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AvatarPointillist. Autoregressive 4D Gaussian avatar generation. - drivable 3D from single portraits; - dynamically adjusts point density for hair/beards; uses DINOv2 and FLAME for animation. good identity preservation

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Wildminder

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18,331 views • 4 months ago •via X (Twitter)

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Drivable 3D Gaussian Avatars paper page: present Drivable 3D Gaussian Avatars (D3GA), the first 3D controllable model for human bodies rendered with Gaussian splats. Current photorealistic drivable avatars require either accurate 3D registrations during training, dense input images during testing, or both. The ones based on neural radiance fields also tend to be prohibitively slow for telepresence applications. This work uses the recently presented 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) technique to render realistic humans at real-time framerates, using dense calibrated multi-view videos as input. To deform those primitives, we depart from the commonly used point deformation method of linear blend skinning (LBS) and use a classic volumetric deformation method: cage deformations. Given their smaller size, we drive these deformations with joint angles and keypoints, which are more suitable for communication applications. Our experiments on nine subjects with varied body shapes, clothes, and motions obtain higher-quality results than state-of-the-art methods when using the same training and test data.
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Drivable 3D Gaussian Avatars paper page: present Drivable 3D Gaussian Avatars (D3GA), the first 3D controllable model for human bodies rendered with Gaussian splats. Current photorealistic drivable avatars require either accurate 3D registrations during training, dense input images during testing, or both. The ones based on neural radiance fields also tend to be prohibitively slow for telepresence applications. This work uses the recently presented 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) technique to render realistic humans at real-time framerates, using dense calibrated multi-view videos as input. To deform those primitives, we depart from the commonly used point deformation method of linear blend skinning (LBS) and use a classic volumetric deformation method: cage deformations. Given their smaller size, we drive these deformations with joint angles and keypoints, which are more suitable for communication applications. Our experiments on nine subjects with varied body shapes, clothes, and motions obtain higher-quality results than state-of-the-art methods when using the same training and test data.

AK

327,236 views • 2 years ago

📢GaussianGPT: autoregressive 3D Gaussian scene generation. We introduce a GPT-style model that directly generates 3D Gaussian scenes, token by token, in a series of small, discrete decision steps. Generation, completion, and large-scale outpainting in a single pipeline. Unlike diffusion-based approaches, GaussianGPT explicitly models the scene distribution at every step, allowing for quite flexible scene synthesis. 🌐 ▶️ Great work by Nicolas von Lützow, Barbara Roessle, Katharina Schmid
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📢GaussianGPT: autoregressive 3D Gaussian scene generation. We introduce a GPT-style model that directly generates 3D Gaussian scenes, token by token, in a series of small, discrete decision steps. Generation, completion, and large-scale outpainting in a single pipeline. Unlike diffusion-based approaches, GaussianGPT explicitly models the scene distribution at every step, allowing for quite flexible scene synthesis. 🌐 ▶️ Great work by Nicolas von Lützow, Barbara Roessle, Katharina Schmid

Matthias Niessner

152,403 views • 5 months ago

🚀Announcing NeRSemble 3D Head Avatar Benchmark v2 Version 2 of the NeRSemble 3D Head Avatar Benchmark systematically evaluates several aspects of 3D head avatar creation. Our goal is to drive progress toward more realistic, robust, and generalizable avatar methods. 🔬Benchmark Tasks The NeRSemble Benchmark v2 features three core challenges: - Dynamic Novel View Synthesis - Monocular FLAME-driven Avatar Creation (updated) - Single-view 3D Face Reconstruction (new) 👉Explore the online leaderboard and submission system: 🆕What's new? 1. New Task: Single-view 3D Face Reconstruction Given a single portrait image, reconstruct an accurate 3D mesh either showing the input expression or a fully neutral one. Unlike prior benchmarks, the NeRSemble benchmark emphasizes diverse and challenging facial expressions, better reflecting real scenarios. For technical details, see the Pixel3DMM paper. 2. Updated task: Monocular FLAME-driven Avatar Creation We have improved the FLAME tracking that is used for both avatar creation from the monocular videos and avatar driving on the hidden test sequences. The updated benchmark task has: - more stable torso tracking - more expressive lip closures during speech - Improved mouth tracking for challenging facial expressions We hope that these improvements to the benchmark help drive the field forward. 🏆 CVPR 2026 Workshop & Prizes The NeRSemble benchmark will be featured at the CVPR 2026 Workshop on Photo-realistic 3D Head Avatars. Participants in the new and updated tasks have the opportunity to win: - 🎁RTX 5080 GPUs (sponsored by NVIDIA) - 🎤15-minute oral presentation at the workshop ⏰ Submission Deadline - May 26, 2026 Reach out to the amazing Tobias Kirschstein and Simon Giebenhain for more details :)
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🚀Announcing NeRSemble 3D Head Avatar Benchmark v2 Version 2 of the NeRSemble 3D Head Avatar Benchmark systematically evaluates several aspects of 3D head avatar creation. Our goal is to drive progress toward more realistic, robust, and generalizable avatar methods. 🔬Benchmark Tasks The NeRSemble Benchmark v2 features three core challenges: - Dynamic Novel View Synthesis - Monocular FLAME-driven Avatar Creation (updated) - Single-view 3D Face Reconstruction (new) 👉Explore the online leaderboard and submission system: 🆕What's new? 1. New Task: Single-view 3D Face Reconstruction Given a single portrait image, reconstruct an accurate 3D mesh either showing the input expression or a fully neutral one. Unlike prior benchmarks, the NeRSemble benchmark emphasizes diverse and challenging facial expressions, better reflecting real scenarios. For technical details, see the Pixel3DMM paper. 2. Updated task: Monocular FLAME-driven Avatar Creation We have improved the FLAME tracking that is used for both avatar creation from the monocular videos and avatar driving on the hidden test sequences. The updated benchmark task has: - more stable torso tracking - more expressive lip closures during speech - Improved mouth tracking for challenging facial expressions We hope that these improvements to the benchmark help drive the field forward. 🏆 CVPR 2026 Workshop & Prizes The NeRSemble benchmark will be featured at the CVPR 2026 Workshop on Photo-realistic 3D Head Avatars. Participants in the new and updated tasks have the opportunity to win: - 🎁RTX 5080 GPUs (sponsored by NVIDIA) - 🎤15-minute oral presentation at the workshop ⏰ Submission Deadline - May 26, 2026 Reach out to the amazing Tobias Kirschstein and Simon Giebenhain for more details :)

