For multivariate co-generation in scientific applications, we advocate pairwise block rather than joint modeling of all variables. This design mitigates the computational burden and data imbalance. To this end, we propose an Annealed Co-Generation (ACG) framework that replaces high-dimensional diffusion modeling with a low-dimensional diffusion model, which enables multivariate co-generation by composing pairwise variable generations. We first train an unconditional diffusion model over causal variables that are disentangled into pairs. At inference time, we recover the joint distribution by coupling these pairwise models through shared common variables, enabling coherent multivariate generation without any additional training. By employing a three-stage annealing process-Consensus, Heating, and Cooling-our method enforces consistency across shared common variables and progressively constrains each pairwise data distribution to lie on a learnable manifold, while maintaining high likelihood within each pair. We demonstrate the framework's flexibility and efficacy on two distinct scientific tasks: flow-field completion and antibody generation. All datasets and code will be made publicly available upon publication.
Object counting is a foundational vision task with over a decade of dedicated research, yet state-of-the-art models still fail systematically in the mixed-object setting that dominates real-world applications such as industrial inspection and product sorting. We show that this gap is strongly driven by limitations in existing training and evaluation data: real counting datasets are prohibitively expensive to annotate and suffer from labeling noise, while existing synthetic alternatives lack diversity and realism. We address this with MixCount, a dataset and benchmark for mixed-object counting designed to target the failure modes of current counting models. To overcome the high cost of constructing and labeling such data, we develop an automatic generation pipeline that synthesizes images, fine-grained textual descriptions, and pixel-perfect counting annotations at scale, eliminating the labeling ambiguity that plagues prior datasets. Evaluating state-of-the-art counting models on MixCount exposes severe degradation in the mixed-object setting. More importantly, training these models on our synthesized data yields substantial gains on real-world benchmarks, reducing MAE by 20.14
Designing aerial robots for specialized tasks, from perching to payload delivery, requires tailoring their aerodynamic shape to specific mission requirements. For tasks involving wide flight envelopes, the usual sequential process of first determining the shape and then the motion planner is likely to be suboptimal due to the inherent nonlinear interactions between them. This limitation has been motivating co-design research, which involves jointly optimizing the aerodynamic shape and the motion planner. In this paper, we present a general-purpose, gradient-based, nested co-design framework where the motion planner solves an optimal control problem and the aerodynamic forces used in the dynamics model are determined by a neural surrogate model. This enables us to model complex subsonic flow conditions encountered in aerial robotics and to overcome the limited applicability of existing co-design methods. These limitations stem from the simplifying assumptions they require for computational tractability to either the planner or the aerodynamics. We validate our method on two complex dynamic tasks for fixed-wing gliders: perching and a short landing. Our optimized designs improve task performance compared to an evolutionary baseline in a fraction of the computation time.
Compositional implicit surface representations model scenes as collections of objects, each encoded by a Signed Distance Field (SDF). A fundamental limitation of this approach is that multiple SDFs can produce geometries that interpenetrate, violating physical plausibility. Existing mitigation strategies rely on soft penalty terms that reduce but do not eliminate intersections, and require careful loss weighting. To truly prevent interpenetration, we propose a hard constraint on vector-valued SDFs and introduce S2MDF, a lightweight plug-and-play module that enforces the constraint on any object-compositional SDF representation without architectural modifications. It introduces negligible computational overhead and is compatible with linearly-interpolated standard meshing algorithms such as Marching Cubes. It can be applied during training or as a post-processing step. Experiments on multiple state-of-the-art compositional methods show that S2MDF reduces intersections to numerical precision while preserving reconstruction quality, outperforming existing mitigation strategies.
