Ang Cao

CV
h-index34
14papers
1,691citations
Novelty57%
AI Score49

14 Papers

CVMar 21, 2023
Text2Room: Extracting Textured 3D Meshes from 2D Text-to-Image Models

Lukas Höllein, Ang Cao, Andrew Owens et al.

We present Text2Room, a method for generating room-scale textured 3D meshes from a given text prompt as input. To this end, we leverage pre-trained 2D text-to-image models to synthesize a sequence of images from different poses. In order to lift these outputs into a consistent 3D scene representation, we combine monocular depth estimation with a text-conditioned inpainting model. The core idea of our approach is a tailored viewpoint selection such that the content of each image can be fused into a seamless, textured 3D mesh. More specifically, we propose a continuous alignment strategy that iteratively fuses scene frames with the existing geometry to create a seamless mesh. Unlike existing works that focus on generating single objects or zoom-out trajectories from text, our method generates complete 3D scenes with multiple objects and explicit 3D geometry. We evaluate our approach using qualitative and quantitative metrics, demonstrating it as the first method to generate room-scale 3D geometry with compelling textures from only text as input.

CVJan 23, 2023
HexPlane: A Fast Representation for Dynamic Scenes

Ang Cao, Justin Johnson

Modeling and re-rendering dynamic 3D scenes is a challenging task in 3D vision. Prior approaches build on NeRF and rely on implicit representations. This is slow since it requires many MLP evaluations, constraining real-world applications. We show that dynamic 3D scenes can be explicitly represented by six planes of learned features, leading to an elegant solution we call HexPlane. A HexPlane computes features for points in spacetime by fusing vectors extracted from each plane, which is highly efficient. Pairing a HexPlane with a tiny MLP to regress output colors and training via volume rendering gives impressive results for novel view synthesis on dynamic scenes, matching the image quality of prior work but reducing training time by more than $100\times$. Extensive ablations confirm our HexPlane design and show that it is robust to different feature fusion mechanisms, coordinate systems, and decoding mechanisms. HexPlane is a simple and effective solution for representing 4D volumes, and we hope they can broadly contribute to modeling spacetime for dynamic 3D scenes.

CVJun 16, 2022
FWD: Real-time Novel View Synthesis with Forward Warping and Depth

Ang Cao, Chris Rockwell, Justin Johnson

Novel view synthesis (NVS) is a challenging task requiring systems to generate photorealistic images of scenes from new viewpoints, where both quality and speed are important for applications. Previous image-based rendering (IBR) methods are fast, but have poor quality when input views are sparse. Recent Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and generalizable variants give impressive results but are not real-time. In our paper, we propose a generalizable NVS method with sparse inputs, called FWD, which gives high-quality synthesis in real-time. With explicit depth and differentiable rendering, it achieves competitive results to the SOTA methods with 130-1000x speedup and better perceptual quality. If available, we can seamlessly integrate sensor depth during either training or inference to improve image quality while retaining real-time speed. With the growing prevalence of depths sensors, we hope that methods making use of depth will become increasingly useful.

CVNov 27, 2023Code
EucliDreamer: Fast and High-Quality Texturing for 3D Models with Stable Diffusion Depth

Cindy Le, Congrui Hetang, Chendi Lin et al.

This paper presents a novel method to generate textures for 3D models given text prompts and 3D meshes. Additional depth information is taken into account to perform the Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) process with depth conditional Stable Diffusion. We ran our model over the open-source dataset Objaverse and conducted a user study to compare the results with those of various 3D texturing methods. We have shown that our model can generate more satisfactory results and produce various art styles for the same object. In addition, we achieved faster time when generating textures of comparable quality. We also conduct thorough ablation studies of how different factors may affect generation quality, including sampling steps, guidance scale, negative prompts, data augmentation, elevation range, and alternatives to SDS.

CVApr 30, 2024Code
Lightplane: Highly-Scalable Components for Neural 3D Fields

Ang Cao, Justin Johnson, Andrea Vedaldi et al.

Contemporary 3D research, particularly in reconstruction and generation, heavily relies on 2D images for inputs or supervision. However, current designs for these 2D-3D mapping are memory-intensive, posing a significant bottleneck for existing methods and hindering new applications. In response, we propose a pair of highly scalable components for 3D neural fields: Lightplane Render and Splatter, which significantly reduce memory usage in 2D-3D mapping. These innovations enable the processing of vastly more and higher resolution images with small memory and computational costs. We demonstrate their utility in various applications, from benefiting single-scene optimization with image-level losses to realizing a versatile pipeline for dramatically scaling 3D reconstruction and generation. Code: \url{https://github.com/facebookresearch/lightplane}.

CVDec 31, 2024Code
Probing Visual Language Priors in VLMs

Tiange Luo, Ang Cao, Gunhee Lee et al.

