Oded Stein

Pranav Jain, Navami Kairanda, Peter Yichen Chen et al.

Partial differential equations (PDEs) on surfaces are fundamental to scientific computing and geometry processing. A popular approach to solving PDEs on surfaces is the finite element method (FEM), where the surface is divided into discrete geometric elements (usually triangles). Recently, physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have emerged as a continuous, mesh-free alternative that does not suffer from FEM's sensitivity to mesh quality or geometric discretization errors. We present PINNSur, a simple framework for using PINNs on curved surfaces: we train a neural field to approximate the surface's normals, and then we express surface differential operators using their projection from $\mathbb{R}^3$ onto the surface. Since every orientable manifold has well-defined normals, our method is suitable for all such surfaces, regardless of curvature or topology, enabling many geometry processing applications. Moreover, despite their empirical success in solving PDEs in flat Euclidean domains, PINNs lack convergence guarantees to the true solution of the underlying PDE, and there is limited systematic experimental evidence demonstrating such convergence. This gap restricts their adoption as reliable solvers compared to established methods like FEM, where convergence to the true solution is well understood and theoretically grounded. These surface PDEs are particularly challenging to solve convergently, as one must not only deal with the convergence of the function approximation, but also with the convergence of the geometric approximation of the surface itself. In this work, we empirically investigate the convergence behavior of PINNs for solving surface PDEs by introducing a simple empirical convergence test.

Dale Decatur, Jacob Serfaty, Oded Stein et al.

We present CrossLift, a technique for computing cross fields on meshes guided by visual features in images. We leverage powerful text-to-image priors that are capable of synthesizing images of feature-aligned quad meshes in 2D. We extract this signal as explicit per-pixel directions in the 2D images, which we then back-project to the mesh surface. We aggregate these candidate surface directions by performing two smooth interpolations on the mesh surface (first within each view and second across multiple views). We propose custom confidence-based weights for the candidate directions in each interpolation that allow us to resolve conflicts between candidates on the same face and smoothly interpolate our field to occluded faces. Our method is modular and can be used with many different 2D visual priors. We show additional applications to texture-aligned quad meshing as well as interactive cross-field design using coarse, user-drawn lines as signal. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CrossLift on a diverse set of both organic and mechanical shapes and produce quad meshes that exhibit superior semantic alignment as compared to existing methods. Project page at: https://crosslift.github.io/

Ana Dodik, Oded Stein, Vincent Sitzmann et al.

We propose a variational technique to optimize for generalized barycentric coordinates that offers additional control compared to existing models. Prior work represents barycentric coordinates using meshes or closed-form formulae, in practice limiting the choice of objective function. In contrast, we directly parameterize the continuous function that maps any coordinate in a polytope's interior to its barycentric coordinates using a neural field. This formulation is enabled by our theoretical characterization of barycentric coordinates, which allows us to construct neural fields that parameterize the entire function class of valid coordinates. We demonstrate the flexibility of our model using a variety of objective functions, including multiple smoothness and deformation-aware energies; as a side contribution, we also present mathematically-justified means of measuring and minimizing objectives like total variation on discontinuous neural fields. We offer a practical acceleration strategy, present a thorough validation of our algorithm, and demonstrate several applications.

Letao Chen, Sanju Mupparaju, Christopher Batty et al.

We propose a method to interpolate Signed Distance Function (SDF) data from a discrete set of samples. Unlike prior work, our approach ensures that the new SDF data values are fully consistent with the input and each other, such that the augmented data still corresponds to a geometrically realizable surface. We express the theoretical properties of SDFs as hard geometric constraints, and construct an efficient greedy algorithm for consistent SDF interpolation that is made even faster with powerful parallelized GPU preprocessing. We exemplify the usefulness of our method by evaluating it on three practical applications: global SDF refinement, in which the SDF data is upsampled without knowledge of the ground truth; mesh reconstruction, where our method can reconstruct highly detailed surfaces using global information from coarse input SDFs; and repair of pseudo-SDFs, which result from many pipelines such as CSG Boolean operations and must be turned into valid SDFs for downstream processing tasks. Our refined SDFs are guaranteed to be consistent with the input, where previous methods have no such guarantee.

Ningna Wang, Xiana Carrera, Christopher Batty et al.

