EDGS: Eliminating Densification for Efficient Convergence of 3DGS Contributions:... • We show that initial triangulation based on 2D correspondences can replace the incremental refinement process, fundamentally changing how 3DGS models allocate resources. • Our method reduces the path each Gaussian must travel in parameter space. Careful initialization not only accelerates convergence but also guides optimization toward a convergence point corresponding to lower reconstruction error and thus higher reconstruction quality. • Our approach outperforms both speed-optimized and quality-focused state-of-the-art models while using only half the splats of standard 3DGS. By improving initialization rather than altering the optimization process, this method is compatible with other 3DGS acceleration techniques, making it a flexible enhancement to existing models.show more

Human Hair Reconstruction with Strand-Aligned 3D Gaussians Contributions (cited):... – We propose a new 3D line lifting scheme that uses a modified 3DGS reconstruction technique to lift 2D orientation maps into a 3D field while also providing refinement of the camera parameters; – We introduce a dual representation of hair strand polylines and 3D Gaussians to achieve differentiable rasterization of hair strands and leverage photometric constraints for strand-based hair reconstruction; – Based on these components, we propose a coarse-to-fine optimization method for prior-guided hair reconstruction that leverages both latent and explicit representations of the hairstyle.show more

Self-Calibrating Gaussian Splatting for Large Field of View Reconstruction... Note: Check below for full video. Abstract (cited): "In this paper, we present a self-calibrating framework that jointly optimizes camera parameters, lens distortion, and 3D Gaussian representations, enabling accurate and efficient scene reconstruction. Our technique is particularly effective for high-quality scene reconstruction from large field-of-view (FOV) imagery taken with wide-angle lenses, allowing the scene to be modeled from a smaller number of images. We introduce a novel method for modeling complex lens distortions using a hybrid network that combines invertible residual networks with explicit grids. This design effectively regularizes the optimization process, achieving greater accuracy than conventional camera models. Additionally, we propose a cubemap-based resampling strategy to support large FOV images without sacrificing resolution or introducing distortion artifacts. Our method is compatible with the fast rasterization of Gaussian Splatting, adaptable to a wide variety of camera lens distortions, and demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets."show more

DroneSplat: 3D Gaussian Splatting for Robust 3D Reconstruction from... In-the-Wild Drone Imagery Abstract: Drones have become essential tools for reconstructing wild scenes due to their outstanding maneuverability. Recent advances in radiance field methods have achieved remarkable rendering quality, providing a new avenue for 3D reconstruction from drone imagery. However, dynamic distractors in wild environments challenge the static scene assumption in radiance fields, while limited view constraints hinder the accurate capture of underlying scene geometry. To address these challenges, we introduce DroneSplat, a novel framework designed for robust 3D reconstruction from in-the-wild drone imagery. Our method adaptively adjusts masking thresholds by integrating local-global segmentation heuristics with statistical approaches, enabling precise identification and elimination of dynamic distractors in static scenes. We enhance 3D Gaussian Splatting with multi-view stereo predictions and a voxel-guided optimization strategy, supporting high-quality rendering under limited view constraints. For comprehensive evaluation, we provide a drone-captured 3D reconstruction dataset encompassing both dynamic and static scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DroneSplat outperforms both 3DGS and NeRF baselines in handling in-the-wild drone imagery.show more

Gaussian Head Avatar: Ultra High-fidelity Head Avatar via Dynamic... Gaussians paper page: Creating high-fidelity 3D head avatars has always been a research hotspot, but there remains a great challenge under lightweight sparse view setups. In this paper, we propose Gaussian Head Avatar represented by controllable 3D Gaussians for high-fidelity head avatar modeling. We optimize the neutral 3D Gaussians and a fully learned MLP-based deformation field to capture complex expressions. The two parts benefit each other, thereby our method can model fine-grained dynamic details while ensuring expression accuracy. Furthermore, we devise a well-designed geometry-guided initialization strategy based on implicit SDF and Deep Marching Tetrahedra for the stability and convergence of the training procedure. Experiments show our approach outperforms other state-of-the-art sparse-view methods, achieving ultra high-fidelity rendering quality at 2K resolution even under exaggerated expressions.show more

