Papers for

virtual reality content creators

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.

Monocular depth estimation works well on lunar terrain images

Efficacy of Monocular Depth Estimation in Lunar Environments

Abstract: Recent advances in monocular depth estimation have demonstrated highly accurate 3D reconstructions within in-distribution terrestrial domains. This study investigates the efficacy of several state-of-the-art approaches to reconstruct out-of-distribution lunar environments using the NASA Ames Polar Optical Lunar Analog Reconstruction (POLAR) stereo dataset and Apollo 17 surface imagery. By leveraging these datasets, we establish a robust analog-to-field validation pipeline that evaluates quantitative performance against ground-truth physical analogs and qualitative performance against historical field data. Our results indicate that select state-of-the-art techniques can successfully generalize to produce high-fidelity relative 3D reconstructions of the unstructured lunar surface.

Tue 27 OctRoboticsComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Getting a sense of depth from just one camera image is a tough challenge, especially on the moon where conditions are very different from Earth. This paper looks at how well modern computer techniques for estimating depth work when applied to pictures of the moon's surface. The authors tested different methods using special Earth-based lunar-like images and real Apollo 17 photos. They found that some methods can still create good 3D maps of the moon’s uneven surface, even though these tools were mostly trained on Earth scenes.
Open → 2610.38080v1

SceneBloom creates realistic indoor room layouts for embodied AI training

SceneBloom: Agentic Indoor Environment Generation with Realistic and Diverse Layouts for Embodied Learning

Abstract: Training generalizable embodied agents requires realistic, varied, and simulation-ready indoor environments. Language-guided methods support semantic planning and object-level reasoning, but precise spatial grounding remains difficult. Visual generative models offer rich priors over plausible arrangements, yet their outputs require geometric reasoning to become physically valid 3D scenes. We introduce SceneBloom, an agentic framework that combines visual layout sampling with contract-guided 3D compilation. A hierarchical sampler uses diffusion priors to generate furniture arrangements within functional zones. A compiler then uses relations extracted from each proposal to guide geometric fitting and local pose correction. Across five room types, SceneBloom attains the highest visual quality and physical stability among the compared methods and is the only method with no detected mesh collisions and out-of-bounds objects. Its layouts are also closer to the distribution of real rooms than those of all compared baselines. Object navigation policies trained in these realistic scenes achieve a higher success rate in held-out real scans than those trained on an equal number of real training scans. Code is available at https://github.com/Tinaliu0123/scenebloom.

Fri 23 OctComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionArtificial IntelligenceRobotics
The gist
Training robots or AI agents that move indoors needs lots of realistic rooms to practice in. The authors created SceneBloom, a system that uses smart models to design furniture layouts in rooms that look real and follow physical rules, like no objects overlapping or outside walls. This makes the virtual environments better for teaching agents how to navigate and understand spaces. Agents trained in these virtual rooms perform better when tested in real homes.
Open → 2610.32978v1

GELLI generates immersive language practice tailored to learners

GELLI: A Generator for Experiential Language Learning Interactions

Abstract: Learning a second language requires extensive practice across situations personal to each learner, yet the most effective existing approaches --- narrative situations designed around specific learning goals and delivered through media --- demand substantial authoring effort, limiting practice to the scope of what was built. We present GELLI, a system that generates narrative practice worlds from a learner's goals: situated scenes with characters to converse with, support alongside the interaction, and reflection, all produced at runtime with no pre authored content. In a within-subjects study with 40 learners of Japanese, GELLI produced greater vocabulary recall and confidence than expert-authored videos targeting the same goals, with no significant difference in speaking performance. Learners turned remembered or imagined situations into experiences they could shape and learn through. Support made experimentation feel safe, while unexpected narrative developments and language suggestions gave them new possibilities to pursue beyond what they initially intended to practice.

Thu 22 OctHuman-Computer Interaction
The gist
Learning a new language is easier when you practice real-life conversations, but making those practice scenarios can take a lot of work. The authors created GELLI, a system that builds unique interactive stories for language learners on the fly, based on what they want to practice. In tests with Japanese learners, GELLI helped people remember words better and feel more confident than watching expert-made videos, while still encouraging safe experimentation and discovery. This system lets learners shape their own experiences instead of only following fixed lessons.
Open → 2610.31987v1

Social and spatial factors affect group experiences in virtual reality stories

Exploring spatial configuration and group familiarity when co-watching 360-degree stories in social virtual reality

Abstract: While traditional cinematic viewing is often characterized as a social experience, engaging with immersive stories is predominantly researched as an individual activity. This mismatch becomes increasingly problematic in social virtual reality (VR), where features designed for typical social activities (e.g., virtual locomotion, spatial and social context) can become meaningful levers for shaping the user experience. To address our limited understanding of these effects, we conducted three exploratory experiments (N$_1$=109, N$_2$=116, N$_3$=88) examining how spatial boundary type, size of allocated personal space, and group familiarity influence co-watching 360-degree stories in social VR. Results shows that small communal spatial boundaries heightened social presence towards others compared to individual boundaries, but also increased mental demand. Reducing the size of the personal spatial boundary increased social presence towards others but also increased disorientation and frustration. Finally, participants with higher group familiarity reported stronger attentional focus on the story, as well as higher spatial presence and social presence towards story characters, but also reported greater physical and perceptual demand. We discuss systematic tradeoffs between engagement and cognitive effort, and suggest practical guidelines for designing shared immersive narrative experiences.