Despite recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs), they may over-rely on visual language priors existing in their training data rather than true visual reasoning. To investigate this, we introduce ViLP, a benchmark featuring deliberately out-of-distribution images synthesized via image generation models and out-of-distribution Q&A pairs. Each question in ViLP is coupled with three potential answers and three corresponding images: one that can be resolved by text priors alone and two that demand visual reasoning. Although, humans achieve near-perfect accuracy, modern VLMs falter; for instance, GPT-4 achieves only 66.17% on ViLP. To alleviate this, we propose a self-improving framework in which models generate new VQA data, then apply pixel-level and semantic corruptions to form "good-bad" image pairs for self-training. Our training objectives compel VLMs to focus more on the actual visual inputs, and we demonstrate their effectiveness in boosting the performance of open-source VLMs, including LLaVA-v1.5 and Cambrian.

CVDec 28, 2023
DreamGaussian4D: Generative 4D Gaussian Splatting

Jiawei Ren, Liang Pan, Jiaxiang Tang et al.

4D content generation has achieved remarkable progress recently. However, existing methods suffer from long optimization times, a lack of motion controllability, and a low quality of details. In this paper, we introduce DreamGaussian4D (DG4D), an efficient 4D generation framework that builds on Gaussian Splatting (GS). Our key insight is that combining explicit modeling of spatial transformations with static GS makes an efficient and powerful representation for 4D generation. Moreover, video generation methods have the potential to offer valuable spatial-temporal priors, enhancing the high-quality 4D generation. Specifically, we propose an integral framework with two major modules: 1) Image-to-4D GS - we initially generate static GS with DreamGaussianHD, followed by HexPlane-based dynamic generation with Gaussian deformation; and 2) Video-to-Video Texture Refinement - we refine the generated UV-space texture maps and meanwhile enhance their temporal consistency by utilizing a pre-trained image-to-video diffusion model. Notably, DG4D reduces the optimization time from several hours to just a few minutes, allows the generated 3D motion to be visually controlled, and produces animated meshes that can be realistically rendered in 3D engines.

CVJan 23, 2025
Fast3R: Towards 3D Reconstruction of 1000+ Images in One Forward Pass

Jianing Yang, Alexander Sax, Kevin J. Liang et al.

Multi-view 3D reconstruction remains a core challenge in computer vision, particularly in applications requiring accurate and scalable representations across diverse perspectives. Current leading methods such as DUSt3R employ a fundamentally pairwise approach, processing images in pairs and necessitating costly global alignment procedures to reconstruct from multiple views. In this work, we propose Fast 3D Reconstruction (Fast3R), a novel multi-view generalization to DUSt3R that achieves efficient and scalable 3D reconstruction by processing many views in parallel. Fast3R's Transformer-based architecture forwards N images in a single forward pass, bypassing the need for iterative alignment. Through extensive experiments on camera pose estimation and 3D reconstruction, Fast3R demonstrates state-of-the-art performance, with significant improvements in inference speed and reduced error accumulation. These results establish Fast3R as a robust alternative for multi-view applications, offering enhanced scalability without compromising reconstruction accuracy.

CVJul 2, 2024
Meta 3D Gen

Raphael Bensadoun, Tom Monnier, Yanir Kleiman et al.

We introduce Meta 3D Gen (3DGen), a new state-of-the-art, fast pipeline for text-to-3D asset generation. 3DGen offers 3D asset creation with high prompt fidelity and high-quality 3D shapes and textures in under a minute. It supports physically-based rendering (PBR), necessary for 3D asset relighting in real-world applications. Additionally, 3DGen supports generative retexturing of previously generated (or artist-created) 3D shapes using additional textual inputs provided by the user. 3DGen integrates key technical components, Meta 3D AssetGen and Meta 3D TextureGen, that we developed for text-to-3D and text-to-texture generation, respectively. By combining their strengths, 3DGen represents 3D objects simultaneously in three ways: in view space, in volumetric space, and in UV (or texture) space. The integration of these two techniques achieves a win rate of 68% with respect to the single-stage model. We compare 3DGen to numerous industry baselines, and show that it outperforms them in terms of prompt fidelity and visual quality for complex textual prompts, while being significantly faster.

CVJan 8
MoE3D: A Mixture-of-Experts Module for 3D Reconstruction

Zichen Wang, Ang Cao, Liam J. Wang et al.