Wonderland: Navigating 3D Scenes from a Single Image Contributions:... • First, we introduce a representation for controllable 3D generation by leveraging the generative priors from camera-guided video diffusion models. Unlike image models, video diffusion models are trained on extensive video datasets. This enables them to capture comprehensive spatial relationships within scenes across multiple views and embed a form of "3D awareness" in their latent space, which allows us to maintain 3D consistency in novel view synthesis. • Second, to achieve controllable novel view generation, we empower video models with precise control over specified camera motions. We introduce a novel dual-branch conditioning mechanism that effectively incorporates desired diverse camera trajectories into the video diffusion model. This enables expansion of a single image into a multi-view consistent capture of a 3D scene with precise pose control. • Third, to achieve efficient 3D reconstruction, we directly transform video latents into 3DGS. We propose a novel latent-based large reconstruction model (LaLRM) that lifts video latents to 3D in a feed-forward manner. With this design, during inference, our model directly predicts 3DGS from a single input image, effectively aligning the generation and reconstruction tasks—and bridging image space and 3D space—through the video latent space. Compared with reconstructing scenes from images, the video latent space offers a 256× spatial-temporal reduction while retaining essential and consistent 3D structural details. Such a high degree of compression is crucial, as it allows the LaLRM to handle a wider range of 3D scenes within the reconstruction framework, with the same memory constraints.show more

📢Pix2NPHM: Learning to Regress NPHM Reconstructions From a Single... Image📢 We directly regress neural parametric head models (NPHMs) from a single image — fast, stable, and significantly more expressive than classical 3DMMs such as FLAME. Face tracking & 3D reconstruction are often limited by the representational capacity of PCA-based face models. By lifting NPHMs to a first-class reconstruction primitive, we enable more accurate geometry, richer expressions, and finer animation control. Pix2NPHM obtains fast and reliable NPHM reconstructions on real-world data. Inference-time optimization against surface normals and canonical point maps can further increase fidelity. Key to successful and generalized training of our ViT-based network are: (1) large-scale registration of existing 3D head datasets, and (2) self-supervised training on vast in-the-wild 2D video datasets using pseudo ground-truth surface normals. Finally, we show that geometry-aware pretraining on pixel-aligned reconstruction tasks significantly outperforms generic visual pretraining (e.g., DINO-style features) in terms of generalization. 🌍 🎥 Great work by Simon Giebenhain, Tobias Kirschstein, Liam Schoneveld, Davide Davoli, Zhe Chenshow more

3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering paper... page: Radiance Field methods have recently revolutionized novel-view synthesis of scenes captured with multiple photos or videos. However, achieving high visual quality still requires neural networks that are costly to train and render, while recent faster methods inevitably trade off speed for quality. For unbounded and complete scenes (rather than isolated objects) and 1080p resolution rendering, no current method can achieve real-time display rates. We introduce three key elements that allow us to achieve state-of-the-art visual quality while maintaining competitive training times and importantly allow high-quality real-time (>= 30 fps) novel-view synthesis at 1080p resolution. First, starting from sparse points produced during camera calibration, we represent the scene with 3D Gaussians that preserve desirable properties of continuous volumetric radiance fields for scene optimization while avoiding unnecessary computation in empty space; Second, we perform interleaved optimization/density control of the 3D Gaussians, notably optimizing anisotropic covariance to achieve an accurate representation of the scene; Third, we develop a fast visibility-aware rendering algorithm that supports anisotropic splatting and both accelerates training and allows realtime rendering. We demonstrate state-of-the-art visual quality and real-time rendering on several established datasets.show more