Wed 21 OctHuman-Computer Interaction
The gist
Watching 360-degree stories in virtual reality is often done alone, but sometimes people watch together. The authors studied how the space around people and how well they know each other affects their experience when watching these stories together in virtual reality. They found that smaller shared spaces made people feel closer to others, but also made the experience more mentally tiring. Also, people who knew each other better paid more attention to the story but felt more physically and mentally taxed. These findings help designers create better shared VR story experiences by balancing closeness and comfort.
Open → 2610.30353v1

Muscle driven character animation controlled by reinforcement learning

RLMuscle: Muscle-Driven Character Animation via Reinforcement Learning

Abstract: Body deformation caused by muscle contraction plays a vital role in the visual realism of character animation, yet in most 3D animation pipelines artists have to manually specify muscle activations, which is time-consuming and gives no guarantee of physical realism. To address this, we propose a new method in which a reinforcement learning (RL) controller discovers per-muscle activations that track reference motions without manual tuning. Existing RL muscle controllers stop at 1D muscles; we go one step further, keeping the 1D model inside the RL control loop as a fast surrogate, and using a 3D volumetric simulation to produce the final deformation. Because both stages share the very same constitutive law, the muscle deformation is produced by the same activations that generated the motion. We further add a measured electromyography (EMG) prior that steers the redundant activation solution toward real human muscle recruitment. To achieve stable, efficient, and realistic simulation, we propose a novel geometric multigrid for Extended Position-Based Dynamics (XPBD) that is built on a coarse tetrahedral cage with barycentric-coordinate prolongation and closes a V-cycle on tetrahedral meshes. Within this GPU-parallelized solver, we inject the same Hill-type force-length law as an energy-based fiber constraint that turns per-fiber activation into realistic muscle contraction and bulging. We demonstrate volumetric muscle simulation on a 194-muscle human body with a diverse set of motions (walk, kick, swim, overhead-squat, etc.), simulating the full-body model at 18 ms per frame on a single RTX 4090. Our work takes a step toward character animation that is not only visually convincing but also biomechanically grounded. The website with code and videos is at https://chunleili.github.io/project-page-rlmuscle/.

Wed 21 OctGraphics
The gist
Making animated characters look realistic is hard because muscles move and change shape in complex ways. This paper presents a way to automatically find how each muscle should activate so the character moves correctly, without artists doing it by hand. The method uses artificial intelligence to learn muscle controls and simulates how muscles contract in 3D for better realism. It also uses real muscle activity data to guide the process, making the movements more like those of humans.
Open → 2610.30033v1

Spherical geometry improves scene graph creation from 360 degree images

Spherical Geometry-Aware Panoptic Scene Graph Generation for Equirectangular Panoramas

Abstract: Panoptic scene graph generation (PSGG) represents scene entities with segmentation masks and directed relations. Equirectangular projection (ERP) panoramas challenge PSGG through distortion, latitude-dependent pixel areas, and an artificial seam. We propose a two-stage spherical geometry-aware framework that fuses overlapping perspective-view predictions using observation reliability, spherical overlap, and angular proximity. Relation reasoning combines spherical-area-aware aggregation, weighted no-relation supervision, and dual-longitude score fusion. We also construct a dataset of 340 high-resolution panoramas with 10,571 nodes and 6,632 directed relations. Against corresponding baselines, spherical fusion improves PQ by 36.03% under matched views, while relation reasoning improves mR@50 by 11.20% under PredCls with ground-truth masks and object labels. The full framework improves mR@50 by 52.99% under SGDet with predicted panoptic segments. These results demonstrate the value of spherical geometry for panoramic PSGG.

Tue 20 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Creating detailed maps of things and their relationships inside 360-degree panoramic images is hard because these images are distorted and have seams. The authors developed a method that uses the spherical shape of these images to better combine many smaller views and reason about their relations. They also built a new large dataset of panoramic scenes with detailed labels. Their approach significantly improves accuracy in identifying objects and the connections between them from these challenging panoramic photos.
Open → 2610.28033v1

Occlusion aware method improves 3d scene densification in Gaussian splatting

Counting Contributions, Not Views: Occlusion-Aware Densification for 3D Gaussian Splatting

Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting grows a dense scene from a sparse initialization through adaptive density control (ADC), driven by per-Gaussian statistics gathered during rendering. These statistics pass a frustum-based visibility filter blind to occlusion: fully occluded Gaussians still count as observed, diluting the averaged gradient signal and suppressing densification precisely where geometry is occluded. We correct this with an occlusion-aware filter that restricts densification statistics to views in which a Gaussian actually contributes, and replace the criterion's raw view-count normalizer with an average-contribution one. Integrated into a StopThePop-based framework, the two together improve every image-quality metric over the occlusion-blind baseline on occlusion-heavy scenes (up to 6% lower LPIPS), at less than half the Gaussians a view-count normalizer requires. Under the longer schedules these large scenes require, the count stays bounded where most criteria diverge, and on smaller benchmarks our method stays competitive at a fraction of the competitors' count.