Limited-angle electron tomography (ET) aims to reconstruct 3D shapes from 2D projections of transmission electron microscopy (TEM) within a restricted range and number of tilting angles, but it suffers from the missing-edge problem that causes severe reconstruction artefacts. Deep learning approaches have shown promising results in alleviating these artefacts, yet they typically require large high-quality training datasets with known 3D ground truth, which are difficult to obtain in electron microscopy. To address these challenges, we propose TEMDiff, a novel 3D diffusion-based iterative reconstruction framework. Our method is trained on readily available volumetric FIB-SEM data using a simulator that maps them to TEM tilt series, enabling the model to learn realistic structural priors without requiring clean TEM ground truth. By operating directly on 3D volumes, TEMDiff implicitly enforces consistency across slices without the need for additional regularization. In simulated ET datasets with limited angular coverage, TEMDiff outperforms the most advanced methods in reconstruction quality. We further demonstrate that a trained model TEMDiff generalizes well to real-world TEM tilts obtained under different conditions and can recover accurate structures from tilt ranges as narrow as 8 degrees, with 2 degrees increments, without any retraining or fine-tuning.
We propose DiffGeo, a latent space diffusion-based generative framework for aerodynamic design space exploration under extreme data scarcity. DiffGeo combines a learned latent space model for automatic shape parameterization, with a diffusion sampler to directly generate novel, geometry-valid and controllable designs. We validate the approach on a series of case studies: (i) a 2D airfoil generation benchmark, where DiffGeo's latent diffusion model is compared against GAN- and VAE-based baselines in terms of sample quality, diversity and constraint adherence under limited data; (ii) integration into a surrogate-based optimization pipeline, where DiffGeo's conditional sampling produces task-informed airfoil data that improve both surrogate modeling and optimization performance; and (iii) extension to 3D turbomachinery blade prototyping, where DiffGeo generates realistic and high-performance blade geometries from a small set of reference designs. Throughout these investigations, DiffGeo achieves high-quality and diverse shape generation with at least an order of magnitude less data than alternatives, decouples geometry representation from design targets for flexible reuse, and seamlessly incorporates complex design constraints via energy-based conditioning. These capabilities demonstrate DiffGeo's potential to enhance early-stage design by automating design space exploration–improving efficiency, expanding design diversity and embedding engineering knowledge through controllable guidance.
Existing generative models for 3D shapes can synthesize high-fidelity and visually plausible shapes. For certain classes of shapes that have undergone an engineering design process, the realism of the shape is tightly coupled with the underlying physical properties, e.g., aerodynamic efficiency for automobiles. Since existing methods lack knowledge of such physics, they are unable to use this knowledge to enhance the realism of shape generation. Motivated by this, we propose a unified physics-based 3D shape generation pipeline, with a focus on industrial design applications. Specifically, we introduce a new flow matching model with explicit physical guidance, consisting of an alternating update process. We iteratively perform a velocity-based update and a physics-based refinement, progressively adjusting the latent code to align with the desired 3D shapes and physical properties. We further strengthen physical validity by incorporating a physics-aware regularization term into the velocity-based update step. To support such physics-guided updates, we build a shape-and-physics variational autoencoder (SP-VAE) that jointly encodes shape and physics information into a unified latent space. The experiments on three benchmarks show that this synergistic formulation improves shape realism beyond mere visual plausibility.
In this work, we focus on boosting the feature extraction to improve the performance of Structure-from-Motion (SfM) in endoscopy videos. We present SuperPoint-E, a new local feature extraction method that, using our proposed Tracking Adaptation supervision strategy, significantly improves the quality of feature detection and description in endoscopy. Extensive experimentation on real endoscopy recordings studies our approach's most suitable configuration and evaluates SuperPoint-E feature quality. The comparison with other baselines also shows that our 3D reconstructions are denser and cover more and longer video segments because our detector fires more densely and our features are more likely to survive (i.e. higher detection precision). In addition, our descriptor is more discriminative, making the guided matching step almost redundant. The presented approach brings significant improvements in the 3D reconstructions obtained, via SfM on endoscopy videos, compared to the original SuperPoint and the gold standard SfM COLMAP pipeline.