Most recent diffusion language model research (that I’ve seen)... seems to be using masking as the noising process. It looks like, however, most closed-source models (Google Gemini Diffusion and possibly Inception Labs’ Mercury) use a different noising process, where instead of masking tokens, they replace them with different tokens (either with a random token or a semantically similar token). I wondered how they were getting such high throughput with the latter noising process, since I believed that optimizing inference with KVCache approximation would be more difficult (for various reasons). I visualized this noising process with tiny-diffusion and compared it to normal unmasking, and was very surprised to see how fast the generation “settles” into a reasonable output, and then only slightly refines afterwards, requiring much fewer steps in total. Unmasking (where tokens are never remasked, the typical implementation) is inherently limited in generation speed by the fact that an increase in tokens decoded per step leads to more errors due to the mismatch between individual and marginal token probability distributions we sample from. The token replacement noising process seems to have a much different set of characteristics. Because we sample each token per step, every token makes “progress” towards the final output each iteration (in addition to *potentially* giving other tokens more information in future steps). Generally, masking has outperformed other noising processes, which is probably why most research focused on it (using smaller models). But the paper referred to in the retweet shows that random replacement as a noising process may scale better as model size increases. Big labs might have noticed these results much earlier (due to having drastically more training resources and being able to test larger models), which may explain the discrepancy in the choice of noising process. I’m gonna test this with larger models, since tiny-diffusion only has 10M parameters.show more

We’re excited to introduce Text-to-LoRA: a Hypernetwork that generates... task-specific LLM adapters (LoRAs) based on a text description of the task. Catch our presentation at #ICML2025! Paper: Code: Biological systems are capable of rapid adaptation, given limited sensory cues. For example, our human visual system can quickly adapt and tune its light sensitivity to our surroundings. While modern LLMs exhibit a wide variety of capabilities and knowledge, they remain rigid when adding task-specific capabilities. Traditionally, customizing these models requires gathering large datasets and performing often expensive, time-consuming fine-tuning for specific applications. To bypass these limitations, Text-to-LoRA (T2L) meta-learns a “hypernetwork” that takes in a text description of a desired task, as a prompt, and generates a task-specific LoRA that performs well on the task. In our experiments, we show that T2L can encode hundreds of existing LoRA adapters. While the compression is lossy, T2L maintains the performance of task-specifically tuned LoRA adapters. We also show that T2L can even generalize to unseen tasks given a natural language description of the tasks. Importantly, Text-to-LoRA is parameter-efficient. It generates LoRAs in a single, inexpensive step, based solely on a simple text description of the task. This approach is a step towards dramatically lowering the technical and computational barriers, allowing non-technical users to specialize foundation models using plain language, rather than needing deep technical expertise or large compute resources.show more

Segment Any 3D Gaussians paper page: Interactive 3D segmentation... in radiance fields is an appealing task since its importance in 3D scene understanding and manipulation. However, existing methods face challenges in either achieving fine-grained, multi-granularity segmentation or contending with substantial computational overhead, inhibiting real-time interaction. In this paper, we introduce Segment Any 3D GAussians (SAGA), a novel 3D interactive segmentation approach that seamlessly blends a 2D segmentation foundation model with 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), a recent breakthrough of radiance fields. SAGA efficiently embeds multi-granularity 2D segmentation results generated by the segmentation foundation model into 3D Gaussian point features through well-designed contrastive training. Evaluation on existing benchmarks demonstrates that SAGA can achieve competitive performance with state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, SAGA achieves multi-granularity segmentation and accommodates various prompts, including points, scribbles, and 2D masks. Notably, SAGA can finish the 3D segmentation within milliseconds, achieving nearly 1000x acceleration compared to previous SOTA.show more