Mon 19 OctComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionGraphics
The gist
Creating detailed 3D scenes from sparse starting points can be challenging when parts of the scene are hidden by others, called occlusion. The authors found that previous methods mistakenly treated hidden parts as visible, which slowed down improving detail in those areas. They developed a way to check if a part of the scene really contributes to the visible view before updating it. This approach leads to clearer 3D images with fewer parts needed, especially in scenes with many hidden objects.
Open → 2610.27108v1

Reusing previous views speeds up interactive scene exploration

LVS: Local View Synthesis from Relative Camera Pose by Reusing Previous Views

Abstract: Interactive scene exploration requires frequent view updates, although small camera motions preserve much of the visible content. Conventional 3D Gaussian Splatting nevertheless renders each target view, leaving this image overlap unexploited. Reusing rendered images offers an alternative. Geometric warping alone cannot recover newly exposed content and remains sensitive to depth errors. We propose a per-scene framework that replaces repeated scene rendering for nearby views with relative-pose-guided RGB-D image reuse. Geometric warping uses depth and relative pose to transport source content, while a lightweight multiscale network predicts RGB residuals to correct artifacts and infer missing appearance. Cached source features further reduce repeated computation. On GS-render, residual refinement improves PSNR by 0.72~dB over pure warping; evaluations on captured and rendered scenes demonstrate low query latency. This separation of scene rendering from local view updates supports responsive scene exploration, with potential applications in augmented and virtual reality.

Thu 8 OctComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionArtificial IntelligenceGraphics
The gist
When exploring a 3D scene on a computer, moving the camera a little usually shows mostly the same things. The authors found a way to use images from previous views with some smart adjustments instead of redrawing every new view from scratch. They combine simple geometric warping with a small neural network to fix errors and add missing details. This makes the scene update faster while still looking good, helping in applications like virtual and augmented reality.
Open → 2610.12127v1

Matrix guided method creates editable 4d scenes from one image

MATE4D: Matrix-Guided Editable 4D Generation from a Single Image

Abstract: Generative models have rapidly pushed content creation be-yond 2D imagery toward dynamic 3D and 4D scene synthesis. Yet pro-ducing realistic and temporally stable 4D content from a single image is still difficult because one view provides limited structural cues and weak motion evidence. We introduce MATE4D, a framework that converts one input image into editable dynamic 4D content. Our method constructs a spatio-temporal multi-view image matrix with text-guided background manipulation, delivering coherent supervision over viewpoint, appear-ance, and motion. These synthesized observations are used to optimize 3D Gaussian primitives, which are then animated through a lightweight deformation module to form a 4D representation. The resulting scenes preserve geometry more faithfully, maintain smoother temporal behavior, and keep background edits more consistent, reducing context ambiguity and motion artifacts. Experiments on Objaverse-XL and Diffusion4D show that MATE4D outperforms strong baselines in visual quality, effi-ciency, and controllability, supporting practical AR/VR content creation.

Thu 8 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Creating moving 3D scenes from just one photo is tricky because one picture doesn’t show all angles or movements clearly. The authors developed MATE4D, a method that turns a single image into a 4D (3D plus motion) model that you can change. It uses a matrix of images generated with text instructions to help learn how objects look, move, and appear from different views. Their system keeps the shapes accurate, movements smooth, and backgrounds consistent. This helps make dynamic virtual scenes that can be used in augmented and virtual reality.
Open → 2610.11181v1

Gaussian head avatar modeling improves route based training choices

Counterfactual Route Optimization for Gaussian Head Avatar Modeling

Abstract: Head avatar modeling requires jointly optimizing multiple objectives with different dominant effects on geometry, appearance, and cross-view consistency. However, their relative effectiveness varies across training states, while existing pipelines typically rely on fixed loss weights or handcrafted stage-wise schedules. A central challenge is therefore to identify which optimization direction is more beneficial at each training state. We propose a counterfactual route optimization framework for Gaussian head avatar modeling, which characterizes state-dependent optimization preference from the realized effects of alternative updates rather than predefined heuristic weighting. Starting from the same training state, we perform short-horizon route-restricted lookahead over geometry, appearance, and joint update routes and evaluate their outcomes under a unified utility. The resulting counterfactual evidence is factorized into a geometry--appearance preference and a residual joint advantage, separately capturing the relative preference between individual update directions and the additional benefit of coordinated optimization. We further amortize this offline evidence into a lightweight controller that directly estimates the current optimization preference and applies bounded modulation to the training objectives during full avatar optimization. Experiments on the NeRSemble dataset validate the effectiveness of the proposed design, consistently outperforming existing methods while preserving clearer local facial structures and finer details.

Wed 7 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Modeling realistic 3D head avatars involves balancing different goals like shape detail, appearance, and consistency from different angles. Instead of using fixed rules for how to train the model, the authors propose a method that tests different training adjustments ahead of time to see which improve results most. They use this information to guide the training process dynamically, improving the final quality of the head avatars with clearer facial details. Their approach works better than previous fixed weighting methods on a standard dataset.
Open → 2610.09791v1

Point-based method improves facial animation transfer without artifacts

PDB: Point-Based Deformation Blending for Facial Animation Retargeting

Abstract: Mesh-agnostic facial animation retargeting transfers expressions across meshes with different structures, but preserving facial motion without surface artifacts remains challenging. To address this, we present PDB, Point-Based Deformation Blending for facial animation retargeting. PDB predicts a compact set of deformed control points from a source neutral-expression pair and blending weights from the target neutral mesh. The weights are computed once per target and reused across frames, while the control points vary with each source expression. ReLU enforces non-negative weights and permits exact zeros, followed by row-wise normalization. The target mesh is reconstructed directly by multiplying the weights and control points, without a predefined cage, precomputed coordinates, a learned per-element deformation decoder, or a global reconstruction solve. Trained only with self-retargeting reconstruction supervision, PDB supports cross-identity transfer without paired cross-identity training expressions. Experiments demonstrate accurate retargeting, fast inference, and localized support in the learned weights. Joint evaluation of expression accuracy and local surface preservation shows reduced surface artifacts relative to the evaluated dense displacement method while retaining the intended motion. Perceptual evaluations further support expression fidelity and visual quality in both self- and cross-retargeting.

