Minchen Li

Juntian Zheng, Zhaofeng Luo, Minchen Li

We introduce a barrier-free optimization framework for non-penetration elastodynamic simulation that matches the robustness of Incremental Potential Contact (IPC) while overcoming its two primary efficiency bottlenecks: (1) reliance on logarithmic barrier functions to enforce non-penetration constraints, which leads to ill-conditioned systems and significantly slows down the convergence of iterative linear solvers; and (2) the time-of-impact (TOI) locking issue, which restricts active-set exploration in collision-intensive scenes and requires a large number of Newton iterations. We propose a novel second-order constrained optimization framework featuring a custom augmented Lagrangian solver that avoids TOI locking by immediately incorporating all requisite contact pairs detected via CCD, enabling more efficient active-set exploration and leading to significantly fewer Newton iterations. By adaptively updating Lagrange multipliers rather than increasing penalty stiffness, our method prevents stagnation at zero TOI while maintaining a well-conditioned system. We further introduce a constraint filtering and decay mechanism to keep the active set compact and stable, along with a theoretical justification of our method's finite-step termination and first-order time integration accuracy under a cumulative TOI-based termination criterion. A comprehensive set of experiments demonstrates the efficiency, robustness, and accuracy of our method. With a GPU-optimized simulator design, our method achieves an up to 103x speedup over GIPC on challenging, contact-rich benchmarks - scenarios that were previously tractable only with barrier-based methods. Our code and data are open-sourced at https://simulation-intelligence.github.io/barrier-free .

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.

Zeshun Zong, Xuan Li, Minchen Li et al.

We propose a hybrid neural network and physics framework for reduced-order modeling of elastoplasticity and fracture. State-of-the-art scientific computing models like the Material Point Method (MPM) faithfully simulate large-deformation elastoplasticity and fracture mechanics. However, their long runtime and large memory consumption render them unsuitable for applications constrained by computation time and memory usage, e.g., virtual reality. To overcome these barriers, we propose a reduced-order framework. Our key innovation is training a low-dimensional manifold for the Kirchhoff stress field via an implicit neural representation. This low-dimensional neural stress field (NSF) enables efficient evaluations of stress values and, correspondingly, internal forces at arbitrary spatial locations. In addition, we also train neural deformation and affine fields to build low-dimensional manifolds for the deformation and affine momentum fields. These neural stress, deformation, and affine fields share the same low-dimensional latent space, which uniquely embeds the high-dimensional simulation state. After training, we run new simulations by evolving in this single latent space, which drastically reduces the computation time and memory consumption. Our general continuum-mechanics-based reduced-order framework is applicable to any phenomena governed by the elastodynamics equation. To showcase the versatility of our framework, we simulate a wide range of material behaviors, including elastica, sand, metal, non-Newtonian fluids, fracture, contact, and collision. We demonstrate dimension reduction by up to 100,000X and time savings by up to 10X.

Yadi Cao, Menglei Chai, Minchen Li et al.

Learning the physical simulation on large-scale meshes with flat Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and stacking Message Passings (MPs) is challenging due to the scaling complexity w.r.t. the number of nodes and over-smoothing. There has been growing interest in the community to introduce \textit{multi-scale} structures to GNNs for physical simulation. However, current state-of-the-art methods are limited by their reliance on the labor-intensive drawing of coarser meshes or building coarser levels based on spatial proximity, which can introduce wrong edges across geometry boundaries. Inspired by the bipartite graph determination, we propose a novel pooling strategy, \textit{bi-stride} to tackle the aforementioned limitations. Bi-stride pools nodes on every other frontier of the breadth-first search (BFS), without the need for the manual drawing of coarser meshes and avoiding the wrong edges by spatial proximity. Additionally, it enables a one-MP scheme per level and non-parametrized pooling and unpooling by interpolations, resembling U-Nets, which significantly reduces computational costs. Experiments show that the proposed framework, \textit{BSMS-GNN}, significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of both accuracy and computational efficiency in representative physical simulations.

Yuchen Sun, Jinyuan Liu, Yin Yang et al.