LongWriter Unleashing 10,000+ Word Generation from Long Context LLMs... discuss: Current long context large language models (LLMs) can process inputs up to 100,000 tokens, yet struggle to generate outputs exceeding even a modest length of 2,000 words. Through controlled experiments, we find that the model's effective generation length is inherently bounded by the sample it has seen during supervised fine-tuning (SFT). In other words, their output limitation is due to the scarcity of long-output examples in existing SFT datasets. To address this, we introduce AgentWrite, an agent-based pipeline that decomposes ultra-long generation tasks into subtasks, enabling off-the-shelf LLMs to generate coherent outputs exceeding 20,000 words. Leveraging AgentWrite, we construct LongWriter-6k, a dataset containing 6,000 SFT data with output lengths ranging from 2k to 32k words. By incorporating this dataset into model training, we successfully scale the output length of existing models to over 10,000 words while maintaining output quality. We also develop LongBench-Write, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating ultra-long generation capabilities. Our 9B parameter model, further improved through DPO, achieves state-of-the-art performance on this benchmark, surpassing even much larger proprietary models. In general, our work demonstrates that existing long context LLM already possesses the potential for a larger output window--all you need is data with extended output during model alignment to unlock this capability.show more

Is Google taking initial steps to enhance Street View?... For some reason, Street View seems stuck in technology that feels outdated. I wonder if we'll see such improvements on the product side. Also, note how much better it performs in all aspects compared to Zip-NeRF in their presented material. It offers more details and fewer artifacts. Great work! "LODGE: Level-of-Detail Large-Scale Gaussian Splatting with Efficient Rendering" Contributions: • We propose a novel LOD representation for 3DGS which, unlike previous methods [27, 28, 17], does not recompute the list of used Gaussians at each frame. This allows for acceleration and compaction, enabling the rendering of large-scale scenes even on mobile devices. • We design a strategy to automatically select optimal hyperparameters for splitting LODs, whereas most other methods require manual tuning of hyperparameters for each 3D scene. • To further accelerate rendering, we split the scene into chunks and pre-compute sets of active Gaussians per chunk. • Finally, we introduce a novel opacity interpolation scheme to produce visually pleasing rendering and eliminate artifacts when transitioning between chunks.show more

🚨 PARKER SOLAR PROBE JUST FOUND HIGH-ENERGY PARTICLES NEAR... THE SUN THAT NO MODEL PREDICTED AND WE DON’T KNOW HOW THEY GOT SO ENERGETIC. During its close passes through the solar corona, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe detected protons accelerated to energies around 400 keV roughly 1,000 times higher than current models of magnetic reconnection at the heliospheric current sheet could explain. The particles appear to be trapped and energized inside magnetic islands that form and merge during reconnection events at the current sheet (the vast surface where the Sun’s magnetic field flips polarity). This mechanism was not expected to produce such high energies so close to the Sun. Why this matters: • It reveals a previously unknown or underestimated source of energetic particles right in the solar corona • Existing models of solar energetic particles have focused mainly on shocks from coronal mass ejections — this suggests reconnection can also be a powerful accelerator • The same process may be contributing more to coronal heating than previously calculated • It has implications for space weather forecasting, since these particles can affect spacecraft and astronauts The deeper implication: Parker is showing us that the physics of the near-Sun environment is more energetic and complex than our models assumed. Magnetic reconnection long known as an important process appears capable of accelerating particles to surprisingly high energies through the merging of magnetic islands. This doesn’t just tweak our understanding of the Sun; it may force revisions in how we model particle acceleration across many astrophysical environments. We’re still in the early stages of understanding what Parker is revealing, but it’s already clear that the corona is more violent and dynamic than we thought. How do you think this discovery might change our models of space weather or solar physics in the coming years? Follow for more updates from Parker Solar Probe and the evolving picture of our Sun.show more

