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.

Mon 26 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Reconstructing 3D shapes that bend and move is hard to check without detailed known references. The authors created a synthetic dataset with images and full mechanical annotations of deforming tubular shapes seen from different camera angles. This dataset lets users test and compare methods that track surface motion, shape, and material points over time. It helps understand how camera movement and physical deformation impact reconstruction performance by offering detailed ground truth data. The authors also provide tools to evaluate annotations and extend the dataset.
Open → 2610.35621v1

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.

Mon 26 OctComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionGraphics
The gist
Reconstructing 3D shapes from multiple images usually takes a lot of time because of how space is divided for processing. The authors propose using a special kind of division called adaptive centroidal Voronoi tessellations, which keep the cells well-shaped and adapt their size to focus more on important areas. This approach allows faster computations using graphics hardware and achieves similar accuracy to the best current methods, but trains much faster on a single GPU.
Open → 2610.35347v1

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.

Wed 7 OctGraphics
The gist
Tracing the paths that light takes to create images is very complex and usually uses a lot of memory, especially when calculating how small changes affect the image. The authors created a new method called ResLRB that keeps track of only one important part of each light path, reducing memory use while still giving accurate results. This method uses randomness cleverly to pick representative points and then reruns the path calculations when needed. This approach helps graphics programs predict subtle changes in lighting without running out of memory.
Open → 2610.10847v1

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.

Sun 4 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Generating images or videos using diffusion models can be slow because they need many small steps. The authors developed a new way called Hybrid-Basis Feature Forecasting to predict features during these steps more quickly by combining different mathematical patterns. This approach can either work fast by using pre-set weights or adjust on the fly to keep good quality even when speeding up a lot. Their tests showed it works well for several large diffusion models, balancing speed and output quality better than older methods.
Open → 2610.05254v1

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.

Wed 23 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Most computer vision systems group parts of an image by recognizing objects or categories, but this study looks at how the brain might start grouping before knowing what things are. The authors created a method called Domain Parent Grouping (DPG) that groups image areas using simple color and light patterns separately. These groups can overlap and show different ways to divide the image, unlike usual methods that force one clear boundary. Their tests show DPG groups match well with how people mark regions and edges in pictures, suggesting early visual organization can arise directly from the raw input.
Open → 2609.27423v1