxel. We transfer the pre-trained Transformer encoder to a downstream peception model. On the nuScene Datset, our model achieves 3.38 mAP improvment for object detection, 2.1 mIoU gain for segmentation, and 1.7 AMOTA gain for multi-object tracking. We also conduct experiments on the Waymo Open Dataset and achieve significant performance improvements over baselines as well.

Recent advancements in Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) have revolutionized image synthesis and manipulation, raising significant concerns about data misappropriation and intellectual property infringement. While adversarial attacks have been extensively explored as a protective measure against such misuse of generative AI, current approaches are severely limited by their heavy reliance on model-specific knowledge and substantial computational costs. Drawing inspiration from the posterior collapse phenomenon observed in VAE training, we propose the Posterior Collapse Attack (PCA), a novel framework for protecting images from unauthorized manipulation. Through comprehensive theoretical analysis and empirical validation, we identify two distinct collapse phenomena during VAE inference: diffusion collapse and concentration collapse. Based on this discovery, we design a unified loss function that can flexibly achieve both types of collapse through parameter adjustment, each corresponding to different protection objectives in preventing image manipulation. Our method significantly reduces dependence on model-specific knowledge by requiring access to only the VAE encoder, which constitutes less than 4\% of LDM parameters. Notably, PCA achieves prompt-invariant protection by operating on the VAE encoder before text conditioning occurs, eliminating the need for empty prompt optimization required by existing methods. This minimal requirement enables PCA to maintain adequate transferability across various VAE-based LDM architectures while effectively preventing unauthorized image editing. Extensive experiments show PCA outperforms existing techniques in protection effectiveness, computational efficiency (runtime and VRAM), and generalization across VAE-based LDM variants. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZhongliangGuo/PosteriorCollapseAttack.

We present Step-Video-T2V, a state-of-the-art text-to-video pre-trained model with 30B parameters and the ability to generate videos up to 204 frames in length. A deep compression Variational Autoencoder, Video-VAE, is designed for video generation tasks, achieving 16x16 spatial and 8x temporal compression ratios, while maintaining exceptional video reconstruction quality. User prompts are encoded using two bilingual text encoders to handle both English and Chinese. A DiT with 3D full attention is trained using Flow Matching and is employed to denoise input noise into latent frames. A video-based DPO approach, Video-DPO, is applied to reduce artifacts and improve the visual quality of the generated videos. We also detail our training strategies and share key observations and insights. Step-Video-T2V's performance is evaluated on a novel video generation benchmark, Step-Video-T2V-Eval, demonstrating its state-of-the-art text-to-video quality when compared with both open-source and commercial engines. Additionally, we discuss the limitations of current diffusion-based model paradigm and outline future directions for video foundation models. We make both Step-Video-T2V and Step-Video-T2V-Eval available at https://github.com/stepfun-ai/Step-Video-T2V. The online version can be accessed from https://yuewen.cn/videos as well. Our goal is to accelerate the innovation of video foundation models and empower video content creators.

Reconstructing dynamic 3D scenes (i.e., 4D geometry) from monocular video is an important yet challenging problem. Conventional multiview geometry-based approaches often struggle with dynamic motion, whereas recent learning-based methods either require specialized 4D representation or sophisticated optimization. In this paper, we present Sora3R, a novel framework that taps into the rich spatiotemporal priors of large-scale video diffusion models to directly infer 4D pointmaps from casual videos. Sora3R follows a two-stage pipeline: (1) we adapt a pointmap VAE from a pretrained video VAE, ensuring compatibility between the geometry and video latent spaces; (2) we finetune a diffusion backbone in combined video and pointmap latent space to generate coherent 4D pointmaps for every frame. Sora3R operates in a fully feedforward manner, requiring no external modules (e.g., depth, optical flow, or segmentation) or iterative global alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Sora3R reliably recovers both camera poses and detailed scene geometry, achieving performance on par with state-of-the-art methods for dynamic 4D reconstruction across diverse scenarios.

The variational autoencoder (VAE) framework remains a popular option for training unsupervised generative models, especially for discrete data where generative adversarial networks (GANs) require workaround to create gradient for the generator. In our work modeling US postal addresses, we show that our discrete VAE with tree recursive architecture demonstrates limited capability of capturing field correlations within structured data, even after overcoming the challenge of posterior collapse with scheduled sampling and tuning of the KL-divergence weight beta. Worse, VAE seems to have difficulty mapping its generated samples to the latent space, as their VAE loss lags behind or even increases during the training process. Motivated by this observation, we show that augmenting training data with generated variants (augmented training) and training a VAE with multiple values of beta simultaneously (multiscale VAE) both improve the generation quality of VAE. Despite their differences in motivation and emphasis, we show that augmented training and multiscale VAE are actually connected and have similar effects on the model.

Established sampling protocols for 3D point cloud learning, such as Farthest Point Sampling (FPS) and Fixed Sample Size (FSS), have long been relied upon. However, real-world data often suffer from corruptions, such as sensor noise, which violates the benign data assumption in current protocols. As a result, these protocols are highly vulnerable to noise, posing significant safety risks in critical applications like autonomous driving. To address these issues, we propose an enhanced point cloud sampling protocol, PointSP, designed to improve robustness against point cloud corruptions. PointSP incorporates key point reweighting to mitigate outlier sensitivity and ensure the selection of representative points. It also introduces a local-global balanced downsampling strategy, which allows for scalable and adaptive sampling while maintaining geometric consistency. Additionally, a lightweight tangent plane interpolation method is used to preserve local geometry while enhancing the density of the point cloud. Unlike learning-based approaches that require additional model training, PointSP is architecture-agnostic, requiring no extra learning or modification to the network. This enables seamless integration into existing pipelines. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world corrupted datasets show that PointSP significantly improves the robustness and accuracy of point cloud classification, outperforming state-of-the-art methods across multiple benchmarks.

Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoders (VQ-VAEs) are fundamental to modern generative modeling, yet they often suffer from training instability and "codebook collapse" due to the inherent coupling of representation learning and discrete codebook optimization. In this paper, we propose VP-VAE (Vector Perturbation VAE), a novel paradigm that decouples representation learning from discretization by eliminating the need for an explicit codebook during training. Our key insight is that, from the neural network's viewpoint, performing quantization primarily manifests as injecting a structured perturbation in latent space. Accordingly, VP-VAE replaces the non-differentiable quantizer with distribution-consistent and scale-adaptive latent perturbations generated via Metropolis--Hastings sampling. This design enables stable training without a codebook while making the model robust to inference-time quantization error. Moreover, under the assumption of approximately uniform latent variables, we derive FSP (Finite Scalar Perturbation), a lightweight variant of VP-VAE that provides a unified theoretical explanation and a practical improvement for FSQ-style fixed quantizers. Extensive experiments on image and audio benchmarks demonstrate that VP-VAE and FSP improve reconstruction fidelity and achieve substantially more balanced token usage, while avoiding the instability inherent to coupled codebook training.

We introduce MotionCrafter, a video diffusion-based framework that jointly reconstructs 4D geometry and estimates dense motion from a monocular video. The core of our method is a novel joint representation of dense 3D point maps and 3D scene flows in a shared coordinate system, and a novel 4D VAE to effectively learn this representation. Unlike prior work that forces the 3D value and latents to align strictly with RGB VAE latents-despite their fundamentally different distributions-we show that such alignment is unnecessary and leads to suboptimal performance. Instead, we introduce a new data normalization and VAE training strategy that better transfers diffusion priors and greatly improves reconstruction quality. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate that MotionCrafter achieves state-of-the-art performance in both geometry reconstruction and dense scene flow estimation, delivering 38.64% and 25.0% improvements in geometry and motion reconstruction, respectively, all without any post-optimization. Project page: https://ruijiezhu94.github.io/MotionCrafter_Page

The development of 2D foundation models for image segmentation has been significantly advanced by the Segment Anything Model (SAM). However, achieving similar success in 3D models remains a challenge due to issues such as non-unified data formats, lightweight models, and the scarcity of labeled data with diverse masks. To this end, we propose a 3D promptable segmentation model (Point-SAM) focusing on point clouds. Our approach utilizes a transformer-based method, extending SAM to the 3D domain. We leverage part-level and object-level annotations and introduce a data engine to generate pseudo labels from SAM, thereby distilling 2D knowledge into our 3D model. Our model outperforms state-of-the-art models on several indoor and outdoor benchmarks and demonstrates a variety of applications, such as 3D annotation. Codes and demo can be found at https://github.com/zyc00/Point-SAM.

The past few years have witnessed the great success and prevalence of self-supervised representation learning within the language and 2D vision communities. However, such advancements have not been fully migrated to the field of 3D point cloud learning. Different from existing pre-training paradigms designed for deep point cloud feature extractors that fall into the scope of generative modeling or contrastive learning, this paper proposes a translative pre-training framework, namely PointVST, driven by a novel self-supervised pretext task of cross-modal translation from 3D point clouds to their corresponding diverse forms of 2D rendered images. More specifically, we begin with deducing view-conditioned point-wise embeddings through the insertion of the viewpoint indicator, and then adaptively aggregate a view-specific global codeword, which can be further fed into subsequent 2D convolutional translation heads for image generation. Extensive experimental evaluations on various downstream task scenarios demonstrate that our PointVST shows consistent and prominent performance superiority over current state-of-the-art approaches as well as satisfactory domain transfer capability. Our code will be publicly available at https://github.com/keeganhk/PointVST.

