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.
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.
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.
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.
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/.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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
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/.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/.
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.
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.
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.
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.