Vladimir Kim

CV
h-index25
15papers
517citations
Novelty56%
AI Score52

15 Papers

CVJul 20, 2024
Temporal Residual Jacobians For Rig-free Motion Transfer

Sanjeev Muralikrishnan, Niladri Shekhar Dutt, Siddhartha Chaudhuri et al.

We introduce Temporal Residual Jacobians as a novel representation to enable data-driven motion transfer. Our approach does not assume access to any rigging or intermediate shape keyframes, produces geometrically and temporally consistent motions, and can be used to transfer long motion sequences. Central to our approach are two coupled neural networks that individually predict local geometric and temporal changes that are subsequently integrated, spatially and temporally, to produce the final animated meshes. The two networks are jointly trained, complement each other in producing spatial and temporal signals, and are supervised directly with 3D positional information. During inference, in the absence of keyframes, our method essentially solves a motion extrapolation problem. We test our setup on diverse meshes (synthetic and scanned shapes) to demonstrate its superiority in generating realistic and natural-looking animations on unseen body shapes against SoTA alternatives. Supplemental video and code are available at https://temporaljacobians.github.io/ .

74.8CVMar 18
Material Magic Wand: Material-Aware Grouping of 3D Parts in Untextured Meshes

Umangi Jain, Vladimir Kim, Matheus Gadelha et al.

We introduce the problem of material-aware part grouping in untextured meshes. Many real-world shapes, such as scales of pinecones or windows of buildings, contain repeated structures that share the same material but exhibit geometric variations. When assigning materials to such meshes, these repeated parts often require piece-by-piece manual identification and selection, which is tedious and time-consuming. To address this, we propose Material Magic Wand, a tool that allows artists to select part groups based on their estimated material properties -- when one part is selected, our algorithm automatically retrieves all other parts likely to share the same material. The key component of our approach is a part encoder that generates a material-aware embedding for each 3D part, accounting for both local geometry and global context. We train our model with a supervised contrastive loss that brings embeddings of material-consistent parts closer while separating those of different materials; therefore, part grouping can be achieved by retrieving embeddings that are close to the embedding of the selected part. To benchmark this task, we introduce a curated dataset of 100 shapes with 241 part-level queries. We verify the effectiveness of our method through extensive experiments and demonstrate its practical value in an interactive material assignment application.

GRDec 9, 2025
Residual Primitive Fitting of 3D Shapes with SuperFrusta

Aditya Ganeshan, Matheus Gadelha, Thibault Groueix et al.

We introduce a framework for converting 3D shapes into compact and editable assemblies of analytic primitives, directly addressing the persistent trade-off between reconstruction fidelity and parsimony. Our approach combines two key contributions: a novel primitive, termed SuperFrustum, and an iterative fiting algorithm, Residual Primitive Fitting (ResFit). SuperFrustum is an analytical primitive that is simultaneously (1) expressive, being able to model various common solids such as cylinders, spheres, cones & their tapered and bent forms, (2) editable, being compactly parameterized with 8 parameters, and (3) optimizable, with a sign distance field differentiable w.r.t. its parameters almost everywhere. ResFit is an unsupervised procedure that interleaves global shape analysis with local optimization, iteratively fitting primitives to the unexplained residual of a shape to discover a parsimonious yet accurate decompositions for each input shape. On diverse 3D benchmarks, our method achieves state-of-the-art results, improving IoU by over 9 points while using nearly half as many primitives as prior work. The resulting assemblies bridge the gap between dense 3D data and human-controllable design, producing high-fidelity and editable shape programs.

CVApr 3, 2024
MatAtlas: Text-driven Consistent Geometry Texturing and Material Assignment

Duygu Ceylan, Valentin Deschaintre, Thibault Groueix et al.

We present MatAtlas, a method for consistent text-guided 3D model texturing. Following recent progress we leverage a large scale text-to-image generation model (e.g., Stable Diffusion) as a prior to texture a 3D model. We carefully design an RGB texturing pipeline that leverages a grid pattern diffusion, driven by depth and edges. By proposing a multi-step texture refinement process, we significantly improve the quality and 3D consistency of the texturing output. To further address the problem of baked-in lighting, we move beyond RGB colors and pursue assigning parametric materials to the assets. Given the high-quality initial RGB texture, we propose a novel material retrieval method capitalized on Large Language Models (LLM), enabling editabiliy and relightability. We evaluate our method on a wide variety of geometries and show that our method significantly outperform prior arts. We also analyze the role of each component through a detailed ablation study.

CVFeb 13, 2025
A Solver-Aided Hierarchical Language for LLM-Driven CAD Design

Benjamin T. Jones, Felix Hähnlein, Zihan Zhang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have been enormously successful in solving a wide variety of structured and unstructured generative tasks, but they struggle to generate procedural geometry in Computer Aided Design (CAD). These difficulties arise from an inability to do spatial reasoning and the necessity to guide a model through complex, long range planning to generate complex geometry. We enable generative CAD Design with LLMs through the introduction of a solver-aided, hierarchical domain specific language (DSL) called AIDL, which offloads the spatial reasoning requirements to a geometric constraint solver. Additionally, we show that in the few-shot regime, AIDL outperforms even a language with in-training data (OpenSCAD), both in terms of generating visual results closer to the prompt and creating objects that are easier to post-process and reason about.