Video Variational Autoencoder (VAE) encodes videos into a low-dimensional latent space, becoming a key component of most Latent Video Diffusion Models (LVDMs) to reduce model training costs. However, as the resolution and duration of generated videos increase, the encoding cost of Video VAEs becomes a limiting bottleneck in training LVDMs. Moreover, the block-wise inference method adopted by most LVDMs can lead to discontinuities of latent space when processing long-duration videos. The key to addressing the computational bottleneck lies in decomposing videos into distinct components and efficiently encoding the critical information. Wavelet transform can decompose videos into multiple frequency-domain components and improve the efficiency significantly, we thus propose Wavelet Flow VAE (WF-VAE), an autoencoder that leverages multi-level wavelet transform to facilitate low-frequency energy flow into latent representation. Furthermore, we introduce a method called Causal Cache, which maintains the integrity of latent space during block-wise inference. Compared to state-of-the-art video VAEs, WF-VAE demonstrates superior performance in both PSNR and LPIPS metrics, achieving 2x higher throughput and 4x lower memory consumption while maintaining competitive reconstruction quality. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/PKU-YuanGroup/WF-VAE.

Recent progress in 3D generation has been driven largely by models conditioned on images or text, while readily available 3D priors are still underused. In many real-world scenarios, the visible-region point cloud are easy to obtain from active sensors such as LiDAR or from feed-forward predictors like VGGT, offering explicit geometric constraints that current methods fail to exploit. In this work, we introduce Points-to-3D, a diffusion-based framework that leverages point cloud priors for geometry-controllable 3D asset and scene generation. Built on a latent 3D diffusion model TRELLIS, Points-to-3D first replaces pure-noise sparse structure latent initialization with a point cloud priors tailored input formulation.A structure inpainting network, trained within the TRELLIS framework on task-specific data designed to learn global structural inpainting, is then used for inference with a staged sampling strategy (structural inpainting followed by boundary refinement), completing the global geometry while preserving the visible regions of the input priors. In practice, Points-to-3D can take either accurate point-cloud priors or VGGT-estimated point clouds from single images as input. Experiments on both objects and scene scenarios consistently demonstrate superior performance over state-of-the-art baselines in terms of rendering quality and geometric fidelity, highlighting the effectiveness of explicitly embedding point-cloud priors for achieving more accurate and structurally controllable 3D generation. Project page: https://jiatongxia.github.io/points2-3D/

The variational autoencoder (VAE; Kingma, Welling (2014)) is a recently proposed generative model pairing a top-down generative network with a bottom-up recognition network which approximates posterior inference. It typically makes strong assumptions about posterior inference, for instance that the posterior distribution is approximately factorial, and that its parameters can be approximated with nonlinear regression from the observations. As we show empirically, the VAE objective can lead to overly simplified representations which fail to use the network's entire modeling capacity. We present the importance weighted autoencoder (IWAE), a generative model with the same architecture as the VAE, but which uses a strictly tighter log-likelihood lower bound derived from importance weighting. In the IWAE, the recognition network uses multiple samples to approximate the posterior, giving it increased flexibility to model complex posteriors which do not fit the VAE modeling assumptions. We show empirically that IWAEs learn richer latent space representations than VAEs, leading to improved test log-likelihood on density estimation benchmarks.

Artificial intelligence onboard satellites has the potential to reduce data transmission requirements, enable real-time decision-making and collaboration within constellations. This study deploys a lightweight foundational model called RaVAEn on D-Orbit's ION SCV004 satellite. RaVAEn is a variational auto-encoder (VAE) that generates compressed latent vectors from small image tiles, enabling several downstream tasks. In this work we demonstrate the reliable use of RaVAEn onboard a satellite, achieving an encoding time of 0.110s for tiles of a 4.8x4.8 km^2 area. In addition, we showcase fast few-shot training onboard a satellite using the latent representation of data. We compare the deployment of the model on the on-board CPU and on the available Myriad vision processing unit (VPU) accelerator. To our knowledge, this work shows for the first time the deployment of a multi-task model on-board a CubeSat and the on-board training of a machine learning model.

Recently, a growing number of work design unsupervised paradigms for point cloud processing to alleviate the limitation of expensive manual annotation and poor transferability of supervised methods. Among them, CrossPoint follows the contrastive learning framework and exploits image and point cloud data for unsupervised point cloud understanding. Although the promising performance is presented, the unbalanced architecture makes it unnecessarily complex and inefficient. For example, the image branch in CrossPoint is sim8.3x heavier than the point cloud branch leading to higher complexity and latency. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a lightweight Vision-and-Pointcloud Transformer (ViPFormer) to unify image and point cloud processing in a single architecture. ViPFormer learns in an unsupervised manner by optimizing intra-modal and cross-modal contrastive objectives. Then the pretrained model is transferred to various downstream tasks, including 3D shape classification and semantic segmentation. Experiments on different datasets show ViPFormer surpasses previous state-of-the-art unsupervised methods with higher accuracy, lower model complexity and runtime latency. Finally, the effectiveness of each component in ViPFormer is validated by extensive ablation studies. The implementation of the proposed method is available at https://github.com/auniquesun/ViPFormer.

Masked autoencoders (MAE) have recently been introduced to 3D self-supervised pretraining for point clouds due to their great success in NLP and computer vision. Unlike MAEs used in the image domain, where the pretext task is to restore features at the masked pixels, such as colors, the existing 3D MAE works reconstruct the missing geometry only, i.e, the location of the masked points. In contrast to previous studies, we advocate that point location recovery is inessential and restoring intrinsic point features is much superior. To this end, we propose to ignore point position reconstruction and recover high-order features at masked points including surface normals and surface variations, through a novel attention-based decoder which is independent of the encoder design. We validate the effectiveness of our pretext task and decoder design using different encoder structures for 3D training and demonstrate the advantages of our pretrained networks on various point cloud analysis tasks.

Video generative models commonly rely on latent spaces learned by 3D Variational Autoencoders (3D-VAEs). However, conventional 3D-VAEs are mainly optimized for pixel-level reconstruction, which can limit the semantic and spatio-temporal structure captured by their latents. Meanwhile, Video Foundation Models (VFMs) such as V-JEPA 2 and VideoMAEv2 show strong video understanding capabilities, yet whether their frozen representations can be transformed into compact, reconstruction-capable, and generation-friendly video latents remains largely unexplored. We answer this question with VideoRAE, a representation autoencoder that leverages multi-scale hierarchical features from a frozen video foundation encoder and compresses them with a lightweight 1D self-attention projector. VideoRAE supports both continuous latents for Diffusion Transformers and discrete tokens for autoregressive models via multi-codebook high-dimensional quantization. During decoding, a local-and-global representation alignment objective with the frozen VFM teacher improves semantic preservation and enables training without KL regularization. Experiments show that VideoRAE achieves strong reconstruction in both continuous and discrete regimes. On UCF-101, it obtains state-of-the-art class-to-video gFVDs of 40 and 93 with AR and DiT generators, respectively, while converging approximately 5x faster than competing autoencoder baselines. In a controlled 2B-scale text-to-video study, replacing LTX-VAE with VideoRAE leads to faster convergence under comparable settings. These results validate frozen VFM representations as versatile and generation-friendly video latents. The model and code will be released on https://zhxie0117.github.io/VideoRAE.

In this paper, a novel self-supervised learning (SSL) method is proposed, which learns not only representations but also representations uncertainties by considering SSL in terms of variational inference. SSL is a method of learning representation without labels by maximizing the similarity between image representations of different augmented views of the same image. Variational autoencoder (VAE) is an unsupervised representation learning method that trains a probabilistic generative model with variational inference. VAE and SSL can learn representations without labels, but the relationship between VAE and SSL has not been revealed. In this paper, the theoretical relationship between SSL and variational inference is clarified. In addition, variational inference SimSiam (VI-SimSiam) is proposed, which can predict the representation uncertainty by interpreting SimSiam with variational inference and defining the latent space distribution. The experiment qualitatively showed that VISimSiam could learn uncertainty by comparing input images and predicted uncertainties. We also revealed a relationship between estimated uncertainty and classification accuracy.

We propose a novel point cloud U-Net diffusion architecture for 3D generative modeling capable of generating high-quality and diverse 3D shapes while maintaining fast generation times. Our network employs a dual-branch architecture, combining the high-resolution representations of points with the computational efficiency of sparse voxels. Our fastest variant outperforms all non-diffusion generative approaches on unconditional shape generation, the most popular benchmark for evaluating point cloud generative models, while our largest model achieves state-of-the-art results among diffusion methods, with a runtime approximately 70% of the previously state-of-the-art PVD. Beyond unconditional generation, we perform extensive evaluations, including conditional generation on all categories of ShapeNet, demonstrating the scalability of our model to larger datasets, and implicit generation which allows our network to produce high quality point clouds on fewer timesteps, further decreasing the generation time. Finally, we evaluate the architecture's performance in point cloud completion and super-resolution. Our model excels in all tasks, establishing it as a state-of-the-art diffusion U-Net for point cloud generative modeling. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/JohnRomanelis/SPVD.git.