Two weeks ago I fixed one of my teeth... with algorithms I wrote a couple of years ago! I got hooked by 3D scanning when I started to work for a software shop in Zurich that was programming 3D computational geometry algorithms for denture scanning to produce crowns (and more). Back then, a typical reconstruction pipeline was like: scan the patient’s teeth using an intraoral scanner, reconstruct the surface mesh, design the restoration digitally, and finally mill the crown out of ceramic. We were working mostly with point clouds and meshes, but it wasn’t just math, it was craftsmanship translated into a digital process. Every micron mattered. You could literally see how a good algorithm meant a better fit in someone’s mouth. Gaussian Splatting isn’t about surface reconstruction, it’s about appearance reconstruction. It doesn’t care about explicit topology, it captures how light interacts with the scene. In a sense, it’s the opposite philosophy of the dental world: instead of modeling what the object is, it models how the object looks. 3D Gaussian Splatting enables applications like training self driving cars, teaching robots to understand their environment, creating virtual worlds, or monitoring real sites. It represents scenes as millions of small Gaussians rendered in real time without the need for meshes or textures. Coming from a world where precision geometry was everything, this shift felt natural. It’s still about reconstruction, but with a different goal: not manufacturing a perfect object, but reproducing how the world actually looks. Two weeks ago I got my first dental crown, made with the same software, reconstruction algorithms, and Swiss precision I once helped develop. I haven’t worked there in two years, but sitting in that chair and seeing the process from the other side was a proud moment. It reminded me why I love this field.show more

The Hidden Language of Diffusion Models paper page: tackle... the challenge of understanding concept representations in text-to-image models by decomposing an input text prompt into a small set of interpretable elements. This is achieved by learning a pseudo-token that is a sparse weighted combination of tokens from the model's vocabulary, with the objective of reconstructing the images generated for the given concept. Applied over the state-of-the-art Stable Diffusion model, this decomposition reveals non-trivial and surprising structures in the representations of concepts. For example, we find that some concepts such as "a president" or "a composer" are dominated by specific instances (e.g., "Obama", "Biden") and their interpolations. Other concepts, such as "happiness" combine associated terms that can be concrete ("family", "laughter") or abstract ("friendship", "emotion"). In addition to peering into the inner workings of Stable Diffusion, our method also enables applications such as single-image decomposition to tokens, bias detection and mitigation, and semantic image manipulationshow more

The human being is the keeper of Love and... Reason in the Universe. Humanity’s highest dream lies not only in eternally preserving its own kind, but also in striving to maintain the Universe’s suitability for other intelligent beings — for the sake of elevating the cosmic tree of life. : The author casts humanity as the Universe’s sole keeper of Love and Reason, the only force capable of infusing cold cosmic matter with warmth and purpose. Our highest dream extends beyond mere self-preservation. It is to ensure the Universe remains hospitable not only for our own eternal continuance but for any other intelligent life that might arise. We are called to tend the cosmic tree of life, nurturing conditions that allow consciousness to bloom wherever it can. This responsibility is both humble and immense. We did not choose the role; it chose us. The same intellect that lets us grasp the stars now demands we safeguard the possibility of other minds grasping them too. To fail would be to let the Universe slip back into silence. To succeed is to make the cosmos a garden rather than a graveyard. Humanity’s greatness is measured not by how long we endure alone, but by how generously we prepare the ground for whatever comes after us. Love and Reason, carried in fragile bodies on a small planet, become the Universe’s quiet rebellion against indifference.show more

We’re excited to introduce ShinkaEvolve: An open-source framework that... evolves programs for scientific discovery with unprecedented sample-efficiency. Blog: Code: Like AlphaEvolve and its variants, our framework leverages LLMs to find state-of-the-art solutions to complex problems, but using orders of magnitude fewer resources! Many evolutionary AI systems are powerful but act like brute-force engines, burning thousands of samples to find good solutions. This makes discovery slow and expensive. We took inspiration from the efficiency of nature. ‘Shinka’ (進化) is Japanese for evolution, and we designed our system to be just as resourceful. On the classic circle packing optimization problem, ShinkaEvolve discovered a new state-of-the-art solution using only 150 samples. This is a big leap in efficiency compared to previous methods that required thousands of evaluations. We applied ShinkaEvolve to a diverse set of hard problems with real-world applications: 1/ AIME Math Reasoning: It evolved sophisticated agentic scaffolds that significantly outperform strong baselines, discovering an entire Pareto frontier of solutions trading performance for efficiency. 2/ Competitive Programming: On ALE-Bench (a benchmark for NP-Hard optimization problems), ShinkaEvolve took the best existing agent's solutions and improved them, turning a 5th place solution on one task into a 2nd place leaderboard rank in a competitive programming competition. 3/ LLM Training: We even turned ShinkaEvolve inward to improve LLMs themselves. It tackled the open challenge of designing load balancing losses for Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models. It discovered a novel loss function that leads to better expert specialization and consistently improves model performance and perplexity. ShinkaEvolve achieves its remarkable sample-efficiency through three key innovations that work together: (1) an adaptive parent sampling strategy to balance exploration and exploitation, (2) novelty-based rejection filtering to avoid redundant work, and (3) a bandit-based LLM ensemble that dynamically picks the best model for the job. By making ShinkaEvolve open-source and highly sample-efficient, our goal is to democratize access to advanced, open-ended discovery tools. Our vision for ShinkaEvolve is to be an easy-to-use companion tool to help scientists and engineers with their daily work. We believe that building more efficient, nature-inspired systems is key to unlocking the future of AI-driven scientific research. We are excited to see what the community builds with it! Learn more in our technical report:show more

