Yuanming Hu

Yu Fang, Jiancheng Liu, Mingrui Zhang et al.

Differentiable physics enables efficient gradient-based optimizations of neural network (NN) controllers. However, existing work typically only delivers NN controllers with limited capability and generalizability. We present a practical learning framework that outputs unified NN controllers capable of tasks with significantly improved complexity and diversity. To systematically improve training robustness and efficiency, we investigated a suite of improvements over the baseline approach, including periodic activation functions, and tailored loss functions. In addition, we find our adoption of batching and an Adam optimizer effective in training complex locomotion tasks. We evaluate our framework on differentiable mass-spring and material point method (MPM) simulations, with challenging locomotion tasks and multiple robot designs. Experiments show that our learning framework, based on differentiable physics, delivers better results than reinforcement learning and converges much faster. We demonstrate that users can interactively control soft robot locomotion and switch among multiple goals with specified velocity, height, and direction instructions using a unified NN controller trained in our system. Code is available at https://github.com/erizmr/Complex-locomotion-skill-learning-via-differentiable-physics.

Beichen Li, Bolei Deng, Wan Shou et al.

The conflict between stiffness and toughness is a fundamental problem in engineering materials design. However, the systematic discovery of microstructured composites with optimal stiffness-toughness trade-offs has never been demonstrated, hindered by the discrepancies between simulation and reality and the lack of data-efficient exploration of the entire Pareto front. We introduce a generalizable pipeline that integrates physical experiments, numerical simulations, and artificial neural networks to address both challenges. Without any prescribed expert knowledge of material design, our approach implements a nested-loop proposal-validation workflow to bridge the simulation-to-reality gap and discover microstructured composites that are stiff and tough with high sample efficiency. Further analysis of Pareto-optimal designs allows us to automatically identify existing toughness enhancement mechanisms, which were previously discovered through trial-and-error or biomimicry. On a broader scale, our method provides a blueprint for computational design in various research areas beyond solid mechanics, such as polymer chemistry, fluid dynamics, meteorology, and robotics.

Yihao Luo, Xianglong He, Chuanyu Pan et al.

Accurate and efficient voxelized representations of 3D meshes are the foundation of 3D reconstruction and generation. However, existing representations based on iso-surface heavily rely on water-tightening or rendering optimization, which inevitably compromise geometric fidelity. We propose Faithful Contouring, a sparse voxelized representation that supports 2048+ resolutions for arbitrary meshes, requiring neither converting meshes to field functions nor extracting the isosurface during remeshing. It achieves near-lossless fidelity by preserving sharpness and internal structures, even for challenging cases with complex geometry and topology. The proposed method also shows flexibility for texturing, manipulation, and editing. Beyond representation, we design a dual-mode autoencoder for Faithful Contouring, enabling scalable and detail-preserving shape reconstruction. Extensive experiments show that Faithful Contouring surpasses existing methods in accuracy and efficiency for both representation and reconstruction. For direct representation, it achieves distance errors at the $10^{-5}$ level; for mesh reconstruction, it yields a 93\% reduction in Chamfer Distance and a 35\% improvement in F-score over strong baselines, confirming superior fidelity as a representation for 3D learning tasks.

Chongjie Ye, Cheng Cao, Chuanyu Pan et al.

Recent multimodal large language models have achieved strong performance in unified text and image understanding and generation, yet extending such native capability to 3D remains challenging due to limited data. Compared to abundant 2D imagery, high-quality 3D assets are scarce, making 3D synthesis under-constrained. Existing methods often rely on indirect pipelines that edit in 2D and lift results into 3D via optimization, sacrificing geometric consistency. We present Omni123, a 3D-native foundation model that unifies text-to-2D and text-to-3D generation within a single autoregressive framework. Our key insight is that cross-modal consistency between images and 3D can serve as an implicit structural constraint. By representing text, images, and 3D as discrete tokens in a shared sequence space, the model leverages abundant 2D data as a geometric prior to improve 3D representations. We introduce an interleaved X-to-X training paradigm that coordinates diverse cross-modal tasks over heterogeneous paired datasets without requiring fully aligned text-image-3D triplets. By traversing semantic-visual-geometric cycles (e.g., text to image to 3D to image) within autoregressive sequences, the model jointly enforces semantic alignment, appearance fidelity, and multi-view geometric consistency. Experiments show that Omni123 significantly improves text-guided 3D generation and editing, demonstrating a scalable path toward multimodal 3D world models.

Zuyu Xu, Kang Shen, Pengnian Cai et al.

The recent emergence of the hybrid quantum-classical neural network (HQCNN) architecture has garnered considerable attention due to the potential advantages associated with integrating quantum principles to enhance various facets of machine learning algorithms and computations. However, the current investigated serial structure of HQCNN, wherein information sequentially passes from one network to another, often imposes limitations on the trainability and expressivity of the network. In this study, we introduce a novel architecture termed Parallel Proportional Fusion of Quantum and Spiking Neural Networks (PPF-QSNN). The dataset information is simultaneously fed into both the spiking neural network and the variational quantum circuits, with the outputs amalgamated in proportion to their individual contributions. We systematically assess the impact of diverse PPF-QSNN parameters on network performance for image classification, aiming to identify the optimal configuration. Numerical results on the MNIST dataset unequivocally illustrate that our proposed PPF-QSNN outperforms both the existing spiking neural network and the serial quantum neural network across metrics such as accuracy, loss, and robustness. This study introduces a novel and effective amalgamation approach for HQCNN, thereby laying the groundwork for the advancement and application of quantum advantage in artificial intelligent computations.