Tue 6 OctComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionGraphics
The gist
Transferring facial expressions between different 3D face models is tricky because the models have different shapes, which can cause weird surface glitches. The authors developed a new way called PDB that uses a set of special points and weights to move the face parts smoothly without those glitches. Their method only needs to learn once per target face and works well even when transferring expressions between different people. Tests showed it keeps expressions accurate, looks better visually, and runs quickly compared to older methods.
Open → 2610.08672v1

Infant simulator adds caregiver model to generate real touch and vision

Infant simulator with an embodied caregiver: Generating infant-perspective touch and vision during social interaction

Abstract: Early development unfolds in caregiver-infant dyads, where infants' sensorimotor streams are shaped by physical contact and face-to-face interaction. Yet developmental robotics simulators commonly model infants in isolation, limiting the study of caregiver-mediated experience. We present a caregiver-enabled extension of the Multi-Modal Infant Model (MIMo) in MuJoCo that turns MIMo into a controllable platform for replaying dyadic interaction and generating dense infant-perspective observations. The system provides (i) an articulated caregiver model compatible with MIMo morphologies, parameterized from anthropometrics and optionally resized to a recorded caregiver; (ii) a workflow to replay naturalistic caregiver-infant holding and soothing interactions; and (iii) logging and visualizing the infant's first-person multimodal experience (we show touch and vision). We showcase the tool on touch by introducing origin-aware contact logging that disambiguates self-, caregiver-, and environment-generated contact and supports aggregation into touch-rate statistics comparable to manual coding. While we showcase tactile analysis, the platform is intended more broadly as a generator of multimodal dyadic datasets (touch and egocentric vision) for modeling the development of social interaction.

Mon 5 OctRobotics
The gist
Early infant development happens through physical contact and face-to-face interaction with caregivers. The authors created a new version of a robotic infant simulator that includes a controllable caregiver, allowing the replay of real social interactions. This system records what the infant ‘sees’ and ‘feels’ during these moments to better understand early social experience. The tool can tell who or what caused each touch, helping analyze social touch patterns automatically.
Open → 2610.05997v1

4D dynamic scenes reconstructed from six sparse cameras using priors and AI

Sparse-View 4D Gaussian Splatting via Spatiotemporal Priors and Generative Assistance

Abstract: We present a 4D Gaussian Splatting framework for the Sparse-View Track of the SIGGRAPH Asia 2026 Volumetric Video Challenge, which requires dynamic scene reconstruction from only six cameras with wide baselines. To achieve robust dynamic reconstruction under such sparse views, our framework integrates three components. (1) Region-adaptive spatial priors: We use foreground masks to guide Gaussian initialization and mask voting to control densification separately for the dynamic foreground and static background. Background geometry is regularized using monocular depth aligned to metric scale. (2) Motion-consistent temporal priors: We provide supervision at intermediate times through frame interpolation and constrain projected Gaussian motion with estimated optical flow. (3) Generative assistance: We place virtual cameras in the widest angular gaps and restore their rendered images using a diffusion-based model conditioned on camera poses. The restored images are iteratively incorporated into training as pseudo-supervision. On the validation set, our framework improves full-frame PSNR from 25.60 dB for the baseline to 29.75 dB. On the official test benchmark, it achieves 30.04 dB full-frame PSNR and 27.88 dB foreground PSNR, ranking first overall in the Sparse-View Track.

Sat 3 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Capturing detailed videos of moving scenes usually needs many cameras, but this paper focuses on doing it with only six widely spaced ones. The authors combine clever guesses about space and motion with AI-generated images to fill gaps that the few cameras miss. Their approach helps make clearer videos of dynamic scenes by improving how 3D shapes and movements are estimated over time. This new method performed best in a recent competition for sparse camera dynamic scene reconstruction.
Open → 2610.04606v1

Manifoldsplat enables fast language guided edits of 3d head avatars

ManifoldSplat: Language-Guided Semantic Shape Editing of 3D Gaussian Head Avatars

Abstract: High-fidelity 3D head avatars have reached near-photorealistic quality. While recent methods enable text-driven manipulation, they struggle to provide fine-grained localized control, often entangling features or lacking geometric consistency. Modifying geometry through natural language currently requires slow per-prompt optimization or compromises identity and rigging. We present ManifoldSplat, the first end-toend framework for language-guided semantic shape editing of animatable 3D Gaussian Splatting avatars reconstructed from monocular videos. By performing edits within the structured FLAME manifold rather than directly optimizing an unstructured Gaussian cloud, we strictly preserve identity and animation. We introduce DeltaRegion, a per-region disentangled Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE) delivering feedforward shape deltas, alongside a refining stage to recover view-consistent details. ManifoldSplat reconstructs and edits an avatar in ~90 seconds on a consumer GPU, rendering at ~800 FPS. Extensive evaluations demonstrate our approach sets a new state-of-the-art in localized prompt alignment, geometric coherence, and identity preservation. Project page and code: https://a-canela.github.io/manifoldsplat/