Deep neural networks are prone to adversarial examples that maliciously alter the network's outcome. Due to the increasing popularity of 3D sensors in safety-critical systems and the vast deployment of deep learning models for 3D point sets, there is a growing interest in adversarial attacks and defenses for such models. So far, the research has focused on the semantic level, namely, deep point cloud classifiers. However, point clouds are also widely used in a geometric-related form that includes encoding and reconstructing the geometry. In this work, we are the first to consider the problem of adversarial examples at a geometric level. In this setting, the question is how to craft a small change to a clean source point cloud that leads, after passing through an autoencoder model, to the reconstruction of a different target shape. Our attack is in sharp contrast to existing semantic attacks on 3D point clouds. While such works aim to modify the predicted label by a classifier, we alter the entire reconstructed geometry. Additionally, we demonstrate the robustness of our attack in the case of defense, where we show that remnant characteristics of the target shape are still present at the output after applying the defense to the adversarial input. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/itailang/geometric_adv.

This paper advocates the use of implicit surface representation in autoencoder-based self-supervised 3D representation learning. The most popular and accessible 3D representation, i.e., point clouds, involves discrete samples of the underlying continuous 3D surface. This discretization process introduces sampling variations on the 3D shape, making it challenging to develop transferable knowledge of the true 3D geometry. In the standard autoencoding paradigm, the encoder is compelled to encode not only the 3D geometry but also information on the specific discrete sampling of the 3D shape into the latent code. This is because the point cloud reconstructed by the decoder is considered unacceptable unless there is a perfect mapping between the original and the reconstructed point clouds. This paper introduces the Implicit AutoEncoder (IAE), a simple yet effective method that addresses the sampling variation issue by replacing the commonly-used point-cloud decoder with an implicit decoder. The implicit decoder reconstructs a continuous representation of the 3D shape, independent of the imperfections in the discrete samples. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed IAE achieves state-of-the-art performance across various self-supervised learning benchmarks.

Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) enables text-to-3D generation by optimizing rendered images with a pretrained diffusion prior, but latent SDS often produces structured color artifacts and high-frequency texture noise. We identify a failure mode of latent SDS caused by VAE-induced pixel drift: the optimized image can move along pixel-space directions that are weakly constrained by the VAE encoder, so its latent representation remains clean and semantically meaningful while the image itself accumulates visible artifacts. We support this diagnosis with controlled 2D SDS experiments, VAE-only optimization, and a simplified analysis showing that encoder-like latent objectives can amplify image-space noise when the inverse mapping to pixels is underconstrained. Motivated by this observation, we propose PixSDS, a lightweight VAE-consistent gradient repair method. PixSDS decodes a latent SDS lookahead step and uses the decoded image as a clean direction for pixel-space optimization, reducing motion in VAE-inconsistent directions without retraining the diffusion model, changing the renderer, or replacing the SDS objective. Experiments in 2D optimization and text-to-3D generation show that PixSDS substantially reduces structured artifacts while preserving semantic content. Code is publicly available at https://sevashasla.github.io/pixsds-webpage/.

Point-, voxel-, and range-views are three representative forms of point clouds. All of them have accurate 3D measurements but lack color and texture information. RGB images are a natural complement to these point cloud views and fully utilizing the comprehensive information of them benefits more robust perceptions. In this paper, we present a unified multi-modal LiDAR segmentation network, termed UniSeg, which leverages the information of RGB images and three views of the point cloud, and accomplishes semantic segmentation and panoptic segmentation simultaneously. Specifically, we first design the Learnable cross-Modal Association (LMA) module to automatically fuse voxel-view and range-view features with image features, which fully utilize the rich semantic information of images and are robust to calibration errors. Then, the enhanced voxel-view and range-view features are transformed to the point space,where three views of point cloud features are further fused adaptively by the Learnable cross-View Association module (LVA). Notably, UniSeg achieves promising results in three public benchmarks, i.e., SemanticKITTI, nuScenes, and Waymo Open Dataset (WOD); it ranks 1st on two challenges of two benchmarks, including the LiDAR semantic segmentation challenge of nuScenes and panoptic segmentation challenges of SemanticKITTI. Besides, we construct the OpenPCSeg codebase, which is the largest and most comprehensive outdoor LiDAR segmentation codebase. It contains most of the popular outdoor LiDAR segmentation algorithms and provides reproducible implementations. The OpenPCSeg codebase will be made publicly available at https://github.com/PJLab-ADG/PCSeg.

We introduce AvatarPointillist, a novel framework for generating dynamic 4D Gaussian avatars from a single portrait image. At the core of our method is a decoder-only Transformer that autoregressively generates a point cloud for 3D Gaussian Splatting. This sequential approach allows for precise, adaptive construction, dynamically adjusting point density and the total number of points based on the subject's complexity. During point generation, the AR model also jointly predicts per-point binding information, enabling realistic animation. After generation, a dedicated Gaussian decoder converts the points into complete, renderable Gaussian attributes. We demonstrate that conditioning the decoder on the latent features from the AR generator enables effective interaction between stages and markedly improves fidelity. Extensive experiments validate that AvatarPointillist produces high-quality, photorealistic, and controllable avatars. We believe this autoregressive formulation represents a new paradigm for avatar generation, and we will release our code inspire future research.

Towards 3D object tracking in point clouds, a novel point-to-box network termed P2B is proposed in an end-to-end learning manner. Our main idea is to first localize potential target centers in 3D search area embedded with target information. Then point-driven 3D target proposal and verification are executed jointly. In this way, the time-consuming 3D exhaustive search can be avoided. Specifically, we first sample seeds from the point clouds in template and search area respectively. Then, we execute permutation-invariant feature augmentation to embed target clues from template into search area seeds and represent them with target-specific features. Consequently, the augmented search area seeds regress the potential target centers via Hough voting. The centers are further strengthened with seed-wise targetness scores. Finally, each center clusters its neighbors to leverage the ensemble power for joint 3D target proposal and verification. We apply PointNet++ as our backbone and experiments on KITTI tracking dataset demonstrate P2B's superiority (~10%'s improvement over state-of-the-art). Note that P2B can run with 40FPS on a single NVIDIA 1080Ti GPU. Our code and model are available at https://github.com/HaozheQi/P2B.

Diffusion probabilistic models have been shown to generate state-of-the-art results on several competitive image synthesis benchmarks but lack a low-dimensional, interpretable latent space, and are slow at generation. On the other hand, standard Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) typically have access to a low-dimensional latent space but exhibit poor sample quality. We present DiffuseVAE, a novel generative framework that integrates VAE within a diffusion model framework, and leverage this to design novel conditional parameterizations for diffusion models. We show that the resulting model equips diffusion models with a low-dimensional VAE inferred latent code which can be used for downstream tasks like controllable synthesis. The proposed method also improves upon the speed vs quality tradeoff exhibited in standard unconditional DDPM/DDIM models (for instance, FID of 16.47 vs 34.36 using a standard DDIM on the CelebA-HQ-128 benchmark using T=10 reverse process steps) without having explicitly trained for such an objective. Furthermore, the proposed model exhibits synthesis quality comparable to state-of-the-art models on standard image synthesis benchmarks like CIFAR-10 and CelebA-64 while outperforming most existing VAE-based methods. Lastly, we show that the proposed method exhibits inherent generalization to different types of noise in the conditioning signal. For reproducibility, our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/kpandey008/DiffuseVAE.

3D shape generation has greatly flourished through the development of so-called "native" 3D diffusion, particularly through the Vecset Diffusion Model (VDM). While recent advancements have shown promising results in generating high-resolution 3D shapes, VDM still struggles with high-speed generation. Challenges exist because of difficulties not only in accelerating diffusion sampling but also VAE decoding in VDM, areas under-explored in previous works. To address these challenges, we present FlashVDM, a systematic framework for accelerating both VAE and DiT in VDM. For DiT, FlashVDM enables flexible diffusion sampling with as few as 5 inference steps and comparable quality, which is made possible by stabilizing consistency distillation with our newly introduced Progressive Flow Distillation. For VAE, we introduce a lightning vecset decoder equipped with Adaptive KV Selection, Hierarchical Volume Decoding, and Efficient Network Design. By exploiting the locality of the vecset and the sparsity of shape surface in the volume, our decoder drastically lowers FLOPs, minimizing the overall decoding overhead. We apply FlashVDM to Hunyuan3D-2 to obtain Hunyuan3D-2 Turbo. Through systematic evaluation, we show that our model significantly outperforms existing fast 3D generation methods, achieving comparable performance to the state-of-the-art while reducing inference time by over 45x for reconstruction and 32x for generation. Code and models are available at https://github.com/Tencent/FlashVDM.

Latent diffusion models have enabled high-quality video synthesis, yet their inference remains costly and time-consuming. As diffusion transformers become increasingly efficient, the latency bottleneck inevitably shifts to VAE decoders. To reduce their latency while maintaining quality, we propose a universal acceleration framework for VAE decoders that preserves full alignment with the original latent distribution. Specifically, we propose (1) an independence-aware channel pruning method to effectively mitigate severe channel redundancy, and (2) a stage-wise dominant operator optimization strategy to address the high inference cost of the widely used causal 3D convolutions in VAE decoders. Based on these innovations, we construct a Flash-VAED family. Moreover, we design a three-phase dynamic distillation framework that efficiently transfers the capabilities of the original VAE decoder to Flash-VAED. Extensive experiments on Wan and LTX-Video VAE decoders demonstrate that our method outperforms baselines in both quality and speed, achieving approximately a 6times speedup while maintaining the reconstruction performance up to 96.9%. Notably, Flash-VAED accelerates the end-to-end generation pipeline by up to 36% with negligible quality drops on VBench-2.0.