CVFeb 3
Seeing Through Clutter: Structured 3D Scene Reconstruction via Iterative Object Removal

Rio Aguina-Kang, Kevin James Blackburn-Matzen, Thibault Groueix et al.

We present SeeingThroughClutter, a method for reconstructing structured 3D representations from single images by segmenting and modeling objects individually. Prior approaches rely on intermediate tasks such as semantic segmentation and depth estimation, which often underperform in complex scenes, particularly in the presence of occlusion and clutter. We address this by introducing an iterative object removal and reconstruction pipeline that decomposes complex scenes into a sequence of simpler subtasks. Using VLMs as orchestrators, foreground objects are removed one at a time via detection, segmentation, object removal, and 3D fitting. We show that removing objects allows for cleaner segmentations of subsequent objects, even in highly occluded scenes. Our method requires no task-specific training and benefits directly from ongoing advances in foundation models. We demonstrate stateof-the-art robustness on 3D-Front and ADE20K datasets. Project Page: https://rioak.github.io/seeingthroughclutter/

CVAug 28, 2025
Reusing Computation in Text-to-Image Diffusion for Efficient Generation of Image Sets

Dale Decatur, Thibault Groueix, Wang Yifan et al.

Text-to-image diffusion models enable high-quality image generation but are computationally expensive. While prior work optimizes per-inference efficiency, we explore an orthogonal approach: reducing redundancy across correlated prompts. Our method leverages the coarse-to-fine nature of diffusion models, where early denoising steps capture shared structures among similar prompts. We propose a training-free approach that clusters prompts based on semantic similarity and shares computation in early diffusion steps. Experiments show that for models trained conditioned on image embeddings, our approach significantly reduces compute cost while improving image quality. By leveraging UnClip's text-to-image prior, we enhance diffusion step allocation for greater efficiency. Our method seamlessly integrates with existing pipelines, scales with prompt sets, and reduces the environmental and financial burden of large-scale text-to-image generation. Project page: https://ddecatur.github.io/hierarchical-diffusion/

GRDec 1, 2021
The Shape Part Slot Machine: Contact-based Reasoning for Generating 3D Shapes from Parts

Kai Wang, Paul Guerrero, Vladimir Kim et al.

We present the Shape Part Slot Machine, a new method for assembling novel 3D shapes from existing parts by performing contact-based reasoning. Our method represents each shape as a graph of ``slots,'' where each slot is a region of contact between two shape parts. Based on this representation, we design a graph-neural-network-based model for generating new slot graphs and retrieving compatible parts, as well as a gradient-descent-based optimization scheme for assembling the retrieved parts into a complete shape that respects the generated slot graph. This approach does not require any semantic part labels; interestingly, it also does not require complete part geometries -- reasoning about the slots proves sufficient to generate novel, high-quality 3D shapes. We demonstrate that our method generates shapes that outperform existing modeling-by-assembly approaches regarding quality, diversity, and structural complexity.

CVAug 6, 2021
GLASS: Geometric Latent Augmentation for Shape Spaces

Sanjeev Muralikrishnan, Siddhartha Chaudhuri, Noam Aigerman et al.

We investigate the problem of training generative models on a very sparse collection of 3D models. We use geometrically motivated energies to augment and thus boost a sparse collection of example (training) models. We analyze the Hessian of the as-rigid-as-possible (ARAP) energy to sample from and project to the underlying (local) shape space, and use the augmented dataset to train a variational autoencoder (VAE). We iterate the process of building latent spaces of VAE and augmenting the associated dataset, to progressively reveal a richer and more expressive generative space for creating geometrically and semantically valid samples. Our framework allows us to train generative 3D models even with a small set of good quality 3D models, which are typically hard to curate. We extensively evaluate our method against a set of strong baselines, provide ablation studies and demonstrate application towards establishing shape correspondences. We present multiple examples of interesting and meaningful shape variations even when starting from as few as 3-10 training shapes.

CVMar 31, 2021
Neural Surface Maps

Luca Morreale, Noam Aigerman, Vladimir Kim et al.