Eye tracking (ET) is a foundational technology for advanced AR/VR applications. However, training ET models for every new ET device is challenging: real data collection is costly and time-consuming, while existing synthetic data generation methods lack realism. To remove the need for additional data collection while maintaining data quality, we introduce a data-driven 3D prior that models the distribution of human eyes across diverse identities, gaze directions, and light settings. This model, which we coin GazePrior, then enables sparse-input 3D reconstruction of annotated data collected with previous ET devices, which can in turn be rendered from the cameras of any target ET device. Our approach synthesizes data with the realism, diversity and ground-truth accuracy of real data collection without its prohibitive costs. Our experiments demonstrate that ET models trained with our synthesized data outperform previous zero-shot methods, achieving higher accuracy and robustness.
Reconstructing 3D clothed humans from monocular images and videos is a fundamental problem with applications in virtual try-on, avatar creation, and mixed reality. Despite significant progress in human body recovery, accurately reconstructing garment geometry, particularly for loose-fitting clothing, remains an open challenge. We propose a unified framework for high-fidelity 3D garment reconstruction from both single images and video sequences. Our approach combines Implicit Sewing Patterns (ISP) with a generative diffusion model to learn expressive garment shape priors in 2D UV space. Leveraging these priors, we introduce a mapping model that establishes correspondences between image pixels, UV pattern coordinates, and 3D geometry, enabling accurate and detailed garment reconstruction from single images. We further extend this formulation to dynamic reconstruction by introducing a spatio-temporal diffusion scheme with test-time guidance to enforce long-range temporal consistency. We also develop analytic projection-based constraints that preserve image-aligned geometry in visible regions while enforcing coherent completion in occluded areas over time. Although trained exclusively on synthetically simulated cloth data, our method generalizes well to real-world imagery and consistently outperforms existing approaches on both tight- and loose-fitting garments. The reconstructed garments preserve fine geometric detail while exhibiting realistic dynamic motion, supporting downstream applications such as texture editing, garment retargeting, and animation.
Optimizing 3D shapes within the latent spaces of deep generative models is fundamental to computer assisted engineering, yet remains prone to a critical failure mode we term manifold drift: the tendency of gradient-based optimization to move latent vectors away from the manifold of valid shapes. This problem is exacerbated in state-of-the-art 3D shape generative models that operate in increasingly high-dimensional latent spaces where valid shapes occupy a vanishingly small fraction of the full space. Existing mitigation strategies, including latent regularization and flow-matching approaches, either sacrifice expressiveness, demand a difficult trade-off between objective guidance and generative fidelity that remains prone to manifold drift, or are computationally infeasible to scale to modern, large-capacity 3D shape models. We introduce a novel optimizer-corrector framework that alternates between gradient steps for objective minimization and guided flow matching to drive the latent state back to the valid shape manifold. By decoupling objective minimization from flow-based correction, optimizing freely and correcting strictly, this alternating design avoids inherent trade-offs, preserving geometric validity without sacrificing expressiveness while remaining computationally feasible on modern 3D shape models. We demonstrate its effectiveness across generative priors of varying complexity, from simple vector latent spaces to large-scale architectures across a variety of downstream optimization tasks, including aerodynamic drag reduction and object compliance optimization.