Generative models have been widely applied to world modeling for environment simulation and future state prediction. With advancements in autonomous driving, there is a growing demand not only for high-fidelity video generation under various controls, but also for producing diverse and meaningful information such as depth estimation. To address this, we propose CVD-STORM, a cross-view video diffusion model utilizing a spatial-temporal reconstruction Variational Autoencoder (VAE) that generates long-term, multi-view videos with 4D reconstruction capabilities under various control inputs. Our approach first fine-tunes the VAE with an auxiliary 4D reconstruction task, enhancing its ability to encode 3D structures and temporal dynamics. Subsequently, we integrate this VAE into the video diffusion process to significantly improve generation quality. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves substantial improvements in both FID and FVD metrics. Additionally, the jointly-trained Gaussian Splatting Decoder effectively reconstructs dynamic scenes, providing valuable geometric information for comprehensive scene understanding.

LiDAR point clouds often contain motion-induced distortions, degrading the accuracy of object appearances in the captured data. In this paper, we first characterize the underlying reasons for the point cloud distortion and show that this is present in public datasets. We find that this distortion is more pronounced in high-speed environments such as highways, as well as in multi-LiDAR configurations, a common setup for heavy vehicles. Previous work has dealt with point cloud distortion from the ego-motion but fails to consider distortion from the motion of other objects. We therefore introduce a novel undistortion pipeline, HiMo, that leverages scene flow estimation for object motion compensation, correcting the depiction of dynamic objects. We further propose an extension of a state-of-the-art self-supervised scene flow method. Due to the lack of well-established motion distortion metrics in the literature, we also propose two metrics for compensation performance evaluation: compensation accuracy at a point level and shape similarity on objects. To demonstrate the efficacy of our method, we conduct extensive experiments on the Argoverse 2 dataset and a new real-world dataset. Our new dataset is collected from heavy vehicles equipped with multi-LiDARs and on highways as opposed to mostly urban settings in the existing datasets. The source code, including all methods and the evaluation data, will be provided upon publication. See https://kin-zhang.github.io/HiMo for more details.

LiDAR-based 3D sensors provide point clouds, a canonical 3D representation used in various scene understanding tasks. Modern LiDARs face key challenges in several real-world scenarios, such as long-distance or low-albedo objects, producing sparse or erroneous point clouds. These errors, which are rooted in the noisy raw LiDAR measurements, get propagated to downstream perception models, resulting in potentially severe loss of accuracy. This is because conventional 3D processing pipelines do not retain any uncertainty information from the raw measurements when constructing point clouds. We propose Probabilistic Point Clouds (PPC), a novel 3D scene representation where each point is augmented with a probability attribute that encapsulates the measurement uncertainty (or confidence) in the raw data. We further introduce inference approaches that leverage PPC for robust 3D object detection; these methods are versatile and can be used as computationally lightweight drop-in modules in 3D inference pipelines. We demonstrate, via both simulations and real captures, that PPC-based 3D inference methods outperform several baselines using LiDAR as well as camera-LiDAR fusion models, across challenging indoor and outdoor scenarios involving small, distant, and low-albedo objects, as well as strong ambient light. Our project webpage is at https://bhavyagoyal.github.io/ppc .

Self-driving cars need to understand 3D scenes efficiently and accurately in order to drive safely. Given the limited hardware resources, existing 3D perception models are not able to recognize small instances (e.g., pedestrians, cyclists) very well due to the low-resolution voxelization and aggressive downsampling. To this end, we propose Sparse Point-Voxel Convolution (SPVConv), a lightweight 3D module that equips the vanilla Sparse Convolution with the high-resolution point-based branch. With negligible overhead, this point-based branch is able to preserve the fine details even from large outdoor scenes. To explore the spectrum of efficient 3D models, we first define a flexible architecture design space based on SPVConv, and we then present 3D Neural Architecture Search (3D-NAS) to search the optimal network architecture over this diverse design space efficiently and effectively. Experimental results validate that the resulting SPVNAS model is fast and accurate: it outperforms the state-of-the-art MinkowskiNet by 3.3%, ranking 1st on the competitive SemanticKITTI leaderboard. It also achieves 8x computation reduction and 3x measured speedup over MinkowskiNet with higher accuracy. Finally, we transfer our method to 3D object detection, and it achieves consistent improvements over the one-stage detection baseline on KITTI.

We propose a novel approach to self-supervised learning of point cloud representations by differentiable neural rendering. Motivated by the fact that informative point cloud features should be able to encode rich geometry and appearance cues and render realistic images, we train a point-cloud encoder within a devised point-based neural renderer by comparing the rendered images with real images on massive RGB-D data. The learned point-cloud encoder can be easily integrated into various downstream tasks, including not only high-level tasks like 3D detection and segmentation, but low-level tasks like 3D reconstruction and image synthesis. Extensive experiments on various tasks demonstrate the superiority of our approach compared to existing pre-training methods.

Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE) has become the de-facto learning paradigm in achieving representation learning and generation for natural language at the same time. Nevertheless, existing VAE-based language models either employ elementary RNNs, which is not powerful to handle complex works in the multi-task situation, or fine-tunes two pre-trained language models (PLMs) for any downstream task, which is a huge drain on resources. In this paper, we propose the first VAE framework empowered with adaptive GPT-2s (AdaVAE). Different from existing systems, we unify both the encoder\&decoder of the VAE model using GPT-2s with adaptive parameter-efficient components, and further introduce Latent Attention operation to better construct latent space from transformer models. Experiments from multiple dimensions validate that AdaVAE is competent to effectively organize language in three related tasks (language modeling, representation modeling and guided text generation) even with less than 15% activated parameters in training. Our code is available at https://github.com/ImKeTT/AdaVAE.

The generation of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) assets from textual data remains a significant challenge, largely due to the scarcity of high-quality vector datasets and the limitations in scalable vector representations required for modeling intricate graphic distributions. This work introduces SVGFusion, a Text-to-SVG model capable of scaling to real-world SVG data without reliance on a text-based discrete language model or prolonged SDS optimization. The essence of SVGFusion is to learn a continuous latent space for vector graphics with a popular Text-to-Image framework. Specifically, SVGFusion consists of two modules: a Vector-Pixel Fusion Variational Autoencoder (VP-VAE) and a Vector Space Diffusion Transformer (VS-DiT). VP-VAE takes both the SVGs and corresponding rasterizations as inputs and learns a continuous latent space, whereas VS-DiT learns to generate a latent code within this space based on the text prompt. Based on VP-VAE, a novel rendering sequence modeling strategy is proposed to enable the latent space to embed the knowledge of construction logics in SVGs. This empowers the model to achieve human-like design capabilities in vector graphics, while systematically preventing occlusion in complex graphic compositions. Moreover, our SVGFusion's ability can be continuously improved by leveraging the scalability of the VS-DiT by adding more VS-DiT blocks. A large-scale SVG dataset is collected to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Extensive experimentation has confirmed the superiority of our SVGFusion over existing SVG generation methods, achieving enhanced quality and generalizability, thereby establishing a novel framework for SVG content creation. Code, model, and data will be released at: https://ximinng.github.io/SVGFusionProject/{https://ximinng.github.io/SVGFusionProject/}

Point cloud completion aims to recover accurate global geometry and preserve fine-grained local details from partial point clouds. Conventional methods typically predict unseen points directly from 3D point cloud coordinates or use self-projected multi-view depth maps to ease this task. However, these gray-scale depth maps cannot reach multi-view consistency, consequently restricting the performance. In this paper, we introduce a GeoFormer that simultaneously enhances the global geometric structure of the points and improves the local details. Specifically, we design a CCM Feature Enhanced Point Generator to integrate image features from multi-view consistent canonical coordinate maps (CCMs) and align them with pure point features, thereby enhancing the global geometry feature. Additionally, we employ the Multi-scale Geometry-aware Upsampler module to progressively enhance local details. This is achieved through cross attention between the multi-scale features extracted from the partial input and the features derived from previously estimated points. Extensive experiments on the PCN, ShapeNet-55/34, and KITTI benchmarks demonstrate that our GeoFormer outperforms recent methods, achieving the state-of-the-art performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/Jinpeng-Yu/GeoFormer{https://github.com/Jinpeng-Yu/GeoFormer}.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) for 3D point cloud recognition are vulnerable to adversarial examples, threatening their practical deployment. Despite the many research endeavors have been made to tackle this issue in recent years, the diversity of adversarial examples on 3D point clouds makes them more challenging to defend against than those on 2D images. For examples, attackers can generate adversarial examples by adding, shifting, or removing points. Consequently, existing defense strategies are hard to counter unseen point cloud adversarial examples. In this paper, we first establish a comprehensive, and rigorous point cloud adversarial robustness benchmark to evaluate adversarial robustness, which can provide a detailed understanding of the effects of the defense and attack methods. We then collect existing defense tricks in point cloud adversarial defenses and then perform extensive and systematic experiments to identify an effective combination of these tricks. Furthermore, we propose a hybrid training augmentation methods that consider various types of point cloud adversarial examples to adversarial training, significantly improving the adversarial robustness. By combining these tricks, we construct a more robust defense framework achieving an average accuracy of 83.45\% against various attacks, demonstrating its capability to enabling robust learners. Our codebase are open-sourced on: https://github.com/qiufan319/benchmark_pc_attack.git.