Maps are arguably one of the most fundamental concepts used to define and operate on manifold surfaces in differentiable geometry. Accordingly, in geometry processing, maps are ubiquitous and are used in many core applications, such as paramterization, shape analysis, remeshing, and deformation. Unfortunately, most computational representations of surface maps do not lend themselves to manipulation and optimization, usually entailing hard, discrete problems. While algorithms exist to solve these problems, they are problem-specific, and a general framework for surface maps is still in need. In this paper, we advocate considering neural networks as encoding surface maps. Since neural networks can be composed on one another and are differentiable, we show it is easy to use them to define surfaces via atlases, compose them for surface-to-surface mappings, and optimize differentiable objectives relating to them, such as any notion of distortion, in a trivial manner. In our experiments, we represent surfaces by generating a neural map that approximates a UV parameterization of a 3D model. Then, we compose this map with other neural maps which we optimize with respect to distortion measures. We show that our formulation enables trivial optimization of rather elusive mapping tasks, such as maps between a collection of surfaces.

CVJul 14, 2020
Modeling Artistic Workflows for Image Generation and Editing

Hung-Yu Tseng, Matthew Fisher, Jingwan Lu et al.

People often create art by following an artistic workflow involving multiple stages that inform the overall design. If an artist wishes to modify an earlier decision, significant work may be required to propagate this new decision forward to the final artwork. Motivated by the above observations, we propose a generative model that follows a given artistic workflow, enabling both multi-stage image generation as well as multi-stage image editing of an existing piece of art. Furthermore, for the editing scenario, we introduce an optimization process along with learning-based regularization to ensure the edited image produced by the model closely aligns with the originally provided image. Qualitative and quantitative results on three different artistic datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework on both image generation and editing tasks.

CVMar 27, 2020
Deep CG2Real: Synthetic-to-Real Translation via Image Disentanglement

Sai Bi, Kalyan Sunkavalli, Federico Perazzi et al.

We present a method to improve the visual realism of low-quality, synthetic images, e.g. OpenGL renderings. Training an unpaired synthetic-to-real translation network in image space is severely under-constrained and produces visible artifacts. Instead, we propose a semi-supervised approach that operates on the disentangled shading and albedo layers of the image. Our two-stage pipeline first learns to predict accurate shading in a supervised fashion using physically-based renderings as targets, and further increases the realism of the textures and shading with an improved CycleGAN network. Extensive evaluations on the SUNCG indoor scene dataset demonstrate that our approach yields more realistic images compared to other state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, networks trained on our generated "real" images predict more accurate depth and normals than domain adaptation approaches, suggesting that improving the visual realism of the images can be more effective than imposing task-specific losses.

LGMay 27, 2019
FAN: Focused Attention Networks

Chu Wang, Babak Samari, Vladimir Kim et al.

Attention networks show promise for both vision and language tasks, by emphasizing relationships between constituent elements through weighting functions. Such elements could be regions in an image output by a region proposal network, or words in a sentence, represented by word embedding. Thus far the learning of attention weights has been driven solely by the minimization of task specific loss functions. We introduce a method for learning attention weights to better emphasize informative pair-wise relations between entities. The key component is a novel center-mass cross entropy loss, which can be applied in conjunction with the task specific ones. We further introduce a focused attention backbone to learn these attention weights for general tasks. We demonstrate that the focused supervision leads to improved attention distribution across meaningful entities, and that it enhances the representation by aggregating features from them. Our focused attention module leads to state-of-the-art recovery of relations in a relationship proposal task and boosts performance for various vision and language tasks.

CVDec 1, 2017
Multi-Content GAN for Few-Shot Font Style Transfer

Samaneh Azadi, Matthew Fisher, Vladimir Kim et al.

In this work, we focus on the challenge of taking partial observations of highly-stylized text and generalizing the observations to generate unobserved glyphs in the ornamented typeface. To generate a set of multi-content images following a consistent style from very few examples, we propose an end-to-end stacked conditional GAN model considering content along channels and style along network layers. Our proposed network transfers the style of given glyphs to the contents of unseen ones, capturing highly stylized fonts found in the real-world such as those on movie posters or infographics. We seek to transfer both the typographic stylization (ex. serifs and ears) as well as the textual stylization (ex. color gradients and effects.) We base our experiments on our collected data set including 10,000 fonts with different styles and demonstrate effective generalization from a very small number of observed glyphs.

CVOct 28, 2017
SeeThrough: Finding Chairs in Heavily Occluded Indoor Scene Images

Moos Hueting, Pradyumna Reddy, Vladimir Kim et al.

Discovering 3D arrangements of objects from single indoor images is important given its many applications including interior design, content creation, etc. Although heavily researched in the recent years, existing approaches break down under medium or heavy occlusion as the core object detection module starts failing in absence of directly visible cues. Instead, we take into account holistic contextual 3D information, exploiting the fact that objects in indoor scenes co-occur mostly in typical near-regular configurations. First, we use a neural network trained on real indoor annotated images to extract 2D keypoints, and feed them to a 3D candidate object generation stage. Then, we solve a global selection problem among these 3D candidates using pairwise co-occurrence statistics discovered from a large 3D scene database. We iterate the process allowing for candidates with low keypoint response to be incrementally detected based on the location of the already discovered nearby objects. Focusing on chairs, we demonstrate significant performance improvement over combinations of state-of-the-art methods, especially for scenes with moderately to severely occluded objects.