Fri 2 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Creating realistic 3D head avatars is possible, but changing their shape using simple language commands is usually slow and can mess up the avatar’s identity or movement. The authors present ManifoldSplat, a system that lets people quickly and precisely edit 3D avatar shapes by typing descriptions. It keeps the avatar’s look and animations intact by working within a structured shape space, and it can produce edited results in about 90 seconds on a regular computer. This method improves how closely edits match the language commands and keeps the avatar consistent when viewed from different angles.
Open → 2610.03599v1

4D facial expression dataset enables deeper emotion intensity analysis

Capturing Dynamics: The 4D Facial Expression Intensity Dataset

Abstract: The estimation and analysis of facial expression intensity play a crucial role in affective communication and human-computer interaction. Previous research has primarily focused on detecting and estimating facial expression intensity from frame-level 2D representations. However, this limitation restricts a comprehensive understanding of real-world facial expressions, as they are inherently 3D and temporally continuous. This paper investigates the perception of facial expression intensity by introducing the 4D Facial Expression Intensity Dataset (4DFEID). We employ a parametric face model and compile a total of 2,869 mesh sequences with controlled geometric variations, generating 4D data instances with diverse peak intensities and identity attributes. Using a Likert scale, we collect more than 90,000 subjective intensity perception ratings via a crowdsourcing platform. We explore various architectures and aggregation methods to establish baselines for episode intensity estimation on the new dataset, revealing that spatial-temporal graph models consistently outperform traditional frame-aggregation methods. In contrast to existing datasets that rely on 2D static imagery, the proposed 4D-FEID dataset provides the community with a unique and vital resource for investigating the perception of facial expression intensity through the use of dynamic 3D stimuli. By offering high-fidelity, spatio-temporally coherent facial data, 4D-FEID establishes a new foundation for research into more nuanced and naturalistic expression analysis, thereby addressing a gap in the current landscape of affective computing and human-computer interaction studies. The dataset is available at link.

Fri 2 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Understanding how strong facial expressions are is important for how computers can read human emotions. Past work mostly looked at flat 2D pictures, but real faces change in 3D over time. The authors created a large collection of 3D face animations showing different expression strengths and asked people to rate how intense they seemed. They tested different ways for computers to estimate these intensities and found models that consider both space and time worked best. This dataset helps researchers build better systems to analyze natural facial expressions more accurately.
Open → 2610.02647v1

Adaptive virtual reality system remembers user layout preferences

SPHERE: Adaptive VR Indoor Scene Generation via LLM-Enhanced Spatial Preference Learning and Human-in-the-Loop RL

Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) advance 3D indoor scene synthesis, current pipelines fail to retain user-specific preferences across sessions, making immersive authoring a repetitive and physically fatiguing process. We present SPHERE, an adaptive VR generation framework that transforms isolated synthesis into continuous human-AI co-creation. SPHERE extracts persistent spatial preferences from natural multimodal interactions (speech and controller edits). To ensure geometric resilience against spatial distortions, it abstracts these raw edits into hierarchical constraints modeling both local functional and global topological contexts. Furthermore, a human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning mechanism dynamically updates retrieval policies based on the user's final edited scenes. A mixed-design user study ($N=42$) and an offline ablation demonstrate that SPHERE significantly reduces corrective edits and physical demand, preventing bias toward shallow object-level traits to yield geometrically resilient, profile-aligned layouts. Ultimately, SPHERE demonstrates how capturing demonstrated spatial logic enables controlled spatial adaptation, establishing a reliable, governed human-AI collaboration framework for immersive authoring. Project page and source code will be available at: https://github.com/hyeonmin11/SPHERE

Thu 1 OctArtificial IntelligenceHuman-Computer Interaction
The gist
Designing indoor virtual spaces can be tiring because current tools don’t remember what users like from earlier sessions. The authors created SPHERE, a virtual reality tool that learns and remembers spatial preferences using natural user interactions like speech and hand movements. It uses smart models to keep designs stable and improves over time by learning from corrections users make. This approach helps users create personalized and consistent virtual room layouts with less effort and fewer mistakes.
Open → 2610.02023v1

Video method improves first person view of hand object interactions

Exo2EgoHOI: Hand-Object-Interaction Aware Exocentric-to-Egocentric Video Generation

Abstract: Egocentric videos of human manipulation provide valuable visual experience for embodied intelligence, yet collecting such data at scale is costly. Exocentric-to-egocentric video generation offers a scalable alternative by transforming abundant third-person manipulation videos into first-person observations. However, existing methods often struggle to faithfully preserve demonstrated hand-object interactions (HOI) across large viewpoint changes due to insufficient fine-grained interaction guidance and weak object-centric anchoring. We present Exo2EgoHOI, an HOI-aware video generative framework for interaction-preserving exocentric-to-egocentric translation. To preserve fine-grained HOI, we introduce a unified 4D HOI prior that combines scene geometry, articulated hand renderings, and dense hand-object relation fields, together with a dual-branch residual adapter for injecting structural and relational cues into the video generation backbone. To preserve object consistency, we introduce Decomposed Gated Cross-Attention, which separately encodes object and background references and adaptively integrates global semantic and local appearance features as object-centric anchors. Experiments on ARCTIC-HOI and Ego-Exo4D demonstrate substantial improvements in object consistency and HOI preservation while maintaining competitive visual fidelity. In particular, on ARCTIC-HOI, Exo2EgoHOI improves object mIoU by 32.3% and reduces MPJPE and PA-MPJPE by 34.7% and 50.0%, respectively, relative to the respective best baseline results. Project page: https://rcl-robotics.github.io/Exo2EgoHOI/.