We present MeshFlow, a new method for generating artist-like 3D meshes. Current mesh generators often adopt Auto-Regressive (AR) next-token prediction, a natural choice given the discrete nature of mesh topology. However, AR methods scale poorly because the inference cost is quadratic in mesh size. They also require discretizing the vertex coordinates, which introduces quantization errors. To address these challenges, we introduce a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) that, supervised with a contrastive loss, represents both continuous vertex positions and discrete connectivity in a continuous latent space. This latent space is significantly more compact than prior token-based mesh representations. We then build a 3D generator based on a Rectified Flow transformer, generating all mesh vertices and edges in parallel. Our model generates meshes 18x faster than the fastest AR generator while also achieving excellent accuracy across standard mesh-generation metrics. Homepage: https://mesh-flow.github.io/, Code: https://github.com/facebookresearch/meshflow

Automotive telemetry data exhibits slow drifts and fast spikes, often within the same sequence, making reliable anomaly detection challenging. Standard reconstruction-based methods, including sequence variational autoencoders (VAEs), use a single latent process and therefore mix heterogeneous time scales, which can smooth out spikes or inflate variances and weaken anomaly separation. In this paper, we present STREAM-VAE, a variational autoencoder for anomaly detection in automotive telemetry time-series data. Our model uses a dual-path encoder to separate slow drift and fast spike signal dynamics, and a decoder that represents transient deviations separately from the normal operating pattern. STREAM-VAE is designed for deployment, producing stable anomaly scores across operating modes for both in-vehicle monitors and backend fleet analytics. Experiments on an automotive telemetry dataset and the public SMD benchmark show that explicitly separating drift and spike dynamics improves robustness compared to strong forecasting, attention, graph, and VAE baselines.

Point cloud streaming is increasingly getting popular, evolving into the norm for interactive service delivery and the future Metaverse. However, the substantial volume of data associated with point clouds presents numerous challenges, particularly in terms of high bandwidth consumption and large storage capacity. Despite various solutions proposed thus far, with a focus on point cloud compression, upsampling, and completion, these reconstruction-related methods continue to fall short in delivering high fidelity point cloud output. As a solution, in DiffPMAE, we propose an effective point cloud reconstruction architecture. Inspired by self-supervised learning concepts, we combine Masked Auto-Encoding and Diffusion Model mechanism to remotely reconstruct point cloud data. By the nature of this reconstruction process, DiffPMAE can be extended to many related downstream tasks including point cloud compression, upsampling and completion. Leveraging ShapeNet-55 and ModelNet datasets with over 60000 objects, we validate the performance of DiffPMAE exceeding many state-of-the-art methods in-terms of auto-encoding and downstream tasks considered.

Recent research has shown a strong theoretical connection between variational autoencoders (VAEs) and the rate-distortion theory. Motivated by this, we consider the problem of lossy image compression from the perspective of generative modeling. Starting with ResNet VAEs, which are originally designed for data (image) distribution modeling, we redesign their latent variable model using a quantization-aware posterior and prior, enabling easy quantization and entropy coding at test time. Along with improved neural network architecture, we present a powerful and efficient model that outperforms previous methods on natural image lossy compression. Our model compresses images in a coarse-to-fine fashion and supports parallel encoding and decoding, leading to fast execution on GPUs. Code is available at https://github.com/duanzhiihao/lossy-vae.

Vector Quantisation (VQ) is experiencing a comeback in machine learning, where it is increasingly used in representation learning. However, optimizing the codevectors in existing VQ-VAE is not entirely trivial. A problem is codebook collapse, where only a small subset of codevectors receive gradients useful for their optimisation, whereas a majority of them simply ``dies off'' and is never updated or used. This limits the effectiveness of VQ for learning larger codebooks in complex computer vision tasks that require high-capacity representations. In this paper, we present a simple alternative method for online codebook learning, Clustering VQ-VAE (CVQ-VAE). Our approach selects encoded features as anchors to update the ``dead'' codevectors, while optimising the codebooks which are alive via the original loss. This strategy brings unused codevectors closer in distribution to the encoded features, increasing the likelihood of being chosen and optimized. We extensively validate the generalization capability of our quantiser on various datasets, tasks (e.g. reconstruction and generation), and architectures (e.g. VQ-VAE, VQGAN, LDM). Our CVQ-VAE can be easily integrated into the existing models with just a few lines of code.

Recent advancements in 3D generative modeling have significantly improved the generation realism, yet the field is still hampered by existing representations, which struggle to capture assets with complex topologies and detailed appearance. This paper present an approach for learning a structured latent representation from native 3D data to address this challenge. At its core is a new sparse voxel structure called O-Voxel, an omni-voxel representation that encodes both geometry and appearance. O-Voxel can robustly model arbitrary topology, including open, non-manifold, and fully-enclosed surfaces, while capturing comprehensive surface attributes beyond texture color, such as physically-based rendering parameters. Based on O-Voxel, we design a Sparse Compression VAE which provides a high spatial compression rate and a compact latent space. We train large-scale flow-matching models comprising 4B parameters for 3D generation using diverse public 3D asset datasets. Despite their scale, inference remains highly efficient. Meanwhile, the geometry and material quality of our generated assets far exceed those of existing models. We believe our approach offers a significant advancement in 3D generative modeling.

Reconstructing interacting hands from monocular images is indispensable in AR/VR applications. Most existing solutions rely on the accurate localization of each skeleton joint. However, these methods tend to be unreliable due to the severe occlusion and confusing similarity among adjacent hand parts. This also defies human perception because humans can quickly imitate an interaction pattern without localizing all joints. Our key idea is to first construct a two-hand interaction prior and recast the interaction reconstruction task as the conditional sampling from the prior. To expand more interaction states, a large-scale multimodal dataset with physical plausibility is proposed. Then a VAE is trained to further condense these interaction patterns as latent codes in a prior distribution. When looking for image cues that contribute to interaction prior sampling, we propose the interaction adjacency heatmap (IAH). Compared with a joint-wise heatmap for localization, IAH assigns denser visible features to those invisible joints. Compared with an all-in-one visible heatmap, it provides more fine-grained local interaction information in each interaction region. Finally, the correlations between the extracted features and corresponding interaction codes are linked by the ViT module. Comprehensive evaluations on benchmark datasets have verified the effectiveness of this framework. The code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/binghui-z/InterPrior_pytorch

Recently, state space models have exhibited strong global modeling capabilities and linear computational complexity in contrast to transformers. This research focuses on applying such architecture to more efficiently and effectively model point cloud data globally with linear computational complexity. In particular, for the first time, we demonstrate that Mamba-based point cloud methods can outperform previous methods based on transformer or multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs). To enable Mamba to process 3-D point cloud data more effectively, we propose a novel Consistent Traverse Serialization method to convert point clouds into 1-D point sequences while ensuring that neighboring points in the sequence are also spatially adjacent. Consistent Traverse Serialization yields six variants by permuting the order of x, y, and z coordinates, and the synergistic use of these variants aids Mamba in comprehensively observing point cloud data. Furthermore, to assist Mamba in handling point sequences with different orders more effectively, we introduce point prompts to inform Mamba of the sequence's arrangement rules. Finally, we propose positional encoding based on spatial coordinate mapping to inject positional information into point cloud sequences more effectively. Point Cloud Mamba surpasses the state-of-the-art (SOTA) point-based method PointNeXt and achieves new SOTA performance on the ScanObjectNN, ModelNet40, ShapeNetPart, and S3DIS datasets. It is worth mentioning that when using a more powerful local feature extraction module, our PCM achieves 79.6 mIoU on S3DIS, significantly surpassing the previous SOTA models, DeLA and PTv3, by 5.5 mIoU and 4.9 mIoU, respectively.

We introduce PointGauss, a novel point cloud-guided framework for real-time multi-object segmentation in Gaussian Splatting representations. Unlike existing methods that suffer from prolonged initialization and limited multi-view consistency, our approach achieves efficient 3D segmentation by directly parsing Gaussian primitives through a point cloud segmentation-driven pipeline. The key innovation lies in two aspects: (1) a point cloud-based Gaussian primitive decoder that generates 3D instance masks within 1 minute, and (2) a GPU-accelerated 2D mask rendering system that ensures multi-view consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate significant improvements over previous state-of-the-art methods, achieving performance gains of 1.89 to 31.78% in multi-view mIoU, while maintaining superior computational efficiency. To address the limitations of current benchmarks (single-object focus, inconsistent 3D evaluation, small scale, and partial coverage), we present DesktopObjects-360, a novel comprehensive dataset for 3D segmentation in radiance fields, featuring: (1) complex multi-object scenes, (2) globally consistent 2D annotations, (3) large-scale training data (over 27 thousand 2D masks), (4) full 360{\deg} coverage, and (5) 3D evaluation masks.

In this paper, we introduce LATO, a novel topology-preserving latent representation that enables scalable, flow matching-based synthesis of explicit 3D meshes. LATO represents a mesh as a Vertex Displacement Field (VDF) anchored on surface, incorporating a sparse voxel Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to compress this explicit signal into a structured, topology-aware voxel latent. To decapsulate the mesh, the VAE decoder progressively subdivides and prunes latent voxels to instantiate precise vertex locations. In the end, a dedicated connection head queries the voxel latent to predict edge connectivity between vertex pairs directly, allowing mesh topology to be recovered without isosurface extraction or heuristic meshing. For generative modeling, LATO adopts a two-stage flow matching process, first synthesizing the structure voxels and subsequently refining the voxel-wise topology features. Compared to prior isosurface/triangle-based diffusion models and autoregressive generation approaches, LATO generates meshes with complex geometry, well-formed topology while being highly efficient in inference.