For full-body avatars, modeling surface dynamics is crucial for overcoming the uncanny valley and achieving perceptual realism. Person-agnostic methods recover static 3D avatars from monocular images, videos, or text prompts, but their skeleton-driven animations lack realistic surface dynamics such as clothing wrinkles. In contrast, person-specific methods achieve high-quality rendering and realistic dynamics, but require expensive multi-view captures for each individual. Recent generalizable dynamic avatar methods struggle to embed surface dynamics, leading to either limited multi-view consistency or dynamic expressiveness. To this end, we propose AvatarDynamizer, a generative method that transforms an off-the-shelf static 3D avatar into a controllable, realistic, and multi-view-consistent 4D avatar. We introduce a novel texture-space surface-dynamics embedding and formulate avatar dynamics modeling as conditional texture generation. Our encoder–decoder representation embeds pose-dependent dynamics into dynamic texture maps, enabling compatibility with pre-trained video diffusion models while decoding them into 3D Gaussians for multi-view consistent rendering. Since existing datasets are limited in scale, sequence length, or motion diversity, we collect a large-scale multi-view dataset with long sequences covering diverse skeletal motions and surface dynamics. Experiments show that our method effectively animates static avatars with faithful surface dynamics and outperforms competing generalizable methods in visual fidelity, especially under limited dynamic training data.
Many downstream decisions in complex terrain require fast wind estimates at a small number of user-specified locations and heights for a given forecast valid time, rather than another dense forecast field on a fixed grid. We present WindINR, a latent-state implicit neural representation framework for continuous high-resolution local wind query and sparse-observation correction. WindINR maps static terrain descriptors, a low-resolution background field, and continuous query coordinates to a high-resolution wind state through a latent-conditioned decoder. To enable rapid inference-time correction, WindINR separates reusable representation learning from sample-specific latent-state correction. During training, a privileged encoder infers a reference latent state from high-resolution supervision, a deployable latent predictor estimates an initial latent state from inference-time inputs alone, and their discrepancies are summarized into a dataset-adaptive Gaussian prior over latent corrections. At inference time, within the WindINR module, network weights remain fixed and only the latent state is updated by minimizing a regularized correction objective using sparse observations and their uncertainty. In controlled OSSEs over the Senja region, including a UAV-aided approach scenario and random-observation robustness tests, WindINR improves local high-resolution wind estimates by updating only a compact latent state rather than the full network. The corrected representation remains continuously queryable at arbitrary coordinates and, in our CPU benchmark, yields about a 2.6× online-correction speedup over full-network fine-tuning, suggesting a practical interface between kilometer-scale background products, sparse local observations, and wind queries in complex terrain.
Black-box optimization is a fundamental science and engineering tool that makes it possible to optimize objectives without gradient information. Unfortunately, as it often requires many function evaluations, it can be challenging when each one is costly. This is especially true when the evaluation function is noisy or failure-prone, and when high-performing solutions are confined to thin, curved, or disconnected regions of the search space. Existing methods leveraging generative models to navigate these subspaces are built to sample from reward-aligned distributions. As a result, they require a large number of evaluations to align their sampler effectively, making them impractical in low-budget settings. We propose SPARROW, an algorithm that completely decouples the generative prior from the reward signal. SPARROW can use any sampler with a known corruption process and trained on unevaluated data, as a fixed, structured proposal operator. Optimization proceeds by rank-based guidance over an archive of evaluated candidates. SPARROW can navigate complex geometries, handle unreliable reward signals, and perform effective optimization under very low evaluation budgets. We provide asymptotic convergence guarantees over the sampler support and demonstrate strong empirical performance on problems with unreliable rewards and geometrically complex landscapes.