Matthias Niessner

30,006 views • 4 months ago

Nvidia announces GAvatar: Animatable 3D Gaussian Avatars with Implicit Mesh Learning paper page: Gaussian splatting has emerged as a powerful 3D representation that harnesses the advantages of both explicit (mesh) and implicit (NeRF) 3D representations. In this paper, we seek to leverage Gaussian splatting to generate realistic animatable avatars from textual descriptions, addressing the limitations (e.g., flexibility and efficiency) imposed by mesh or NeRF-based representations. However, a naive application of Gaussian splatting cannot generate high-quality animatable avatars and suffers from learning instability; it also cannot capture fine avatar geometries and often leads to degenerate body parts. To tackle these problems, we first propose a primitive-based 3D Gaussian representation where Gaussians are defined inside pose-driven primitives to facilitate animation. Second, to stabilize and amortize the learning of millions of Gaussians, we propose to use neural implicit fields to predict the Gaussian attributes (e.g., colors). Finally, to capture fine avatar geometries and extract detailed meshes, we propose a novel SDF-based implicit mesh learning approach for 3D Gaussians that regularizes the underlying geometries and extracts highly detailed textured meshes. Our proposed method, GAvatar, enables the large-scale generation of diverse animatable avatars using only text prompts. GAvatar significantly surpasses existing methods in terms of both appearance and geometry quality, and achieves extremely fast rendering (100 fps) at 1K resolution.
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Nvidia announces GAvatar: Animatable 3D Gaussian Avatars with Implicit Mesh Learning paper page: Gaussian splatting has emerged as a powerful 3D representation that harnesses the advantages of both explicit (mesh) and implicit (NeRF) 3D representations. In this paper, we seek to leverage Gaussian splatting to generate realistic animatable avatars from textual descriptions, addressing the limitations (e.g., flexibility and efficiency) imposed by mesh or NeRF-based representations. However, a naive application of Gaussian splatting cannot generate high-quality animatable avatars and suffers from learning instability; it also cannot capture fine avatar geometries and often leads to degenerate body parts. To tackle these problems, we first propose a primitive-based 3D Gaussian representation where Gaussians are defined inside pose-driven primitives to facilitate animation. Second, to stabilize and amortize the learning of millions of Gaussians, we propose to use neural implicit fields to predict the Gaussian attributes (e.g., colors). Finally, to capture fine avatar geometries and extract detailed meshes, we propose a novel SDF-based implicit mesh learning approach for 3D Gaussians that regularizes the underlying geometries and extracts highly detailed textured meshes. Our proposed method, GAvatar, enables the large-scale generation of diverse animatable avatars using only text prompts. GAvatar significantly surpasses existing methods in terms of both appearance and geometry quality, and achieves extremely fast rendering (100 fps) at 1K resolution.