Point clouds are naturally sparse, while image pixels are dense. The inconsistency limits feature fusion from both modalities for point-wise scene flow estimation. Previous methods rarely predict scene flow from the entire point clouds of the scene with one-time inference due to the memory inefficiency and heavy overhead from distance calculation and sorting involved in commonly used farthest point sampling, KNN, and ball query algorithms for local feature aggregation. To mitigate these issues in scene flow learning, we regularize raw points to a dense format by storing 3D coordinates in 2D grids. Unlike the sampling operation commonly used in existing works, the dense 2D representation 1) preserves most points in the given scene, 2) brings in a significant boost of efficiency, and 3) eliminates the density gap between points and pixels, allowing us to perform effective feature fusion. We also present a novel warping projection technique to alleviate the information loss problem resulting from the fact that multiple points could be mapped into one grid during projection when computing cost volume. Sufficient experiments demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our method, outperforming the prior-arts on the FlyingThings3D and KITTI dataset.

Most visual generative models compress images into a latent space before applying diffusion or autoregressive modelling. Yet, existing approaches such as VAEs and foundation model aligned encoders implicitly constrain the latent space without explicitly shaping its distribution, making it unclear which types of distributions are optimal for modeling. We introduce Distribution-Matching VAE (DMVAE), which explicitly aligns the encoder's latent distribution with an arbitrary reference distribution via a distribution matching constraint. This generalizes beyond the Gaussian prior of conventional VAEs, enabling alignment with distributions derived from self-supervised features, diffusion noise, or other prior distributions. With DMVAE, we can systematically investigate which latent distributions are more conducive to modeling, and we find that SSL-derived distributions provide an excellent balance between reconstruction fidelity and modeling efficiency, reaching gFID equals 3.2 on ImageNet with only 64 training epochs. Our results suggest that choosing a suitable latent distribution structure (achieved via distribution-level alignment), rather than relying on fixed priors, is key to bridging the gap between easy-to-model latents and high-fidelity image synthesis. Code is avaliable at https://github.com/sen-ye/dmvae.

We present a novel method for constructing Variational Autoencoder (VAE). Instead of using pixel-by-pixel loss, we enforce deep feature consistency between the input and the output of a VAE, which ensures the VAE's output to preserve the spatial correlation characteristics of the input, thus leading the output to have a more natural visual appearance and better perceptual quality. Based on recent deep learning works such as style transfer, we employ a pre-trained deep convolutional neural network (CNN) and use its hidden features to define a feature perceptual loss for VAE training. Evaluated on the CelebA face dataset, we show that our model produces better results than other methods in the literature. We also show that our method can produce latent vectors that can capture the semantic information of face expressions and can be used to achieve state-of-the-art performance in facial attribute prediction.

Point cloud analysis (such as 3D segmentation and detection) is a challenging task, because of not only the irregular geometries of many millions of unordered points, but also the great variations caused by depth, viewpoint, occlusion, etc. Current studies put much focus on the adaption of neural networks to the complex geometries of point clouds, but are blind to a fundamental question: how to learn an appropriate point embedding space that is aware of both discriminative semantics and challenging variations? As a response, we propose a clustering based supervised learning scheme for point cloud analysis. Unlike current de-facto, scene-wise training paradigm, our algorithm conducts within-class clustering on the point embedding space for automatically discovering subclass patterns which are latent yet representative across scenes. The mined patterns are, in turn, used to repaint the embedding space, so as to respect the underlying distribution of the entire training dataset and improve the robustness to the variations. Our algorithm is principled and readily pluggable to modern point cloud segmentation networks during training, without extra overhead during testing. With various 3D network architectures (i.e., voxel-based, point-based, Transformer-based, automatically searched), our algorithm shows notable improvements on famous point cloud segmentation datasets (i.e.,2.0-2.6% on single-scan and 2.0-2.2% multi-scan of SemanticKITTI, 1.8-1.9% on S3DIS, in terms of mIoU). Our algorithm also demonstrates utility in 3D detection, showing 2.0-3.4% mAP gains on KITTI.

Latent diffusion models with Transformer architectures excel at generating high-fidelity images. However, recent studies reveal an optimization dilemma in this two-stage design: while increasing the per-token feature dimension in visual tokenizers improves reconstruction quality, it requires substantially larger diffusion models and more training iterations to achieve comparable generation performance. Consequently, existing systems often settle for sub-optimal solutions, either producing visual artifacts due to information loss within tokenizers or failing to converge fully due to expensive computation costs. We argue that this dilemma stems from the inherent difficulty in learning unconstrained high-dimensional latent spaces. To address this, we propose aligning the latent space with pre-trained vision foundation models when training the visual tokenizers. Our proposed VA-VAE (Vision foundation model Aligned Variational AutoEncoder) significantly expands the reconstruction-generation frontier of latent diffusion models, enabling faster convergence of Diffusion Transformers (DiT) in high-dimensional latent spaces. To exploit the full potential of VA-VAE, we build an enhanced DiT baseline with improved training strategies and architecture designs, termed LightningDiT. The integrated system achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on ImageNet 256x256 generation with an FID score of 1.35 while demonstrating remarkable training efficiency by reaching an FID score of 2.11 in just 64 epochs--representing an over 21 times convergence speedup compared to the original DiT. Models and codes are available at: https://github.com/hustvl/LightningDiT.

This paper introduces a new interpretation of the Variational Autoencoder framework by taking a fully geometric point of view. We argue that vanilla VAE models unveil naturally a Riemannian structure in their latent space and that taking into consideration those geometrical aspects can lead to better interpolations and an improved generation procedure. This new proposed sampling method consists in sampling from the uniform distribution deriving intrinsically from the learned Riemannian latent space and we show that using this scheme can make a vanilla VAE competitive and even better than more advanced versions on several benchmark datasets. Since generative models are known to be sensitive to the number of training samples we also stress the method's robustness in the low data regime.

Pre-trained point cloud models have found extensive applications in 3D understanding tasks like object classification and part segmentation. However, the prevailing strategy of full fine-tuning in downstream tasks leads to large per-task storage overhead for model parameters, which limits the efficiency when applying large-scale pre-trained models. Inspired by the recent success of visual prompt tuning (VPT), this paper attempts to explore prompt tuning on pre-trained point cloud models, to pursue an elegant balance between performance and parameter efficiency. We find while instance-agnostic static prompting, e.g. VPT, shows some efficacy in downstream transfer, it is vulnerable to the distribution diversity caused by various types of noises in real-world point cloud data. To conquer this limitation, we propose a novel Instance-aware Dynamic Prompt Tuning (IDPT) strategy for pre-trained point cloud models. The essence of IDPT is to develop a dynamic prompt generation module to perceive semantic prior features of each point cloud instance and generate adaptive prompt tokens to enhance the model's robustness. Notably, extensive experiments demonstrate that IDPT outperforms full fine-tuning in most tasks with a mere 7% of the trainable parameters, providing a promising solution to parameter-efficient learning for pre-trained point cloud models. Code is available at https://github.com/zyh16143998882/ICCV23-IDPT.

While recent work on text-conditional 3D object generation has shown promising results, the state-of-the-art methods typically require multiple GPU-hours to produce a single sample. This is in stark contrast to state-of-the-art generative image models, which produce samples in a number of seconds or minutes. In this paper, we explore an alternative method for 3D object generation which produces 3D models in only 1-2 minutes on a single GPU. Our method first generates a single synthetic view using a text-to-image diffusion model, and then produces a 3D point cloud using a second diffusion model which conditions on the generated image. While our method still falls short of the state-of-the-art in terms of sample quality, it is one to two orders of magnitude faster to sample from, offering a practical trade-off for some use cases. We release our pre-trained point cloud diffusion models, as well as evaluation code and models, at https://github.com/openai/point-e.

Vector-quantized variational autoencoders (VQ-VAEs) are central to models that rely on high reconstruction fidelity, from neural compression to generative pipelines. Hierarchical extensions, such as VQ-VAE2, are often credited with superior reconstruction performance because they split global and local features across multiple levels. However, since higher levels derive all their information from lower levels, they should not carry additional reconstructive content beyond what the lower-level already encodes. Combined with recent advances in training objectives and quantization mechanisms, this leads us to ask whether a single-level VQ-VAE, with matched representational budget and no codebook collapse, can equal the reconstruction fidelity of its hierarchical counterpart. Although the multi-scale structure of hierarchical models may improve perceptual quality in downstream tasks, the effect of hierarchy on reconstruction accuracy, isolated from codebook utilization and overall representational capacity, remains empirically underexamined. We revisit this question by comparing a two-level VQ-VAE and a capacity-matched single-level model on high-resolution ImageNet images. Consistent with prior observations, we confirm that inadequate codebook utilization limits single-level VQ-VAEs and that overly high-dimensional embeddings destabilize quantization and increase codebook collapse. We show that lightweight interventions such as initialization from data, periodic reset of inactive codebook vectors, and systematic tuning of codebook hyperparameters significantly reduce collapse. Our results demonstrate that when representational budgets are matched, and codebook collapse is mitigated, single-level VQ-VAEs can match the reconstruction fidelity of hierarchical variants, challenging the assumption that hierarchical quantization is inherently superior for high-quality reconstructions.