We propose a simple yet effective approach to enhance the performance of feed-forward 3D reconstruction models. Existing methods often struggle near depth discontinuities, where standard regression losses encourage spatial averaging and thus blur sharp boundaries. To address this issue, we introduce a mixture-of-experts formulation that handles uncertainty at depth boundaries by combining multiple smooth depth predictions. A softmax weighting head dynamically selects among these hypotheses on a per-pixel basis. By integrating our mixture model into a pre-trained state-of-the-art 3D model, we achieve a substantial reduction of boundary artifacts and gains in overall reconstruction accuracy. Notably, our approach is highly compute efficient, delivering generalizable improvements even when fine-tuned on a small subset of training data while incurring only negligible additional inference computation, suggesting a promising direction for lightweight and accurate 3D reconstruction.

CVApr 19, 2025
Locate 3D: Real-World Object Localization via Self-Supervised Learning in 3D

Sergio Arnaud, Paul McVay, Ada Martin et al. · mit

We present LOCATE 3D, a model for localizing objects in 3D scenes from referring expressions like "the small coffee table between the sofa and the lamp." LOCATE 3D sets a new state-of-the-art on standard referential grounding benchmarks and showcases robust generalization capabilities. Notably, LOCATE 3D operates directly on sensor observation streams (posed RGB-D frames), enabling real-world deployment on robots and AR devices. Key to our approach is 3D-JEPA, a novel self-supervised learning (SSL) algorithm applicable to sensor point clouds. It takes as input a 3D pointcloud featurized using 2D foundation models (CLIP, DINO). Subsequently, masked prediction in latent space is employed as a pretext task to aid the self-supervised learning of contextualized pointcloud features. Once trained, the 3D-JEPA encoder is finetuned alongside a language-conditioned decoder to jointly predict 3D masks and bounding boxes. Additionally, we introduce LOCATE 3D DATASET, a new dataset for 3D referential grounding, spanning multiple capture setups with over 130K annotations. This enables a systematic study of generalization capabilities as well as a stronger model.

CVFeb 27, 2025
From Thousands to Billions: 3D Visual Language Grounding via Render-Supervised Distillation from 2D VLMs

Ang Cao, Sergio Arnaud, Oleksandr Maksymets et al.

3D vision-language grounding faces a fundamental data bottleneck: while 2D models train on billions of images, 3D models have access to only thousands of labeled scenes--a six-order-of-magnitude gap that severely limits performance. We introduce $\textbf{LIFT-GS}$, a practical distillation technique that overcomes this limitation by using differentiable rendering to bridge 3D and 2D supervision. LIFT-GS predicts 3D Gaussian representations from point clouds and uses them to render predicted language-conditioned 3D masks into 2D views, enabling supervision from 2D foundation models (SAM, CLIP, LLaMA) without requiring any 3D annotations. This render-supervised formulation enables end-to-end training of complete encoder-decoder architectures and is inherently model-agnostic. LIFT-GS achieves state-of-the-art results with $25.7\%$ mAP on open-vocabulary instance segmentation (vs. $20.2\%$ prior SOTA) and consistent $10-30\%$ improvements on referential grounding tasks. Remarkably, pretraining effectively multiplies fine-tuning datasets by 2X, demonstrating strong scaling properties that suggest 3D VLG currently operates in a severely data-scarce regime. Project page: https://liftgs.github.io

CVApr 16, 2024
EucliDreamer: Fast and High-Quality Texturing for 3D Models with Depth-Conditioned Stable Diffusion

Cindy Le, Congrui Hetang, Chendi Lin et al.

We present EucliDreamer, a simple and effective method to generate textures for 3D models given text prompts and meshes. The texture is parametrized as an implicit function on the 3D surface, which is optimized with the Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) process and differentiable rendering. To generate high-quality textures, we leverage a depth-conditioned Stable Diffusion model guided by the depth image rendered from the mesh. We test our approach on 3D models in Objaverse and conducted a user study, which shows its superior quality compared to existing texturing methods like Text2Tex. In addition, our method converges 2 times faster than DreamFusion. Through text prompting, textures of diverse art styles can be produced. We hope Euclidreamer proides a viable solution to automate a labor-intensive stage in 3D content creation.

CVJun 26, 2021
Inverting and Understanding Object Detectors

Ang Cao, Justin Johnson

As a core problem in computer vision, the performance of object detection has improved drastically in the past few years. Despite their impressive performance, object detectors suffer from a lack of interpretability. Visualization techniques have been developed and widely applied to introspect the decisions made by other kinds of deep learning models; however, visualizing object detectors has been underexplored. In this paper, we propose using inversion as a primary tool to understand modern object detectors and develop an optimization-based approach to layout inversion, allowing us to generate synthetic images recognized by trained detectors as containing a desired configuration of objects. We reveal intriguing properties of detectors by applying our layout inversion technique to a variety of modern object detectors, and further investigate them via validation experiments: they rely on qualitatively different features for classification and regression; they learn canonical motifs of commonly co-occurring objects; they use diff erent visual cues to recognize objects of varying sizes. We hope our insights can help practitioners improve object detectors.