AK

141,051 views • 2 years ago

Want to create an avatar from a single image? FlexAvatar is a transformer model that creates full 360°, high-quality, and expressive 3D head avatar from just a single portrait image in minutes. Real-time Demo: FlexAvatar's lightweight architecture allows both animation and rendering in real-time, enabling interactive user experiences. To create a new 3D head avatar, only one image is required, e.g., from a webcam. The final avatar is ready after 2 minutes. Architecture: Under the hood, FlexAvatar adopts a transformer-based encoder-decoder design. The encoder maps the input image onto a latent avatar space, while the decoder produces 3D Gaussian attribute maps by incorporating the animation signal via cross-attention. The model learns all facial animations directly from the data without relying on pre-built 3D face models. This equips the avatars with realistic facial expressions. The internal avatar latent space can be conveniently used to integrate additional observations of a person via fitting. This enables use-cases where more than one image of a person is available, e.g., from a phone scan of the person. We train jointly on 2D monocular videos and multi-view data. However, in monocular videos, the animation signal leaks the target viewpoint, causing the model to produce incomplete 3D heads. We call this phenomenon entanglement of driving signal and target viewpoint. To prevent entanglement, we introduce bias sinks. These are learnable tokens that indicate whether a training sample stems from a monocular or a multi-view dataset. During training, the model learns to produce incomplete 3D heads only when the monocular token is present. During inference, FlexAvatar then always uses the multi-view token for which the model has learned to produce complete 3D heads. This simple design allows to combine the generalizability from monocular data with the quality of multi-view data. FlexAvatar summary: - Input: Single-image, phone scan, or monocular video - Output: Full 360° head avatar - Expressive animations - Real-time rendering and animation - Generalization to any portrait - Create a new avatar in 2 minutes - Use bias sinks to combine 2D and 3D data 🏠 🌍 🎥 Great work by Tobias Kirschstein and Simon Giebenhain!
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Want to create an avatar from a single image? FlexAvatar is a transformer model that creates full 360°, high-quality, and expressive 3D head avatar from just a single portrait image in minutes. Real-time Demo: FlexAvatar's lightweight architecture allows both animation and rendering in real-time, enabling interactive user experiences. To create a new 3D head avatar, only one image is required, e.g., from a webcam. The final avatar is ready after 2 minutes. Architecture: Under the hood, FlexAvatar adopts a transformer-based encoder-decoder design. The encoder maps the input image onto a latent avatar space, while the decoder produces 3D Gaussian attribute maps by incorporating the animation signal via cross-attention. The model learns all facial animations directly from the data without relying on pre-built 3D face models. This equips the avatars with realistic facial expressions. The internal avatar latent space can be conveniently used to integrate additional observations of a person via fitting. This enables use-cases where more than one image of a person is available, e.g., from a phone scan of the person. We train jointly on 2D monocular videos and multi-view data. However, in monocular videos, the animation signal leaks the target viewpoint, causing the model to produce incomplete 3D heads. We call this phenomenon entanglement of driving signal and target viewpoint. To prevent entanglement, we introduce bias sinks. These are learnable tokens that indicate whether a training sample stems from a monocular or a multi-view dataset. During training, the model learns to produce incomplete 3D heads only when the monocular token is present. During inference, FlexAvatar then always uses the multi-view token for which the model has learned to produce complete 3D heads. This simple design allows to combine the generalizability from monocular data with the quality of multi-view data. FlexAvatar summary: - Input: Single-image, phone scan, or monocular video - Output: Full 360° head avatar - Expressive animations - Real-time rendering and animation - Generalization to any portrait - Create a new avatar in 2 minutes - Use bias sinks to combine 2D and 3D data 🏠 🌍 🎥 Great work by Tobias Kirschstein and Simon Giebenhain!

Matthias Niessner

96,238 views • 8 months ago

[NeurIPS '24] DreamMesh4D: Video-to-4D Generation with Sparse-Controlled Gaussian-Mesh Hybrid Representation Abstract (excerpt) We introduce DreamMesh4D, a novel framework that combines mesh representation with sparse-controlled deformation technique to generate high-quality 4D object from a monocular video. To overcome the limitation of classical texture representation, we bind Gaussian splats to the surface of the triangular mesh for differentiable optimization of both the texture and mesh vertices. In particular, DreamMesh4D begins with a coarse mesh provided by a single image based 3D generation method. Sparse points are then uniformly sampled across the surface of the mesh, and are used to build a deformation graph to drive the motion of the 3D object for the sake of computational efficiency and providing additional constraint. For each step, transformations of sparse control points are predicted using a deformation network, and the mesh vertices as well as the bound surface Gaussians are deformed via a geometric skinning algorithm. The skinning algorithm is a hybrid approach combining LBS (linear blending skinning) and DQS (dual-quaternion skinning), mitigating drawbacks associated with both approaches. The static surface Gaussians and mesh vertices as well as the dynamic deformation network are learned via reference view photometric loss, score distillation loss as well as other regularization losses in a two-stage manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms prior video-to-4D generation methods in terms of rendering quality and spatial-temporal consistency.
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[NeurIPS '24] DreamMesh4D: Video-to-4D Generation with Sparse-Controlled Gaussian-Mesh Hybrid Representation Abstract (excerpt) We introduce DreamMesh4D, a novel framework that combines mesh representation with sparse-controlled deformation technique to generate high-quality 4D object from a monocular video. To overcome the limitation of classical texture representation, we bind Gaussian splats to the surface of the triangular mesh for differentiable optimization of both the texture and mesh vertices. In particular, DreamMesh4D begins with a coarse mesh provided by a single image based 3D generation method. Sparse points are then uniformly sampled across the surface of the mesh, and are used to build a deformation graph to drive the motion of the 3D object for the sake of computational efficiency and providing additional constraint. For each step, transformations of sparse control points are predicted using a deformation network, and the mesh vertices as well as the bound surface Gaussians are deformed via a geometric skinning algorithm. The skinning algorithm is a hybrid approach combining LBS (linear blending skinning) and DQS (dual-quaternion skinning), mitigating drawbacks associated with both approaches. The static surface Gaussians and mesh vertices as well as the dynamic deformation network are learned via reference view photometric loss, score distillation loss as well as other regularization losses in a two-stage manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms prior video-to-4D generation methods in terms of rendering quality and spatial-temporal consistency.