High-fidelity 3D head generation plays a crucial role in the film, animation and video game industries. In industrial pipelines, studios typically enforce a fixed reference topology across all head assets, as such a clean and uniform topology is a prerequisite for production-level rigging, skinning and animation. In this paper, we present TOPOS, a framework tailored for single image conditioned 3D head generation that jointly recovers geometry and appearance under such an industry-standard topology. In contrast to general 3D generative models which produce triangle meshes with inconsistent topology and numerous vertices, hindering semantic correspondence and asset-level reuse, TOPOS generates head meshes with a fixed, studio-style topology, enabling consistent vertex-level correspondence across all generated heads. To model heads under this unified topology, we proposed a novel variational autoencoder structure, termed TOPOS-VAE. Inspired by multi-model large language models (MLLMs), our TOPOS-VAE leverages the Perceiver Resampler to convert input pointclouds sampled from head meshes of diverse topologies into the target reference topology. Building upon TOPOS-VAE's structured latent space, we train a rectified flow transformer, TOPOS-DiT, to efficiently generate high-fidelity head meshes from a single image. We further present TOPOS-Texture, an end-to-end module that produces relightable UV texture maps from the same portrait image via fine-tuning a multimodal image generative model. The generated textures are spatially aligned with the underlying mesh geometry and faithfully preserve high-frequency appearance details. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TOPOS achieves state-of-the-art performance on 3D head generation, surpassing both classical face reconstruction methods and general 3D object generative models, highlighting its effectiveness for digital human creation.

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) have been a pioneering force in the realm of deep generative models. Amongst its legions of progenies, Wasserstein Autoencoders (WAEs) stand out in particular due to the dual offering of heightened generative quality and a strong theoretical backbone. WAEs consist of an encoding and a decoding network forming a bottleneck with the prime objective of generating new samples resembling the ones it was catered to. In the process, they aim to achieve a target latent representation of the encoded data. Our work is an attempt to offer a theoretical understanding of the machinery behind WAEs. From a statistical viewpoint, we pose the problem as concurrent density estimation tasks based on neural network-induced transformations. This allows us to establish deterministic upper bounds on the realized errors WAEs commit. We also analyze the propagation of these stochastic errors in the presence of adversaries. As a result, both the large sample properties of the reconstructed distribution and the resilience of WAE models are explored.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models excel at robotic tasks by leveraging large-scale 2D vision-language pretraining, but their reliance on RGB images limits spatial reasoning critical for real-world interaction. Retraining these models with 3D data is computationally prohibitive, while discarding existing 2D datasets wastes valuable resources. To bridge this gap, we propose PointVLA, a framework that enhances pre-trained VLAs with point cloud inputs without requiring retraining. Our method freezes the vanilla action expert and injects 3D features via a lightweight modular block. To identify the most effective way of integrating point cloud representations, we conduct a skip-block analysis to pinpoint less useful blocks in the vanilla action expert, ensuring that 3D features are injected only into these blocks--minimizing disruption to pre-trained representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PointVLA outperforms state-of-the-art 2D imitation learning methods, such as OpenVLA, Diffusion Policy and DexVLA, across both simulated and real-world robotic tasks. Specifically, we highlight several key advantages of PointVLA enabled by point cloud integration: (1) Few-shot multi-tasking, where PointVLA successfully performs four different tasks using only 20 demonstrations each; (2) Real-vs-photo discrimination, where PointVLA distinguishes real objects from their images, leveraging 3D world knowledge to improve safety and reliability; (3) Height adaptability, Unlike conventional 2D imitation learning methods, PointVLA enables robots to adapt to objects at varying table height that unseen in train data. Furthermore, PointVLA achieves strong performance in long-horizon tasks, such as picking and packing objects from a moving conveyor belt, showcasing its ability to generalize across complex, dynamic environments.

Polygonal meshes are the standard surface representation of modern 3D pipelines, and generating high-quality meshes with artist-style topology is essential for film, gaming, and interactive 3D applications. Mainstream approaches serialize a mesh into a token sequence and decode it autoregressively, which is slow at inference and sensitive to error accumulation, making them impractical for interactive asset creation. We present Meshy T2, a fast native mesh generation framework built on flow matching. At its core is a vertex-set mesh VAE that encodes a mesh into one continuous latent token per vertex and decodes vertices, edge connectivity, and face winding order in a single pass, preserving high-precision geometry and artist-authored topology without vertex quantization or welding. Generation proceeds as a coarse-to-fine cascade of two flow-matching models: an image-conditioned voxel flow first sketches the overall shape as a coarse occupancy scaffold, and a mesh flow then populates the scaffold with per-vertex latent tokens, conditioned on the image, the scaffold, and a requested vertex budget. This design delivers three practical capabilities: interactive generation speed through parallel flow-based synthesis; effective face-count control through the requested vertex budget; and native support for multi-part assets, whose components emerge directly from the generated connectivity. In our experiments, Meshy T2 achieves state-of-the-art geometric fidelity and completes end-to-end image-to-mesh generation within a median of 6 seconds, over an order of magnitude faster than autoregressive baselines. Code and weights will be available at https://github.com/meshy-dev/meshy-t2.

Video-based point cloud compression (V-PCC) converts the dynamic point cloud data into video sequences using traditional video codecs for efficient encoding. However, this lossy compression scheme introduces artifacts that degrade the color attributes of the data. This paper introduces a framework designed to enhance the color quality in the V-PCC compressed point clouds. We propose the lightweight de-compression Unet (LDC-Unet), a 2D neural network, to optimize the projection maps generated during V-PCC encoding. The optimized 2D maps will then be back-projected to the 3D space to enhance the corresponding point cloud attributes. Additionally, we introduce a transfer learning strategy and develop a customized natural image dataset for the initial training. The model was then fine-tuned using the projection maps of the compressed point clouds. The whole strategy effectively addresses the scarcity of point cloud training data. Our experiments, conducted on the public 8i voxelized full bodies long sequences (8iVSLF) dataset, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in improving the color quality.

Large-scale terrain scans are the basis for many important tasks, such as topographic mapping, forestry, agriculture, and infrastructure planning. The resulting point cloud data sets are so massive in size that even basic tasks like viewing take hours to days of pre-processing in order to create level-of-detail structures that allow inspecting the data set in their entirety in real time. In this paper, we propose a method that is capable of instantly visualizing massive country-sized scans with hundreds of billions of points. Upon opening the data set, we first load a sparse subsample of points and initialize an overview of the entire point cloud, immediately followed by a surface reconstruction process to generate higher-quality, hole-free heightmaps. As users start navigating towards a region of interest, we continue to prioritize the heightmap construction process to the user's viewpoint. Once a user zooms in closely, we load the full-resolution point cloud data for that region and update the corresponding height map textures with the full-resolution data. As users navigate elsewhere, full-resolution point data that is no longer needed is unloaded, but the updated heightmap textures are retained as a form of medium level of detail. Overall, our method constitutes a form of direct out-of-core rendering for massive point cloud data sets (terabytes, compressed) that requires no preprocessing and no additional disk space. Source code, executable, pre-trained model, and dataset are available at: https://github.com/cg-tuwien/lidarscout

Transformer, as an alternative to CNN, has been proven effective in many modalities (e.g., texts and images). For 3D point cloud transformers, existing efforts focus primarily on pushing their accuracy to the state-of-the-art level. However, their latency lags behind sparse convolution-based models (3x slower), hindering their usage in resource-constrained, latency-sensitive applications (such as autonomous driving). This inefficiency comes from point clouds' sparse and irregular nature, whereas transformers are designed for dense, regular workloads. This paper presents FlatFormer to close this latency gap by trading spatial proximity for better computational regularity. We first flatten the point cloud with window-based sorting and partition points into groups of equal sizes rather than windows of equal shapes. This effectively avoids expensive structuring and padding overheads. We then apply self-attention within groups to extract local features, alternate sorting axis to gather features from different directions, and shift windows to exchange features across groups. FlatFormer delivers state-of-the-art accuracy on Waymo Open Dataset with 4.6x speedup over (transformer-based) SST and 1.4x speedup over (sparse convolutional) CenterPoint. This is the first point cloud transformer that achieves real-time performance on edge GPUs and is faster than sparse convolutional methods while achieving on-par or even superior accuracy on large-scale benchmarks.

Recently, the self-supervised learning framework data2vec has shown inspiring performance for various modalities using a masked student-teacher approach. However, it remains open whether such a framework generalizes to the unique challenges of 3D point clouds. To answer this question, we extend data2vec to the point cloud domain and report encouraging results on several downstream tasks. In an in-depth analysis, we discover that the leakage of positional information reveals the overall object shape to the student even under heavy masking and thus hampers data2vec to learn strong representations for point clouds. We address this 3D-specific shortcoming by proposing point2vec, which unleashes the full potential of data2vec-like pre-training on point clouds. Our experiments show that point2vec outperforms other self-supervised methods on shape classification and few-shot learning on ModelNet40 and ScanObjectNN, while achieving competitive results on part segmentation on ShapeNetParts. These results suggest that the learned representations are strong and transferable, highlighting point2vec as a promising direction for self-supervised learning of point cloud representations.

We propose the Wasserstein Auto-Encoder (WAE)---a new algorithm for building a generative model of the data distribution. WAE minimizes a penalized form of the Wasserstein distance between the model distribution and the target distribution, which leads to a different regularizer than the one used by the Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE). This regularizer encourages the encoded training distribution to match the prior. We compare our algorithm with several other techniques and show that it is a generalization of adversarial auto-encoders (AAE). Our experiments show that WAE shares many of the properties of VAEs (stable training, encoder-decoder architecture, nice latent manifold structure) while generating samples of better quality, as measured by the FID score.