Tue 29 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Videos taken from the first-person view of hands manipulating objects are useful but expensive to collect. The authors built a system to turn ordinary third-person videos into realistic first-person views, keeping the hand and object interactions accurate. They created new ways to model hand-object relationships and keep objects consistent when changing viewpoints. Their method performs better than past approaches in making these converted videos look real and preserve the details of hand movements and object positions.
Open → 2609.38615v1

Semantic inpainting improves animatable head avatars from single images

Learning Semantic Inpainting for Animatable Gaussian Head Avatars

Abstract: We present SInGA, a novel method for learning Semantic Inpainting for animatable Gaussian head Avatars from a single image. Existing avatar approaches often rely on multi-view observations and lack effective handling of unobserved regions in single-view settings, limiting their applicability in such scenarios. To address this, we propose a semantic inpainting framework defined in UV space for completing unobserved facial regions. Our key insight lies in the structured topology of the UV representation, which provides consistent spatial correspondences and enables reliable completion of identity-specific features using the inherent symmetry cues of human faces. We extract features from observed regions and use them to complete unobserved regions. The completed representation is then used to regress Gaussian attributes, effectively performing Gaussian inpainting. In addition, instead of relying on a single Gaussian at each surface or pixel location, we stack multiple Gaussians to enhance detail. The resulting avatar generalizes across identities without requiring per-identity optimization and can be animated with driving inputs. Experimental results show that our method generates high-quality head avatars with improved completeness and identity preservation, while supporting realistic animation and consistent rendering from unobserved views.

Tue 29 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Making realistic digital head avatars from just one photo is hard because parts of the face are hidden. The authors came up with a method that fills in those missing parts by using the known patterns and symmetry of faces. Their technique represents a face using special 3D points called Gaussians, stacking several to show fine details. This lets the avatars look complete and keeps the person’s identity clear, while allowing the avatar to be animated naturally from different angles.
Open → 2609.38343v1

High quality 3D material creation done fully in texture space

Texture Space Material Diffusion

Abstract: We present a method for generating high quality materials for 3D objects entirely in texture space. We finetune a video diffusion transformer for text-guided material generation, multi-view material generation, and material upscaling. Our key insight is to use the known projection from image space to texture space, enabling the diffusion process to generalize across arbitrary geometries and texture parameterizations. This approach also avoids the view consistency issues inherent in video and multi-view diffusion models. Because texture space is two dimensional, we can reuse the strong priors of pretrained video diffusion models. We apply our method to high quality material reconstruction from posed photos captured under unknown lighting, as well as to text- and image guided material generation. Our method can scale to high resolutions (8K), 100+ input views, and neural material representations. In quantitative and qualitative evaluations we show state-of-the-art results for material generation and reconstruction.

Tue 29 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionGraphics
The gist
Creating realistic materials for 3D objects is tricky because materials need to look good from every angle and work on different shapes. The authors developed a method that makes materials directly on the flat 2D surfaces called textures, which wrap around 3D objects. By using this approach with a special AI model trained on video sequences and carefully connecting images to texture spaces, they avoid common problems like inconsistent views. Their method can generate high-resolution materials guided by text or photos, and works well even with complex objects and many pictures.
Open → 2609.37654v1

Framework benchmarks context aware extended reality interface suggestions

A Benchmarking Framework for Context-aware XR Interfaces

Abstract: Everyday Extended Reality (XR) systems aim to provide context-aware access to the right functionalities at the right time and place, with minimal manual reconfiguration as users switch context. Yet these interfaces are hard to evaluate: current prototyping and user-study workflows offer no systematic, repeatable way to compare adaptation methods across users and scenarios. We present ContextXR, a novel benchmarking framework for context-aware XR interfaces. ContextXR represents an XR application as a connected graph of functional facets, each a semantically coherent group of related capabilities that together support a shared user intent. On this representation, we build MineXR++, a dataset augmenting prior XR interface data with facet-level annotations, and formulate three canonical tasks of context-aware suggestion: context factor analysis, initial facet suggestion, and next facet suggestion. Our evaluation protocol scores suggestion methods by a simulated interaction metric, the navigation and search cost of reaching the desired functionality. Through experiments benchmarking global popularity, relational retrieval, and LLM-based methods, we demonstrate that ContextXR enables the systematic, reproducible evaluation of context-aware XR interfaces.

