Papers for
graphics software engineers
Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.
Synthetic benchmark enables tests of deformable 3D shape reconstruction
Synthetic Deformable Tubular Benchmark: A mechanically annotated dataset for evaluating deformable 3D reconstruction
Abstract: Evaluating deformable 3D reconstruction requires ground truth linking camera motion, surface deformation, material correspondence and image appearance. We introduce the Synthetic Deformable Tubular Benchmark, generated with LumenMorph, an open-source toolkit for creating, annotating and evaluating tubular scenes. The release contains 5,580 RGB images. Its baseline crosses three surface-motion conditions with moving and stationary cameras in six scene families; matched appearance variants cover only moving-camera finite-element actions in four families. Documented public and evaluation interfaces expose camera poses, geometry, depth, deformation fields, persistent material correspondences and discrete finite-element records. Persistent triangle identities and material weights let users track the same surface location across frames and query its three-dimensional trajectory. Separately implemented geometric and mechanical checks assess annotation consistency with the generating models. Structure-from-motion, optical-flow and supplied-geometry displacement-interpolation studies demonstrate how the resource distinguishes registration coverage from geometric accuracy, exposes camera- and surface-motion effects, and tests the benefits and mismatch of mechanical priors. Public readers, evaluation contracts and the configurable generator support reuse and extension. Data integrity, fixed-environment repeatability and retained-prediction score replay have distinct verification scopes. The benchmark provides a controlled synthetic reference without claiming anatomical or clinical realism.
Multi-view 3D reconstruction speeds up with adaptive Voronoi cells
CVTSplat: Multi-view Reconstruction Using an Adaptive Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation
Abstract: Voronoi tessellations have recently emerged as an adaptive, space-partitioning discretization for shape and appearance reconstruction from multi-view images. However, the irregular cells they produce make the repeated reconstruction of the tessellation during optimization costly. We therefore explore adaptive centroidal Voronoi tessellations (CVTs), which extend standard CVTs with non-uniform cell sizes while preserving the regular, well-shaped cells that make them efficient to compute. In CVTSplat, cell size is modulated by the evolving signed distance field, concentrating sites near the zero level set while keeping cells nearly centroidal. This regularity lets us specialize the whole pipeline, with GPU algorithms for nearest-neighbor queries and approximate Voronoi construction, and a rasterizer tailored to small, nearly isotropic cells. Our Voronoi construction is 5 to 10 times faster than general-purpose alternatives in this regime. On DTU and BlendedMVS, CVTSplat reaches geometric accuracy competitive with the best Gaussian-splatting surface methods while training in about 2.5 minutes on a single GPU.
Constant memory method improves gradient estimation in light tracing
Stochastic Graph Compression for Constant-Memory Differentiable Light Tracing
Abstract: We describe Reservoir Light Replay Backpropagation (ResLRB), a method for reverse-mode differentiable light tracing whose memory is constant in path length and in the number of sensor connections per light path. Naive automatic differentiation of a light tracer records a computation graph that grows with the number of valid sensor connections along each path, since flux can be splatted from every scattering vertex; adjoint path replay removes the analogous dependence on depth for viewpoint path tracing, but its non-branching structure does not extend to the splatting case. We compress the adjoint graph during the primal pass by stochastically retaining a single representative sensor connection per light path via a streaming weighted reservoir. The adjoint pass reconstructs the path deterministically by replaying its pseudorandom number sequence and backpropagates only through the retained connection, yielding an unbiased gradient estimator whose peak memory is that of differentiating a single scattering event.
Hybrid basis method speeds up diffusion model image and video generation
Hybrid-Basis Feature Forecasting for Diffusion Sampling Acceleration
Abstract: We propose Hybrid-Basis Feature Forecasting (HybridFF), a training-free, plug-and-play framework for accelerating diffusion sampling. To capture local smoothness, long-range trends, and complex non-monotonic variations when modeling feature evolution, HybridFF first estimates coefficients using moving least squares (MLS) for each of multiple complementary basis families and then combines the corresponding predictors using fusion weights. In addition to the choice of basis functions, the fusion weights also play a critical role. We introduce two strategies to balance quality and speedup. HybridFF (Fixed) prioritizes efficiency with model-specific fusion weights calibrated on a small set and held constant during inference. HybridFF (Adaptive) updates the fusion weights online using branch reliability scores computed from an exponential moving average of full-step prediction errors, improving prediction fidelity and generation quality under aggressive caching while retaining substantial acceleration. Experiments across DiT-XL/2, FLUX.1-dev, SD3.5-Large, and HunyuanVideo demonstrate a favorable speedup--quality trade-off over representative single-basis forecasters and caching baselines.
Visual grouping forms overlapping units without knowing object meaning
Overlapping Visual Grouping Without Semantic Priors
Abstract: Most computer-vision systems organize visual input toward a predefined interpretation, such as semantic categories, prompted regions, learned object-like representations, or a single spatial partition. This work considers an earlier stage of visual organization: the formation of candidate perceptual units directly from sensor measurements before their identity, meaning, or task relevance is known. We introduce Domain Parent Grouping (DPG), a sensor-grounded grouping method in which complementary measurement relationships are represented in separate processing domains. Spatially connected groups formed within these domains are related through cross-domain overlap, yielding a non-exclusive grouping representation rather than a single mutually exclusive segmentation. This representation retains broader and more localized groups, as well as alternative grouping boundaries over the same image locations, simultaneously available. DPG also includes a native mechanism for reprocessing selected group content, in which input-relative measurement ranges allow the observational resolution to change while preserving previously formed groups. DPG is implemented using three domains representing locally contextualized luminance, direct chromatic relationships, and contextual chromatic relationships. Experiments on the BSDS500 dataset demonstrate the benefit of combining the three domains. The results further show that DPG forms measurement-supported groups corresponding to low-level image structure, and that these groups exhibit measurable correspondence with human-annotated regions and boundaries. This demonstrates that structured visual organization can emerge directly from relationships among sensor measurements.