Visual tokenizers are pivotal in multimodal large models, acting as bridges between continuous inputs and discrete tokens. Nevertheless, training high-compression-rate VQ-VAEs remains computationally demanding, often necessitating thousands of GPU hours. This work demonstrates that a pre-trained VAE can be efficiently transformed into a VQ-VAE by controlling quantization noise within the VAE's tolerance threshold. We present Quantize-then-Rectify (ReVQ), a framework leveraging pre-trained VAEs to enable rapid VQ-VAE training with minimal computational overhead. By integrating channel multi-group quantization to enlarge codebook capacity and a post rectifier to mitigate quantization errors, ReVQ compresses ImageNet images into at most 512 tokens while sustaining competitive reconstruction quality (rFID = 1.06). Significantly, ReVQ reduces training costs by over two orders of magnitude relative to state-of-the-art approaches: ReVQ finishes full training on a single NVIDIA 4090 in approximately 22 hours, whereas comparable methods require 4.5 days on 32 A100 GPUs. Experimental results show that ReVQ achieves superior efficiency-reconstruction trade-offs.

Sequential VAEs have been successfully considered for many high-dimensional time series modelling problems, with many variant models relying on discrete-time mechanisms such as recurrent neural networks (RNNs). On the other hand, continuous-time methods have recently gained attraction, especially in the context of irregularly-sampled time series, where they can better handle the data than discrete-time methods. One such class are Gaussian process variational autoencoders (GPVAEs), where the VAE prior is set as a Gaussian process (GP). However, a major limitation of GPVAEs is that it inherits the cubic computational cost as GPs, making it unattractive to practioners. In this work, we leverage the equivalent discrete state space representation of Markovian GPs to enable linear time GPVAE training via Kalman filtering and smoothing. We show on a variety of high-dimensional temporal and spatiotemporal tasks that our method performs favourably compared to existing approaches whilst being computationally highly scalable.

High-fidelity 3D object synthesis remains significantly more challenging than 2D image generation due to the unstructured nature of mesh data and the cubic complexity of dense volumetric grids. Existing two-stage pipelines-compressing meshes with a VAE (using either 2D or 3D supervision), followed by latent diffusion sampling-often suffer from severe detail loss caused by inefficient representations and modality mismatches introduced in VAE. We introduce Sparc3D, a unified framework that combines a sparse deformable marching cubes representation Sparcubes with a novel encoder Sparconv-VAE. Sparcubes converts raw meshes into high-resolution (1024^3) surfaces with arbitrary topology by scattering signed distance and deformation fields onto a sparse cube, allowing differentiable optimization. Sparconv-VAE is the first modality-consistent variational autoencoder built entirely upon sparse convolutional networks, enabling efficient and near-lossless 3D reconstruction suitable for high-resolution generative modeling through latent diffusion. Sparc3D achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction fidelity on challenging inputs, including open surfaces, disconnected components, and intricate geometry. It preserves fine-grained shape details, reduces training and inference cost, and integrates naturally with latent diffusion models for scalable, high-resolution 3D generation.

Generating high-quality 3D assets from text and images has long been challenging, primarily due to the absence of scalable 3D representations capable of capturing intricate geometry distributions. In this work, we introduce Direct3D, a native 3D generative model scalable to in-the-wild input images, without requiring a multiview diffusion model or SDS optimization. Our approach comprises two primary components: a Direct 3D Variational Auto-Encoder (D3D-VAE) and a Direct 3D Diffusion Transformer (D3D-DiT). D3D-VAE efficiently encodes high-resolution 3D shapes into a compact and continuous latent triplane space. Notably, our method directly supervises the decoded geometry using a semi-continuous surface sampling strategy, diverging from previous methods relying on rendered images as supervision signals. D3D-DiT models the distribution of encoded 3D latents and is specifically designed to fuse positional information from the three feature maps of the triplane latent, enabling a native 3D generative model scalable to large-scale 3D datasets. Additionally, we introduce an innovative image-to-3D generation pipeline incorporating semantic and pixel-level image conditions, allowing the model to produce 3D shapes consistent with the provided conditional image input. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our large-scale pre-trained Direct3D over previous image-to-3D approaches, achieving significantly better generation quality and generalization ability, thus establishing a new state-of-the-art for 3D content creation. Project page: https://nju-3dv.github.io/projects/Direct3D/.

The increasing demand for virtual reality applications has highlighted the significance of crafting immersive 3D assets. We present a text-to-3D 360^{circ} scene generation pipeline that facilitates the creation of comprehensive 360^{circ} scenes for in-the-wild environments in a matter of minutes. Our approach utilizes the generative power of a 2D diffusion model and prompt self-refinement to create a high-quality and globally coherent panoramic image. This image acts as a preliminary "flat" (2D) scene representation. Subsequently, it is lifted into 3D Gaussians, employing splatting techniques to enable real-time exploration. To produce consistent 3D geometry, our pipeline constructs a spatially coherent structure by aligning the 2D monocular depth into a globally optimized point cloud. This point cloud serves as the initial state for the centroids of 3D Gaussians. In order to address invisible issues inherent in single-view inputs, we impose semantic and geometric constraints on both synthesized and input camera views as regularizations. These guide the optimization of Gaussians, aiding in the reconstruction of unseen regions. In summary, our method offers a globally consistent 3D scene within a 360^{circ} perspective, providing an enhanced immersive experience over existing techniques. Project website at: http://dreamscene360.github.io/

Recently, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong generalization across diverse tasks. However, effective robotic manipulation in physical environments fundamentally requires geometric understanding and spatial reasoning. While some VLA approaches attempt to incorporate 3D information, they are constrained by limited data availability and geometric information loss in current 3D encoding pipelines, and fail to jointly capture 3D geometry and temporally structured actions in dynamic environments. To address these limitations, we introduce Lift3D-VLA, a unified VLA framework that equips models with explicit 3D point cloud reasoning and enables temporally coherent action generation. First, building upon our previous work Lift3D, an enhanced 2D model-lifting strategy is proposed to geometrically align 3D points with pretrained 2D positional embeddings. This design enables direct point-cloud encoding within the VLA vision encoder while minimizing spatial information loss. Based on explicit 3D inputs, we propose Geometry-Centric Masked Autoencoding (GC-MAE), a dual-objective self-supervised framework that reconstructs the current point cloud while predicting its future geometric evolution. This formulation allows the 2D vision encoder to internalize both 3D structure and physical dynamics. To fully exploit 3D representations, we further design layer-wise temporal action modeling, which leverages multiple layers of the LLM to collaboratively predict action chunks, enabling temporally consistent predictions. Across 22 simulated tasks and 8 real-world manipulation tasks, Lift3D-VLA achieves 10.8% and 11.1% higher mean success rates on MetaWorld and RLBench than the best-performing prior VLA methods, and outperforms the strongest real-world baseline by 4 percentage points, while exhibiting stronger generalization to out-of-distribution perturbations.

Recently, image-to-3D approaches have significantly advanced the generation quality and speed of 3D assets based on large reconstruction models, particularly 3D Gaussian reconstruction models. Existing large 3D Gaussian models directly map 2D image to 3D Gaussian parameters, while regressing 2D image to 3D Gaussian representations is challenging without 3D priors. In this paper, we propose a large Point-to-Gaussian model, that inputs the initial point cloud produced from large 3D diffusion model conditional on 2D image to generate the Gaussian parameters, for image-to-3D generation. The point cloud provides initial 3D geometry prior for Gaussian generation, thus significantly facilitating image-to-3D Generation. Moreover, we present the Attention mechanism, Projection mechanism, and Point feature extractor, dubbed as APP block, for fusing the image features with point cloud features. The qualitative and quantitative experiments extensively demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on GSO and Objaverse datasets, and show the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) have gained significant popularity among researchers as a powerful tool for understanding unknown distributions based on limited samples. This popularity stems partly from their impressive performance and partly from their ability to provide meaningful feature representations in the latent space. Wasserstein Autoencoders (WAEs), a variant of VAEs, aim to not only improve model efficiency but also interpretability. However, there has been limited focus on analyzing their statistical guarantees. The matter is further complicated by the fact that the data distributions to which WAEs are applied - such as natural images - are often presumed to possess an underlying low-dimensional structure within a high-dimensional feature space, which current theory does not adequately account for, rendering known bounds inefficient. To bridge the gap between the theory and practice of WAEs, in this paper, we show that WAEs can learn the data distributions when the network architectures are properly chosen. We show that the convergence rates of the expected excess risk in the number of samples for WAEs are independent of the high feature dimension, instead relying only on the intrinsic dimension of the data distribution.

We introduce LTX-Video, a transformer-based latent diffusion model that adopts a holistic approach to video generation by seamlessly integrating the responsibilities of the Video-VAE and the denoising transformer. Unlike existing methods, which treat these components as independent, LTX-Video aims to optimize their interaction for improved efficiency and quality. At its core is a carefully designed Video-VAE that achieves a high compression ratio of 1:192, with spatiotemporal downscaling of 32 x 32 x 8 pixels per token, enabled by relocating the patchifying operation from the transformer's input to the VAE's input. Operating in this highly compressed latent space enables the transformer to efficiently perform full spatiotemporal self-attention, which is essential for generating high-resolution videos with temporal consistency. However, the high compression inherently limits the representation of fine details. To address this, our VAE decoder is tasked with both latent-to-pixel conversion and the final denoising step, producing the clean result directly in pixel space. This approach preserves the ability to generate fine details without incurring the runtime cost of a separate upsampling module. Our model supports diverse use cases, including text-to-video and image-to-video generation, with both capabilities trained simultaneously. It achieves faster-than-real-time generation, producing 5 seconds of 24 fps video at 768x512 resolution in just 2 seconds on an Nvidia H100 GPU, outperforming all existing models of similar scale. The source code and pre-trained models are publicly available, setting a new benchmark for accessible and scalable video generation.