Honestly this does touch on our philosophy. We could... very easily chase profits and charge $50 because it's entirely made in USA, the quality of the cotton and weave, the printing method, the inks we use etc. Obviously yall see others doing it for even lower quality products. Our pricing is not reflective of the product but we do it to keep it affordable and accessible and to help grow the mission of reshoring industry. A lot of people are trying to be made in USA businesses but also charge out the absolute ass trying to maintain margins and an income they'd grown accustomed to. It's an unrealistic expectation in our current economy and you're shooting the movement in the foot pricing yourself out of volume. Made in USA needs volume and cashflow. Goods need to be moving and exchanging hands, that's what drives the economy. If you're out there charging a premium people will still continue to go buy the foreign slop because it's cheaper and they don't share the values of what supporting made in USA really is. Shirts specifically if you're still using foreign shirts and cotton, they use the absolute cheapest shit they can find. (Just like wool, there's varying degrees of quality genetics that determines softness and performance). Probably the most frequent comment we get is about softness and how crazy comfortable our stuff is. That's for a reason and not by magic or accident. Our designs don't have that gross plastic stiff feel to them that flakes off and degrades quickly. That's for a reason because of how we choose to do things the hard way. We understand we care more about these things than most and for the general public they willingly buy lower quality stuff more to just support who is selling it. But I think awareness is also part of the issue because I was also one of those "it's just a shirt, who cares" people until I wore an AL shirt. They are hands down the biggest bang for the buck in this space and we have shirts lasting people years and years now for the same price you pay to fund china whether directly or indirectly. The best (and how capitalism is supposed to work) way to grow the movement is to be an educated consumer. Check tags, country of origin labels, ink and printing method. If someone is being shady or dodgy over the answers? There's your answer. And this goes for all products. We keep an active list of all kinds of made in USA products for all sorts of things that we have personally bought and used to check for quality both the product but also the business. anyway. TLDR we give up massive profits because we believe in what we're doing even tho it slows growth.show more

FastMap: Revisiting Dense and Scalable Structure from Motion "FASTMAP,... a redesigned SfM framework, achieves fast, high-accuracy dense structure from motion. On large scenes with thousands of images, FASTMAP is up to one to two orders of magnitude faster than GLOMAP and COLMAP. ... Importantly, FASTMAP achieves efficiency improvements while keeping comparable performance. Extensive experiments on eight datasets demonstrate pose estimation accuracy and novel view synthesis quality close to GLOMAP and COLMAP. " Contributions: 1. For all the iterative nonlinear optimization problems involved, we design algorithms such that the computational complexity of each iteration is only linear in the number of image pairs, not keypoint pairs or 3D points. This includes replacing the traditional bundle adjustment [50] present in previous SfM frameworks with a novel re-weighting epipolar adjustment algorithm, which is much more efficient. 2. Throughout the entire framework, we formulate as many steps as possible as GPU-friendly dense tensor operations. This allows us to implement the entire method in PyTorch [39], which provides seamless GPU acceleration.show more