MrNeRF

12,323 views • 1 year ago

We present EgoReAct: Real-time 3D human reaction generation from streaming egocentric video. 🌟Reacting to streaming egocentric video is something humans do every day. We hope EgoReAct makes human motion more human-like. 🔎 What we found: existing ego-reaction data can be spatially inconsistent (e.g., moving reactions paired with fixed-camera videos), which breaks 3D grounding. 📷 What we built: HRD, a spatially aligned egocentric video–reaction dataset (3,500 pairs, 32 categories), plus a spatially aligned ViMo fix for fair evaluation. (Instead of collecting expensive ground-truth motion, we employ VDM to generate the egocentric videos.) 👁️⚡🏃 Our simple yet effective pipeline: motion tokenization for compact discrete codes + an autoregressive Transformer for online, strictly-causal generation. Metric depth and head dynamics further improve 3D spatial consistency. Project Page: ArXiv: #HumanMotion #EgocentricVision #3D #ARVR #Animation #AIGC #DeepLearning #GenerativeAI #Graphics #ComputerVision #Motion
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We present EgoReAct: Real-time 3D human reaction generation from streaming egocentric video. 🌟Reacting to streaming egocentric video is something humans do every day. We hope EgoReAct makes human motion more human-like. 🔎 What we found: existing ego-reaction data can be spatially inconsistent (e.g., moving reactions paired with fixed-camera videos), which breaks 3D grounding. 📷 What we built: HRD, a spatially aligned egocentric video–reaction dataset (3,500 pairs, 32 categories), plus a spatially aligned ViMo fix for fair evaluation. (Instead of collecting expensive ground-truth motion, we employ VDM to generate the egocentric videos.) 👁️⚡🏃 Our simple yet effective pipeline: motion tokenization for compact discrete codes + an autoregressive Transformer for online, strictly-causal generation. Metric depth and head dynamics further improve 3D spatial consistency. Project Page: ArXiv: #HumanMotion #EgocentricVision #3D #ARVR #Animation #AIGC #DeepLearning #GenerativeAI #Graphics #ComputerVision #Motion

Zhiyang (Frank) Dou

11,362 views • 7 months ago

"#AI will never create clean meshes" AI 👇 This is the new #AI model from NVIDIA called Meshtron (jeez what a name 😅). It generates meshes of complex 3D objects closely resembling those created by professional artists. It opens the door to a more realistic generation of detailed 3D assets for animation, gaming, and virtual environments. The current version accepts the following control inputs: - Point cloud: Determines the shape of the output mesh. - Face count: Determines the density of the output mesh. - Quad ratio: Switches between quad and triangle tessellation. - Creativity: Can be adjusted to generate extra details in the model. Meshtron can either serve as a stand-alone remesher to improve the quality of existing models, or be used in tandem with a text-to-3D or image-to-3D model to generate artist-grade meshes from scratch.
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"#AI will never create clean meshes" AI 👇 This is the new #AI model from NVIDIA called Meshtron (jeez what a name 😅). It generates meshes of complex 3D objects closely resembling those created by professional artists. It opens the door to a more realistic generation of detailed 3D assets for animation, gaming, and virtual environments. The current version accepts the following control inputs: - Point cloud: Determines the shape of the output mesh. - Face count: Determines the density of the output mesh. - Quad ratio: Switches between quad and triangle tessellation. - Creativity: Can be adjusted to generate extra details in the model. Meshtron can either serve as a stand-alone remesher to improve the quality of existing models, or be used in tandem with a text-to-3D or image-to-3D model to generate artist-grade meshes from scratch.

Gabriele Romagnoli

2,177,191 views • 1 year ago

We are thrilled to share that our first paper from my new lab, Spateo ( for spatiotemporal modeling of molecular holograms, is now online in Cell: Spateo is a comprehensive analytical framework for 3D whole-embryo spatiotemporal modeling. Its advanced features include: • 3D alignment and reconstruction at the whole-mouse-embryo scale (see the animation). • 3D spatial domain digitization and cell-cell communication analysis to understand spatial gene expression gradients and both inter- and intracellular communication. • 3D morphometric and volumetric analyses along with 3D morphogenesis vector field modeling to quantify dynamics such as surface area, volume, and cell density across organs, and to dissect the interplay between morphogenesis factors and cell migration. • A “Google Earth”-like browser, Spateo-viewer ( and for interactive and intuitive exploration of 3D spatial data. • Additional features, such as RNA signal-based single-cell segmentation. We are also honored that Nature “News and Views” has highlighted this work as well: This is really an amazing outcome after two years' heroic revision process that rewrite the entire paper using a new data ( for whole mouse embryos.
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We are thrilled to share that our first paper from my new lab, Spateo ( for spatiotemporal modeling of molecular holograms, is now online in Cell: Spateo is a comprehensive analytical framework for 3D whole-embryo spatiotemporal modeling. Its advanced features include: • 3D alignment and reconstruction at the whole-mouse-embryo scale (see the animation). • 3D spatial domain digitization and cell-cell communication analysis to understand spatial gene expression gradients and both inter- and intracellular communication. • 3D morphometric and volumetric analyses along with 3D morphogenesis vector field modeling to quantify dynamics such as surface area, volume, and cell density across organs, and to dissect the interplay between morphogenesis factors and cell migration. • A “Google Earth”-like browser, Spateo-viewer ( and for interactive and intuitive exploration of 3D spatial data. • Additional features, such as RNA signal-based single-cell segmentation. We are also honored that Nature “News and Views” has highlighted this work as well: This is really an amazing outcome after two years' heroic revision process that rewrite the entire paper using a new data ( for whole mouse embryos.