Generative design can rapidly propose diverse, constraint-satisfying candidates for real-time analysis and closed-loop optimization under expensive physics evaluations. However, reliable generation requires effective incorporation of physical constraints by means of physics-guided generation. In many state-of-the-art physics-guided flow-based methods, physical optimization cannot fully converge within the generative time schedule, leading to limited constraint-satisfaction accuracy in the generated samples. We refer to this issue as the asynchronicity. This phenomenon arises when an energy-based objective is used as the physical loss in denoising generative paradigms, such as diffusion models and flow matching models. To address it, we propose Dflow-SUR, a new physics-guided flow matching framework that performs surrogate-based, gradient-driven optimization directly in the initial source space used to initialize the flow inference. Compared with existing physics-guided schemes, Dflow-SUR improves physical-loss minimization by four to six orders of magnitude, yielding samples that better satisfy physical constraints and, for 3D wing design, produce smoother spanwise pressure distributions. Moreover, Dflow-SUR reduces wall-clock time by 74
Accurate cardiac anatomy modeling requires the model to be able to handle intricate interrelations among structures. In this paper, we propose VecHeart, a unified framework for holistic reconstruction and generation of four-chamber cardiac structures. To overcome the limitations of current feed-forward implicit methods, specifically their restriction to single-object modeling and their neglect of inter-part correlations, we introduce Hybrid Part Transformer, which leverages part-specific learnable queries and interleaved attention to capture complex inter-chamber dependencies. Furthermore, we propose Anatomical Completion Masking and Modality Alignment strategies, enabling the model to infer complete four-chamber structures from partial, sparse, or noisy observations, even when certain anatomical parts are entirely missing. VecHeart also seamlessly extends to 3D+t dynamic mesh sequence generation, demonstrating exceptional versatility. Experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, maintaining high-fidelity reconstruction across diverse challenging scenarios. Code will be released.
Deep learning is becoming increasingly pervasive within the fluid mechanics community. However, it continues to face resistance due to the difficulty of predicting its generalization behavior. This challenge can be partially addressed by training models that know when they are wrong—that is, models capable of providing meaningful estimates of uncertainty alongside their predictions. Although uncertainty quantification is a well-established area in the deep learning literature, it has yet to gain widespread adoption in fluid mechanics, particularly for neural network-based models. This paper reviews recent advances in uncertainty-aware deep learning, focusing on methods that are grounded in rigorous mathematical frameworks while requiring minimal modifications to standard architectures or training procedures. Four approaches—Deep Ensembles, Monte Carlo Dropout, Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics, and ZigZag—are evaluated on two fluid mechanics datasets of increasing complexity to illustrate their respective strengths and limitations. The importance of recalibration is also stressed.
Visual object counting is a fundamental computer vision task in industrial inspection, where accurate, high-throughput inventory tracking and quality assurance are critical. Moreover, manufactured parts are often too light to reliably deduce their count from their weight, or too heavy to move the stack on a scale safely and practically, making automated visual counting the more robust solution in many scenarios. However, existing methods struggle with stacked 3D items in containers, pallets, or bins, where most objects are heavily occluded and only a few are directly visible. To address this important yet underexplored challenge, we propose a novel 3D counting approach that decomposes the task into two complementary subproblems: estimating the 3D geometry of the stack and its occupancy ratio from multi-view images. By combining geometric reconstruction with deep learning-based depth analysis, our method can accurately count identical manufactured parts inside containers, even when they are irregularly stacked and partially hidden. We validate our 3D counting pipeline on large-scale synthetic and diverse real-world data with manually verified total counts, demonstrating robust performance under realistic inspection conditions.
Recent progress in text-conditioned human motion generation has been largely driven by diffusion models trained on large-scale human motion data. Building on this progress, recent methods attempt to transfer such models for character animation and real robot control by applying a Whole-Body Controller (WBC) that converts diffusion-generated motions into executable trajectories. While WBC trajectories become compliant with physics, they may expose substantial deviations from original motion. To address this issue, we here propose PhysMoDPO, a Direct Preference Optimization framework. Unlike prior work that relies on hand-crafted physics-aware heuristics such as foot-sliding penalties, we integrate WBC into our training pipeline and optimize diffusion model such that the output of WBC becomes compliant both with physics and original text instructions. To train PhysMoDPO we deploy physics-based and task-specific rewards and use them to assign preference to synthesized trajectories. Our extensive experiments on text-to-motion and spatial control tasks demonstrate consistent improvements of PhysMoDPO in both physical realism and task-related metrics on simulated robots. Moreover, we demonstrate that PhysMoDPO results in significant improvements when applied to zero-shot motion transfer in simulation and for real-world deployment on a G1 humanoid robot.