Zhiao Huang, Yuanming Hu, Tao Du et al.

Simulated virtual environments serve as one of the main driving forces behind developing and evaluating skill learning algorithms. However, existing environments typically only simulate rigid body physics. Additionally, the simulation process usually does not provide gradients that might be useful for planning and control optimizations. We introduce a new differentiable physics benchmark called PasticineLab, which includes a diverse collection of soft body manipulation tasks. In each task, the agent uses manipulators to deform the plasticine into the desired configuration. The underlying physics engine supports differentiable elastic and plastic deformation using the DiffTaichi system, posing many under-explored challenges to robotic agents. We evaluate several existing reinforcement learning (RL) methods and gradient-based methods on this benchmark. Experimental results suggest that 1) RL-based approaches struggle to solve most of the tasks efficiently; 2) gradient-based approaches, by optimizing open-loop control sequences with the built-in differentiable physics engine, can rapidly find a solution within tens of iterations, but still fall short on multi-stage tasks that require long-term planning. We expect that PlasticineLab will encourage the development of novel algorithms that combine differentiable physics and RL for more complex physics-based skill learning tasks.

Yuanming Hu, Mingkuan Xu, Ye Kuang et al.

Leveraging spatial sparsity has become a popular approach to accelerate 3D computer graphics applications. Spatially sparse data structures and efficient sparse kernels (such as parallel stencil operations on active voxels), are key to achieve high performance. Existing work focuses on improving performance within a single sparse computational kernel. We show that a system that looks beyond a single kernel, plus additional domain-specific sparse data structure analysis, opens up exciting new space for optimizing sparse computations. Specifically, we propose a domain-specific data-flow graph model of imperative and sparse computation programs, which describes kernel relationships and enables easy analysis and optimization. Combined with an asynchronous execution engine that exposes a wide window of kernels, the inter-kernel optimizer can then perform effective sparse computation optimizations, such as eliminating unnecessary voxel list generations and removing voxel activation checks. These domain-specific optimizations further make way for classical general-purpose optimizations that are originally challenging to directly apply to computations with sparse data structures. Without any computational code modification, our new system leads to $4.02\times$ fewer kernel launches and $1.87\times$ speed up on our GPU benchmarks, including computations on Eulerian grids, Lagrangian particles, meshes, and automatic differentiation.

Yuanming Hu, Luke Anderson, Tzu-Mao Li et al.

We present DiffTaichi, a new differentiable programming language tailored for building high-performance differentiable physical simulators. Based on an imperative programming language, DiffTaichi generates gradients of simulation steps using source code transformations that preserve arithmetic intensity and parallelism. A light-weight tape is used to record the whole simulation program structure and replay the gradient kernels in a reversed order, for end-to-end backpropagation. We demonstrate the performance and productivity of our language in gradient-based learning and optimization tasks on 10 different physical simulators. For example, a differentiable elastic object simulator written in our language is 4.2x shorter than the hand-engineered CUDA version yet runs as fast, and is 188x faster than the TensorFlow implementation. Using our differentiable programs, neural network controllers are typically optimized within only tens of iterations.

Yuanming Hu, Jiancheng Liu, Andrew Spielberg et al.

Physical simulators have been widely used in robot planning and control. Among them, differentiable simulators are particularly favored, as they can be incorporated into gradient-based optimization algorithms that are efficient in solving inverse problems such as optimal control and motion planning. Simulating deformable objects is, however, more challenging compared to rigid body dynamics. The underlying physical laws of deformable objects are more complex, and the resulting systems have orders of magnitude more degrees of freedom and therefore they are significantly more computationally expensive to simulate. Computing gradients with respect to physical design or controller parameters is typically even more computationally challenging. In this paper, we propose a real-time, differentiable hybrid Lagrangian-Eulerian physical simulator for deformable objects, ChainQueen, based on the Moving Least Squares Material Point Method (MLS-MPM). MLS-MPM can simulate deformable objects including contact and can be seamlessly incorporated into inference, control and co-design systems. We demonstrate that our simulator achieves high precision in both forward simulation and backward gradient computation. We have successfully employed it in a diverse set of control tasks for soft robots, including problems with nearly 3,000 decision variables.

Yuanming Hu, Hao He, Chenxi Xu et al.

Retouching can significantly elevate the visual appeal of photos, but many casual photographers lack the expertise to do this well. To address this problem, previous works have proposed automatic retouching systems based on supervised learning from paired training images acquired before and after manual editing. As it is difficult for users to acquire paired images that reflect their retouching preferences, we present in this paper a deep learning approach that is instead trained on unpaired data, namely a set of photographs that exhibits a retouching style the user likes, which is much easier to collect. Our system is formulated using deep convolutional neural networks that learn to apply different retouching operations on an input image. Network training with respect to various types of edits is enabled by modeling these retouching operations in a unified manner as resolution-independent differentiable filters. To apply the filters in a proper sequence and with suitable parameters, we employ a deep reinforcement learning approach that learns to make decisions on what action to take next, given the current state of the image. In contrast to many deep learning systems, ours provides users with an understandable solution in the form of conventional retouching edits, rather than just a "black-box" result. Through quantitative comparisons and user studies, we show that this technique generates retouching results consistent with the provided photo set.