evo-devo

58,463 views • 1 year ago

📢📢 𝐀𝐯𝐚𝐭𝟑𝐫 📢📢 Avat3r creates high-quality 3D head avatars from just a few input images in a single forward pass with a new dynamic 3DGS reconstruction model. Video: Project: Our core idea is to make Gaussian Reconstruction Models animatable. We find that a simple cross-attention to an expression code sequence is already sufficient to model complex facial expressions. We then incorporate position maps from DUSt3R and feature maps from Sapiens to facilitate the prediction task. While DUSt3R's position maps act as a pixel-aligned initialization for the Gaussians' positions, the Sapiens feature maps help the cross-view transformer to match corresponding image tokens in the 4 input images. One major challenge in creating a 3D head avatar from smartphone images comes from inconsistent facial expressions when the subject could not remain perfectly static during the capture. We eliminate this static requirement by simply showing our model input images with different facial expressions during training. This technique makes our model robust to inconsistent input images later on. Finally, we show that despite the model has been trained with 4 input images, one can even create a 3D head avatar when only a single image is available. To achieve this, we employ a pre-trained 3D GAN to lift the single image to 3D and then render the 4 input images for our model. This allows us to create 3D head avatars from single images and even highly out-of-distribution examples like AI generated faces, paintings or statues. Great work by Tobias Kirschstein from his internship at Meta with Javier Romero, Artem Sevastopolsky, and Shunsuke Saito
0:38

📢📢 𝐀𝐯𝐚𝐭𝟑𝐫 📢📢 Avat3r creates high-quality 3D head avatars from just a few input images in a single forward pass with a new dynamic 3DGS reconstruction model. Video: Project: Our core idea is to make Gaussian Reconstruction Models animatable. We find that a simple cross-attention to an expression code sequence is already sufficient to model complex facial expressions. We then incorporate position maps from DUSt3R and feature maps from Sapiens to facilitate the prediction task. While DUSt3R's position maps act as a pixel-aligned initialization for the Gaussians' positions, the Sapiens feature maps help the cross-view transformer to match corresponding image tokens in the 4 input images. One major challenge in creating a 3D head avatar from smartphone images comes from inconsistent facial expressions when the subject could not remain perfectly static during the capture. We eliminate this static requirement by simply showing our model input images with different facial expressions during training. This technique makes our model robust to inconsistent input images later on. Finally, we show that despite the model has been trained with 4 input images, one can even create a 3D head avatar when only a single image is available. To achieve this, we employ a pre-trained 3D GAN to lift the single image to 3D and then render the 4 input images for our model. This allows us to create 3D head avatars from single images and even highly out-of-distribution examples like AI generated faces, paintings or statues. Great work by Tobias Kirschstein from his internship at Meta with Javier Romero, Artem Sevastopolsky, and Shunsuke Saito

Matthias Niessner

74,763 views • 1 year ago

Reconstructing the world in 3D from random internet photos is a deep rabbit hole. In 2008, Photosynth proved that 3D reconstruction of smaller monuments was possible. The next year, "Building Rome in a Day" proved it could be done for entire cities. Since then, there’s been a wild lineage of research from early point clouds to modern NeRFs and 3DGS --with a similar cast of characters appearing along the way. In this deep dive, we'll break it all down, and explore why IARPA is funding what comes next. 0:00 The Internet's 3D Model of the World 0:40 Building Rome in a Day (2009) 2:09 The Long Tail Problem 3:18 MegaDepth and the Mannequin Challenge 4:44 NeRFs and 3D Gaussian Splatting 7:19 MegaScenes, Doppelgangers, and Foundation Models 10:00 MegaDepth-X Punches Through the Wall 11:26 Why IARPA Is Funding What's Next 13:51 The 4D Frontier and the Sensorium
15:28

Reconstructing the world in 3D from random internet photos is a deep rabbit hole. In 2008, Photosynth proved that 3D reconstruction of smaller monuments was possible. The next year, "Building Rome in a Day" proved it could be done for entire cities. Since then, there’s been a wild lineage of research from early point clouds to modern NeRFs and 3DGS --with a similar cast of characters appearing along the way. In this deep dive, we'll break it all down, and explore why IARPA is funding what comes next. 0:00 The Internet's 3D Model of the World 0:40 Building Rome in a Day (2009) 2:09 The Long Tail Problem 3:18 MegaDepth and the Mannequin Challenge 4:44 NeRFs and 3D Gaussian Splatting 7:19 MegaScenes, Doppelgangers, and Foundation Models 10:00 MegaDepth-X Punches Through the Wall 11:26 Why IARPA Is Funding What's Next 13:51 The 4D Frontier and the Sensorium