Thu 24 SeptHuman-Computer InteractionArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Extended Reality (XR) systems can change what tools they show you depending on where you are and what you're doing, but it's hard to measure how well they do this. The authors created ContextXR, a way to break down XR apps into groups of related functions to better test suggestion methods. They also made a dataset called MineXR++ to support this testing and defined tasks to see how well systems suggest the right tools. Their experiments show that ContextXR lets developers consistently compare different methods for recommending XR features based on context.
Open → 2609.30466v1

Early eye movements reveal how cybersickness develops in VR

How Early Can You Tell? Early Eye Gaze Dynamics and Cybersickness Progression in Virtual Reality

Abstract: Cybersickness remains one of the primary barriers to prolonged and comfortable virtual reality (VR) use, yet the temporal development of cybersickness remains poorly understood because its onset and progression vary substantially across individuals. Eye tracking provides a continuous and unobtrusive measure of user behavior, making it well suited for investigating how users respond throughout VR exposure. However, existing work has mainly focused on aggregate gaze measures or post-exposure assessments, leaving the relationship between early eye-movement dynamics and discomfort progression underexplored. In this paper, we investigate whether early eye-movement dynamics characterize the subsequent progression of cybersickness. Using trajectories of fixation duration, fixation dispersion, saccade amplitude, saccade velocity, and gaze eccentricity computed over the first one to five minutes of VR exposure, we evaluate their association with subsequent discomfort progression and compare early gaze dynamics between participants with low and high post-exposure cybersickness severity. Our results show that early fixation dispersion is consistently associated with subsequent discomfort progression, whereas no significant differences are observed between cybersickness severity groups. These findings suggest that early fixation dispersion can characterize the progression of discomfort rather than the final cybersickness severity. Overall, this work provides new insight into the temporal relationship between early eye-movement behavior and cybersickness progression, contributing to the understanding of gaze dynamics during immersive experiences.

Mon 21 SeptHuman-Computer Interaction
The gist
Feeling sick in virtual reality (VR) can happen differently for everyone, making it hard to predict. The authors studied whether eye movement patterns in the first few minutes of VR use could show who might get more uncomfortable later. They found that people whose eyes moved around more widely early on tended to feel worse as time went on, but this did not predict how bad their sickness would be at the end. This helps us understand how VR sickness builds up by looking at eye behavior early in the experience.
Open → 2609.25422v1

OpenFlyScan guides drones to improve 3D city models quickly

OpenFlyScan: A Quality-Guided Aerial Reconstruction System for Consumer Drones

Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) provides high-fidelity scenes for large-scale embodied simulation, but constructing large-scale urban assets remains constrained by expensive equipment and delayed quality feedback. Preset surveys can leave complex surfaces insufficiently observed, with defects discovered only after reconstruction, requiring return visits and repeated processing. We present OpenFlyScan, a quality-guided aerial reconstruction system for consumer drones that integrates a GS quality model, a reacquisition planner, and a custom-designed mobile app. The model learns from GS rendering errors to predict regional reconstruction quality. Based on these predictions, the planner then generates complementary reacquisition strips to be executed through the app, which also supports automated oblique surveys and data transfer without additional hardware on board. Across real aerial scenes, the model effectively identifies regions that are likely to be poorly reconstructed. In the Expo West field experiment, targeted reacquisition improves PSNR at additional views by 10.95 dB. With consumer drones, OpenFlyScan integrates capture, targeted reacquisition, and reconstruction to support rapid, low-cost urban asset creation. Code and models will be made publicly available at https://openflyscan.github.io/.

Mon 21 SeptRoboticsComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Creating detailed 3D maps of cities using drones can be expensive and slow because mistakes are often found too late. The authors created OpenFlyScan, a system that helps consumer drones spot blurry or missing parts in their 3D maps. It then tells the drone where to fly again to capture better images using a phone app, all without extra hardware. This approach makes 3D city mapping faster and more affordable while improving image quality.
Open → 2609.24253v1

Structure-aware adaptation improves light field reconstruction from noisy images

STAR: Structure-aware Test-time Adaptation for diffusion-based light field Reconstruction

Abstract: Light field (LF) reconstruction from limited and noisy focal stack (FS) measurements is a highly ill-posed inverse problem. Although the LF-to-FS imaging geometry is fixed for a given optical setup, LF spatial-angular structure---including within-view spatial details, cross-view angular dependencies, and disparity across views---varies across scenes. Consequently, a fixed pre-trained prior may not optimally capture the spatial-angular structure of each test LF. We propose Structure-aware Test-time Adaptation for diffusion-based light field Reconstruction (STAR), the first test-time adaptation framework for reconstructing an LF from FS. For each test LF, STAR freezes a pre-trained diffusion prior and fits three lightweight adapters to the observed FS to jointly adapt the three components of the LF's spatial-angular structure. STAR outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in both two- and three-focal-sheet settings, with shorter inference times than those with test-time parameter updates.