Unsigned distance functions offer a powerful and flexible implicit surface representation that, unlike their signed counterparts, allow for surfaces that are open, non-orientable, or non-manifold. We consider the problem of reconstructing arbitrary surfaces from a finite set of samples of unsigned distance data. Existing methods for mesh reconstruction from distance data rely on sign information, accurate gradients, a corresponding continuous distance function, or extensive data-dependent training. However, they fail when applied to input that is both discrete and unsigned. Inspired by this challenge, we study the power diagram generated by the distance samples and propose a novel theoretical concept, the superpower contour, which we prove converges to the true surface in the limit of sampling density. We use this superpower contour as an initial surface proxy and design an algorithm that leverages it to produce a polygonal mesh approximating the unknown true geometry. Our method vastly outperforms other conceivable strategies for the discrete unsigned distance reconstruction task, and sets the stage for future work on this mathematically rich problem.

Nam Anh Dinh, Itai Lang, Hyunwoo Kim et al.

We present Geometry in Style, a new method for identity-preserving mesh stylization. Existing techniques either adhere to the original shape through overly restrictive deformations such as bump maps or significantly modify the input shape using expressive deformations that may introduce artifacts or alter the identity of the source shape. In contrast, we represent a deformation of a triangle mesh as a target normal vector for each vertex neighborhood. The deformations we recover from target normals are expressive enough to enable detailed stylizations yet restrictive enough to preserve the shape's identity. We achieve such deformations using our novel differentiable As-Rigid-As-Possible (dARAP) layer, a neural-network-ready adaptation of the classical ARAP algorithm which we use to solve for per-vertex rotations and deformed vertices. As a differentiable layer, dARAP is paired with a visual loss from a text-to-image model to drive deformations toward style prompts, altogether giving us Geometry in Style. Our project page is at https://threedle.github.io/geometry-in-style.

Xiana Carrera, Ningna Wang, Christopher Batty et al.

We propose an algorithm to reconstruct explicit polygonal meshes from discretely sampled Signed Distance Function (SDF) data, which is especially effective at recovering sharp features. Building on the traditional Dual Contouring of Hermite Data method, we design and solve a quadratic optimization problem to decide the optimal placement of the mesh's vertices within each cell of a regular grid. Critically, this optimization relies solely on discretely sampled SDF data, without requiring arbitrary access to the function, gradient information, or training on large-scale datasets. Our method sets a new state of the art in surface reconstruction from SDFs at medium and high resolutions, and opens the door for applications in 3D modeling and design.

Ana Dodik, Vincent Sitzmann, Justin Solomon et al.

Skinning is a popular way to rig and deform characters for animation, to compute reduced-order simulations, and to define features for geometry processing. Methods built on skinning rely on weight functions that distribute the influence of each degree of freedom across the mesh. Automatic skinning methods generate these weight functions with minimal user input, usually by solving a variational problem on a mesh whose boundary is the skinned surface. This formulation necessitates tetrahedralizing the volume bounded by the surface, which brings with it meshing artifacts, the possibility of tetrahedralization failure, and the impossibility of generating weights for surfaces that are not closed. We introduce a mesh-free and robust automatic skinning method that generates high-quality skinning weights comparable to the current state of the art without volumetric meshes. Our method reliably works even on open surfaces and triangle soups where current methods fail. We achieve this through the use of a Lagrangian representation for skinning weights, which circumvents the need for finite elements while optimizing the biharmonic energy.

S. Mazdak Abulnaga, Oded Stein, Polina Golland et al.

Although shape correspondence is a central problem in geometry processing, most methods for this task apply only to two-dimensional surfaces. The neglected task of volumetric correspondence--a natural extension relevant to shapes extracted from simulation, medical imaging, and volume rendering--presents unique challenges that do not appear in the two-dimensional case. In this work, we propose a method for mapping between volumes represented as tetrahedral meshes. Our formulation minimizes a distortion energy designed to extract maps symmetrically, i.e., without dependence on the ordering of the source and target domains. We accompany our method with theoretical discussion describing the consequences of this symmetry assumption, leading us to select a symmetrized ARAP energy that favors isometric correspondences. Our final formulation optimizes for near-isometry while matching the boundary. We demonstrate our method on a diverse geometric dataset, producing low-distortion matchings that align closely to the boundary.