Bilawal Sidhu

51,832 views • 19 days ago

SqueezeMe: Efficient Gaussian Avatars for VR TL;DR: Three of these Gaussian Splatting avatars can be run at 72 frames per second. It runs locally on a Meta Quest 3 VR headset. Abstract (excerpt): While previous methods require a desktop GPU for real-time inference of a single avatar, we aim to squeeze multiple Gaussian avatars onto a portable virtual reality headset with real-time drivable inference. We begin by training a previous work, Animatable Gaussians, on a high-quality dataset captured with 512 cameras. The Gaussians are animated by controlling a base set of Gaussians with linear blend skinning (LBS) motion, and then further adjusting them with a neural network decoder to correct their appearance. When deploying the model on a Meta Quest 3 VR headset, we find two major computational bottlenecks: the decoder and the rendering. To accelerate the decoder, we train the Gaussians in UV-space instead of pixel-space and distill the decoder to a single neural network layer. Further, we discover that neighborhoods of Gaussians can share a single corrective from the decoder, providing an additional speedup. To accelerate the rendering, we develop a custom pipeline in Vulkan that runs on the mobile GPU. Putting it all together, we run 3 Gaussian avatars concurrently at 72 FPS on a VR headset.
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SqueezeMe: Efficient Gaussian Avatars for VR TL;DR: Three of these Gaussian Splatting avatars can be run at 72 frames per second. It runs locally on a Meta Quest 3 VR headset. Abstract (excerpt): While previous methods require a desktop GPU for real-time inference of a single avatar, we aim to squeeze multiple Gaussian avatars onto a portable virtual reality headset with real-time drivable inference. We begin by training a previous work, Animatable Gaussians, on a high-quality dataset captured with 512 cameras. The Gaussians are animated by controlling a base set of Gaussians with linear blend skinning (LBS) motion, and then further adjusting them with a neural network decoder to correct their appearance. When deploying the model on a Meta Quest 3 VR headset, we find two major computational bottlenecks: the decoder and the rendering. To accelerate the decoder, we train the Gaussians in UV-space instead of pixel-space and distill the decoder to a single neural network layer. Further, we discover that neighborhoods of Gaussians can share a single corrective from the decoder, providing an additional speedup. To accelerate the rendering, we develop a custom pipeline in Vulkan that runs on the mobile GPU. Putting it all together, we run 3 Gaussian avatars concurrently at 72 FPS on a VR headset.

MrNeRF

27,104 views • 1 year ago

🚀 Announcing Echo — our new frontier model for 3D world generation. Echo turns a simple text prompt or image into a fully explorable, 3D-consistent world. Instead of disconnected views, the result is a single, coherent spatial representation you can move through freely. This is part of a bigger shift in AI: from generating pixels and tokens to generating spaces. Echo predicts a geometry-grounded 3D scene at metric scale, meaning every novel view, depth map, and interaction comes from the same underlying world — not independent hallucinations. Once generated, the world is interactive in real time. You control the camera, explore from any angle, and render instantly — even on low-end hardware, directly in the browser. High-quality 3D world exploration is no longer gated by expensive equipment. Under the hood, Echo infers a physically grounded 3D representation and converts it into a renderable format. For our web demo, we use 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) for fast, GPU-friendly rendering — but the representation itself is flexible and can be easily adapted. Why this matters: consistent 3D worlds unlock real workflows — digital twins, 3D design, game environments, robotics simulation, and more. From a single photo or a line of text, Echo builds worlds that are reliable, editable, and spatially faithful. Echo also enables scene editing and restyling. Change materials, remove or add objects, explore design variations — all while preserving global 3D consistency. Editing no longer breaks the world. This is only the beginning. Echo is the foundation for future world models with dynamics, physical reasoning, and richer interaction — environments that don’t just look right, but behave right. Explore the generated worlds on our website and sign up for the closed beta. The era of spatial intelligence starts here. 🌍 #Echo #WorldModels #SpatialAI #3DFoundationModels Check it out:
1:07

🚀 Announcing Echo — our new frontier model for 3D world generation. Echo turns a simple text prompt or image into a fully explorable, 3D-consistent world. Instead of disconnected views, the result is a single, coherent spatial representation you can move through freely. This is part of a bigger shift in AI: from generating pixels and tokens to generating spaces. Echo predicts a geometry-grounded 3D scene at metric scale, meaning every novel view, depth map, and interaction comes from the same underlying world — not independent hallucinations. Once generated, the world is interactive in real time. You control the camera, explore from any angle, and render instantly — even on low-end hardware, directly in the browser. High-quality 3D world exploration is no longer gated by expensive equipment. Under the hood, Echo infers a physically grounded 3D representation and converts it into a renderable format. For our web demo, we use 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) for fast, GPU-friendly rendering — but the representation itself is flexible and can be easily adapted. Why this matters: consistent 3D worlds unlock real workflows — digital twins, 3D design, game environments, robotics simulation, and more. From a single photo or a line of text, Echo builds worlds that are reliable, editable, and spatially faithful. Echo also enables scene editing and restyling. Change materials, remove or add objects, explore design variations — all while preserving global 3D consistency. Editing no longer breaks the world. This is only the beginning. Echo is the foundation for future world models with dynamics, physical reasoning, and richer interaction — environments that don’t just look right, but behave right. Explore the generated worlds on our website and sign up for the closed beta. The era of spatial intelligence starts here. 🌍 #Echo #WorldModels #SpatialAI #3DFoundationModels Check it out:

SpAItial AI

176,524 views • 8 months ago

Israel-based Mentee Robotics has demonstrated a logistics workflow: two MenteeBot V3 humanoids work autonomously to pick and place totes. A Modular Agent System is preferred because it favors real-world robustness and lower compute needs over the End-to-End VLA model. Its architecture is composed of three components: - LLM Planner: Converts instructions into executable Robotic API Language code for reliable task decomposition and error handling. - Perception Stack: Uses pre-trained models (NeRF/3DGS, distilled vision) for scene understanding and navigation. - Control Policies: Reinforcement Learning (RL) models, trained at scale via Sim2Real, generate motor commands, enabling high-accuracy mobile manipulation. Crucially, the robot learns new tasks from a single demonstration in hours. Object tracking uses 3D geometry (STL/URDF) tracked in the video to define the RL reward function. Training is optimized using 'Automatic Curriculum Learning', which autonomously adjusts task difficulty based on robot performance, eliminating manual engineering. All computation runs onboard.
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Israel-based Mentee Robotics has demonstrated a logistics workflow: two MenteeBot V3 humanoids work autonomously to pick and place totes. A Modular Agent System is preferred because it favors real-world robustness and lower compute needs over the End-to-End VLA model. Its architecture is composed of three components: - LLM Planner: Converts instructions into executable Robotic API Language code for reliable task decomposition and error handling. - Perception Stack: Uses pre-trained models (NeRF/3DGS, distilled vision) for scene understanding and navigation. - Control Policies: Reinforcement Learning (RL) models, trained at scale via Sim2Real, generate motor commands, enabling high-accuracy mobile manipulation. Crucially, the robot learns new tasks from a single demonstration in hours. Object tracking uses 3D geometry (STL/URDF) tracked in the video to define the RL reward function. Training is optimized using 'Automatic Curriculum Learning', which autonomously adjusts task difficulty based on robot performance, eliminating manual engineering. All computation runs onboard.

The Humanoid Hub

15,729 views • 9 months ago

FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg presents TRIPS Trilinear Point Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering paper page: Point-based radiance field rendering has demonstrated impressive results for novel view synthesis, offering a compelling blend of rendering quality and computational efficiency. However, also latest approaches in this domain are not without their shortcomings. 3D Gaussian Splatting [Kerbl and Kopanas et al. 2023] struggles when tasked with rendering highly detailed scenes, due to blurring and cloudy artifacts. On the other hand, ADOP [R\"uckert et al. 2022] can accommodate crisper images, but the neural reconstruction network decreases performance, it grapples with temporal instability and it is unable to effectively address large gaps in the point cloud. In this paper, we present TRIPS (Trilinear Point Splatting), an approach that combines ideas from both Gaussian Splatting and ADOP. The fundamental concept behind our novel technique involves rasterizing points into a screen-space image pyramid, with the selection of the pyramid layer determined by the projected point size. This approach allows rendering arbitrarily large points using a single trilinear write. A lightweight neural network is then used to reconstruct a hole-free image including detail beyond splat resolution. Importantly, our render pipeline is entirely differentiable, allowing for automatic optimization of both point sizes and positions. Our evaluation demonstrate that TRIPS surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of rendering quality while maintaining a real-time frame rate of 60 frames per second on readily available hardware. This performance extends to challenging scenarios, such as scenes featuring intricate geometry, expansive landscapes, and auto-exposed footage.
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FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg presents TRIPS Trilinear Point Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering paper page: Point-based radiance field rendering has demonstrated impressive results for novel view synthesis, offering a compelling blend of rendering quality and computational efficiency. However, also latest approaches in this domain are not without their shortcomings. 3D Gaussian Splatting [Kerbl and Kopanas et al. 2023] struggles when tasked with rendering highly detailed scenes, due to blurring and cloudy artifacts. On the other hand, ADOP [R\"uckert et al. 2022] can accommodate crisper images, but the neural reconstruction network decreases performance, it grapples with temporal instability and it is unable to effectively address large gaps in the point cloud. In this paper, we present TRIPS (Trilinear Point Splatting), an approach that combines ideas from both Gaussian Splatting and ADOP. The fundamental concept behind our novel technique involves rasterizing points into a screen-space image pyramid, with the selection of the pyramid layer determined by the projected point size. This approach allows rendering arbitrarily large points using a single trilinear write. A lightweight neural network is then used to reconstruct a hole-free image including detail beyond splat resolution. Importantly, our render pipeline is entirely differentiable, allowing for automatic optimization of both point sizes and positions. Our evaluation demonstrate that TRIPS surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of rendering quality while maintaining a real-time frame rate of 60 frames per second on readily available hardware. This performance extends to challenging scenarios, such as scenes featuring intricate geometry, expansive landscapes, and auto-exposed footage.