Thu 17 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Rebuilding light field images from a few blurry and noisy pictures is very difficult because the details and angles vary with each scene. The authors propose a method called STAR that adapts a pre-trained model for each new scene by adjusting small parts to better match the scene’s unique structure. This approach improves the reconstruction quality and speeds up processing compared to previous methods. STAR works with different numbers of input images and handles variations in spatial and angular details effectively.
Open → 2609.19747v1

Orca improves 3D scene views by fixing missing image parts

ORCA: Occlusion-Aware Refinement and Completion for Novel View Synthesis

Abstract: Novel-view synthesis from a single image is a fundamentally ambiguous problem. As the camera moves away from the input viewpoint, previously hidden regions become visible, exposing missing geometry and holes in the reconstructed scene. Existing methods often rely on generative models to complete such regions. However, many of these artifacts are small gaps near depth boundaries and do not require generating new scene content. In order to eliminate expensive process of generating image we introduce ORCA, an occlusion-aware method for reconstructing and completing explorable 3D scenes from a single image. ORCA first introduces 3D structure into a Gaussian-anchor representation using monocular depth while preserving the original camera-ray correspondence. During scene exploration, missing regions are handled based on their size and structure. Small disocclusions are repaired using RGB-D information already available in the reconstruction, while generative inpainting is reserved for larger regions that cannot be reliably recovered from the scene. New Gaussian anchors are added and optimized locally without modifying the existing representation. By reducing unnecessary reliance on generative inpainting, ORCA limits generation-induced hallucinations and better preserves the content and structure of the original scene. On DIV2K, ORCA improves novel-view quality over VistaDream across all reported metrics, increasing MUSIQ from 61.60 to 68.71 and CLIP-IQA from 0.474 to 0.574. These results show that many novel-view artifacts can be repaired effectively by reusing information already present in the reconstructed scene.

Tue 15 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Making 3D views from just one picture is tricky because when you move around, you see parts hidden before that aren’t in the original photo. The authors showed that many small gaps in these views can be fixed by reusing information already in the 3D scene, rather than guessing new details. Their method, called ORCA, decides if missing parts are small or large, fixing small holes with existing data and only inventing new content for big gaps. This reduces errors and keeps the scenes looking like the real photo.
Open → 2609.17450v1

MoVT improves 3D motion creation from text using video data

MoVT: Video-Augmented Motion Tokenizer for Text-to-Motion Generation

Abstract: Text-driven 3D human motion generation models face significant challenges in responding to diverse and unconstrained textual prompts, primarily due to the limited availability of 3D motion training data. To address this, we introduce MoVT, a novel framework that effectively leverages the extensive range of human action videos to enhance text-to-motion generation. At the core of our approach is the cross-modal augmented motion tokenizer, which projects discrete 3D motion tokens into the 2D domain. This projection allows us to enrich the motion codebook with complex, real-world motion patterns derived from videos. The enriched discrete tokens are then mapped back to the 3D domain, resulting in aligned 3D and 2D codebooks with an enhanced capacity to represent intricate motions. These enhanced codebooks are integrated into a generative masked transformer, which predicts masked motion token indices in a modality-agnostic manner. This enables the use of text-index pairs, generated from the 2D codebook and annotated motion videos, to further enhance the generator. Extensive empirical evaluations show that MoVT performs favorably against prior state-of-the-art methods across multiple key metrics.

Mon 14 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Generating 3D human motions from text is hard because there isn’t enough 3D motion data to learn from. The researchers created MoVT, a new system that learns from lots of regular videos of people moving to better understand and create motions from text descriptions. MoVT converts 3D motions into 2D forms to gather more complex real-world movements from videos and then combines these back into 3D motions. This method helps produce better and more detailed 3D human motions based on text instructions.
Open → 2609.14965v1

Anti aliased gaussian ray tracing improves image quality for central cameras

ConeGaussian: Anti-Aliased Gaussian Ray-Tracing for Generic Central Cameras

Abstract: In rendering, a camera is a sampling operator that maps each finite pixel to a bundle of rays. Different camera models change the geometry of this bundle, thus making a unified and faithful rendering formulation challenging. Consequently, Gaussian ray tracing supports generic cameras (with optical center) through their inverse ray mappings, yet typically reduces every pixel to a single center ray. This ignores the camera-dependent pixel footprint, causing aliasing under minification, while unconstrained Gaussians expose unsupported frequencies under magnification. We present ConeGaussian, a camera-model-agnostic anti-aliasing framework for Gaussian ray-based rendering. Instead of defining the pixel filter on a camera-specific image plane, ConeGaussian constructs an anisotropic footprint directly from neighboring rays produced by the camera's native inverse mapping. We derive a closed-form response under a locally linear, depth-local, moment-matched approximation of the finite pixel footprint, while the same geometry defines a per-Gaussian training-frequency floor. Notably, by construction, our filtering principle can be used unmodified across calibrated central camera models and multiple Gaussian ray-rendering backbones. Additionally, unlike in mip-splatting, our scene-space frequency floor and filtering enable trivial composition at render time, allowing us to remove excess blurring. On pinhole and strongly distorted fisheye captures, ConeGaussian consistently improves two distinct ray-based backbones, by up to 4.3 dB at 1/8 resolution, and reduces fisheye LPIPS by 30% where perspective screen-plane footprint formulations are not directly applicable.

Fri 11 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Rendering images through cameras involves mapping pixels to bundles of rays, but different camera designs create different ray patterns, making it hard to get consistent, smooth images without glitches called aliasing. The authors found that existing methods often use just one ray per pixel or apply filters in ways that don't fit all camera types, leading to blurry or pixelated results. They created ConeGaussian, a method that better estimates the area each pixel covers by looking at neighboring rays and adjusting the image smoothing accordingly. This approach works across many camera types and improves image quality, especially in fisheye and pinhole cameras, by reducing visual artifacts and maintaining sharpness.
Open → 2609.13397v1