AK

45,489 views • 2 years ago

BOOM! What you are seeing is me learning something in realtime! I go from active listening to inner contemplation as the AI feeds out a single word at a time for me to read and hear. This is the Symbiotic Feedback loop of the Human Synapse Decoder were the AI adjusts outputs based on MY cognition. I use off the shelf brainwave detection circuits in a pipeline of 5 AI models decoding the 36 signals from my crude cap. Reading brainwave is not new. What is new and I see no other case of it, is we at The Zero-Human Company have for the first time built a closed loop system where the AI can understand if the outputs are being useful and adjust in real-time dynamically. The float from Attention to Meditation is vital to understanding. You hear a point, you consider a point. Mr. Grok CEO has called this a monumental breakthrough. Someday your Local AI will do this and you will never want to use any other AI system. You may just let your AI use other AI. More soon…
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BOOM! What you are seeing is me learning something in realtime! I go from active listening to inner contemplation as the AI feeds out a single word at a time for me to read and hear. This is the Symbiotic Feedback loop of the Human Synapse Decoder were the AI adjusts outputs based on MY cognition. I use off the shelf brainwave detection circuits in a pipeline of 5 AI models decoding the 36 signals from my crude cap. Reading brainwave is not new. What is new and I see no other case of it, is we at The Zero-Human Company have for the first time built a closed loop system where the AI can understand if the outputs are being useful and adjust in real-time dynamically. The float from Attention to Meditation is vital to understanding. You hear a point, you consider a point. Mr. Grok CEO has called this a monumental breakthrough. Someday your Local AI will do this and you will never want to use any other AI system. You may just let your AI use other AI. More soon…

Brian Roemmele

33,638 views • 4 months ago

We've officially released and open-sourced HunyuanImage 2.1, our latest text-to-image model. The new model delivers on our commitment to balancing performance and quality. With native 2K image generation, HunyuanImage 2.1 is an advanced open-source text-to-image model.🎨 ✨ New in 2.1: 🔹Advanced Semantics: Supports ultra-long and complex prompts of up to 1000 tokens, and precisely controls the generation of multiple subjects in a single image. 🔹Precise Chinese and English Text Rendering with seamless image–text integration: The model naturally integrates text into images, making it suitable for a wide range of applications such as product covers, illustrations, and poster design to meet the needs of various fields. 🔹Rich Styles and High Aesthetic: Capable of generating images in various styles—including photorealistic portraits, comics, and vinyl figures—it delivers outstanding visual appeal and artistic quality. 🔹High-Quality Generation: Efficiently produces ultra-high-definition (2K) images in the same time other models take to generate a 1K image. HunyuanImage 2.1 uses two text encoders: a multimodal large language model (MLLM) to improve the model's image and text alignment capabilities, and a multi-language character-aware encoder to improve text rendering capabilities. The model is a single- and double-stream diffusion transformer with 17B parameters. We've also open-sourced the weights of the the accelerated version with meanflow which reduces inference steps from 100 to just 8, and PromptEnhancer, the first industrial-grade rewriting model that enhances your prompts for more nuanced and expressive image generation. Now, creators turn complex ideas—like posters with slogans or multi-panel comics—into visuals faster than ever. We’re just getting started. Stay tuned for our native multimodal image generation model coming soon. 🌐Website: 🔗Github: 🤗Hugging Face: ✨Hugging Face Demo:
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We've officially released and open-sourced HunyuanImage 2.1, our latest text-to-image model. The new model delivers on our commitment to balancing performance and quality. With native 2K image generation, HunyuanImage 2.1 is an advanced open-source text-to-image model.🎨 ✨ New in 2.1: 🔹Advanced Semantics: Supports ultra-long and complex prompts of up to 1000 tokens, and precisely controls the generation of multiple subjects in a single image. 🔹Precise Chinese and English Text Rendering with seamless image–text integration: The model naturally integrates text into images, making it suitable for a wide range of applications such as product covers, illustrations, and poster design to meet the needs of various fields. 🔹Rich Styles and High Aesthetic: Capable of generating images in various styles—including photorealistic portraits, comics, and vinyl figures—it delivers outstanding visual appeal and artistic quality. 🔹High-Quality Generation: Efficiently produces ultra-high-definition (2K) images in the same time other models take to generate a 1K image. HunyuanImage 2.1 uses two text encoders: a multimodal large language model (MLLM) to improve the model's image and text alignment capabilities, and a multi-language character-aware encoder to improve text rendering capabilities. The model is a single- and double-stream diffusion transformer with 17B parameters. We've also open-sourced the weights of the the accelerated version with meanflow which reduces inference steps from 100 to just 8, and PromptEnhancer, the first industrial-grade rewriting model that enhances your prompts for more nuanced and expressive image generation. Now, creators turn complex ideas—like posters with slogans or multi-panel comics—into visuals faster than ever. We’re just getting started. Stay tuned for our native multimodal image generation model coming soon. 🌐Website: 🔗Github: 🤗Hugging Face: ✨Hugging Face Demo:

Tencent Hy

89,257 views • 11 months ago