We introduce a novel approach to simulate the interaction between fluids and thin elastic solids without any penetration. Our approach is centered around an optimization system augmented with barriers, which aims to find a configuration that ensures the absence of penetration while enforcing incompressibility for the fluids and minimizing elastic potentials for the solids. Unlike previous methods that primarily focus on velocity coherence at the fluid-solid interfaces, we demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of explicitly resolving positional constraints, including both explicit representation of solid positions and the implicit representation of fluid level-set interface. To preserve the volume of the fluid, we propose a simple yet efficient approach that adjusts the associated level-set values. Additionally, we develop a distance metric capable of measuring the separation between an implicitly represented surface and a Lagrangian object of arbitrary codimension. By integrating the inertia, solid elastic potential, damping, barrier potential, and fluid incompressibility within a unified system, we are able to robustly simulate a wide range of processes involving fluid interactions with lower-dimensional objects such as shells and rods. These processes include topology changes, bouncing, splashing, sliding, rolling, floating, and more.

Yuxing Qiu, Feng Gao, Minchen Li et al.

Recent breakthroughs in Vision-Language (V&L) joint research have achieved remarkable results in various text-driven tasks. High-quality Text-to-video (T2V), a task that has been long considered mission-impossible, was proven feasible with reasonably good results in latest works. However, the resulting videos often have undesired artifacts largely because the system is purely data-driven and agnostic to the physical laws. To tackle this issue and further push T2V towards high-level physical realism, we present an autonomous data generation technique and a dataset, which intend to narrow the gap with a large number of multi-modal, 3D Text-to-Video/Simulation (T2V/S) data. In the dataset, we provide high-resolution 3D physical simulations for both solids and fluids, along with textual descriptions of the physical phenomena. We take advantage of state-of-the-art physical simulation methods (i) Incremental Potential Contact (IPC) and (ii) Material Point Method (MPM) to simulate diverse scenarios, including elastic deformations, material fractures, collisions, turbulence, etc. Additionally, high-quality, multi-view rendering videos are supplied for the benefit of T2V, Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), and other communities. This work is the first step towards fully automated Text-to-Video/Simulation (T2V/S). Live examples and subsequent work are at https://sites.google.com/view/tpa-net.

Xuan Tang, Kemeng Huang, Gilbert Bernstein et al.

Incremental Potential Contact (IPC) enables robust, contact-rich simulation by casting elasticity and contact as a single energy minimization problem, but high-performance IPC pipelines are typically built from specialized kernels and assembly logic tied to fixed energies, primitive types, and parameterizations, making extensions costly and combinatorial. We present YASPS, a GPU-oriented framework that removes this extensibility bottleneck by making structure explicit in a differentiable intermediate representation. YASPS introduces two first-class relational operators: JOIN, which composes dependent quantities across user-declared relations (e.g., element-to-vertex connectivity), and UNION, which represents alternative parameterizations within a relation (e.g., mixing free vertices with affine-body or other parameterizations without fragmenting the program). Because JOIN and UNION are part of the symbolic program, YASPS differentiates through them using dedicated rules and an efficient second-order procedure that reuses intermediate Jacobians and reduces Hessian-projection cost. From the same relational description, YASPS derives the global gradient/Hessian sparsity and block layout, enabling structure-aware block-sparse storage and compression, and JIT-compiles CUDA kernels for evaluation, derivatives, assembly, and solving. Across IPC-style examples, including layered cloth-on-bunny, mixed rigid/deformable bunnies, and a caged deformation model, YASPS supports rapid front-end extensions with minimal back-end changes while achieving competitive end-to-end performance; its Hessian compression yields near 10x faster CG iterations in our benchmarks.

Chengfeng Zhao, Junbo Qi, Yulou Liu et al.

Simulating physically realistic garment deformations is an essential task for virtual immersive experience, which is often achieved by physics simulation methods. However, these methods are typically time-consuming, computationally demanding, and require costly hardware, which is not suitable for real-time applications. Recent learning-based methods tried to resolve this problem by training graph neural networks to learn the garment deformation on vertices, which, however, fail to capture the intricate deformation of complex garment meshes with complex topologies. In this paper, we introduce a novel neural deformation field-based method, named UNIC, to animate the garments of an avatar in real time, given the motion sequences. Our key idea is to learn the instance-specific neural deformation field to animate the garment meshes. Such an instance-specific learning scheme does not require UNIC to generalize to new garments but only to new motion sequences, which greatly reduces the difficulty in training and improves the deformation quality. Moreover, neural deformation fields map the 3D points to their deformation offsets, which not only avoids handling topologies of the complex garments but also injects a natural smoothness constraint in the deformation learning. Extensive experiments have been conducted on various kinds of garment meshes to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of UNIC over baseline methods, making it potentially practical and useful in real-world interactive applications like video games.

Xuan Wang, Zhaofeng Luo, Minchen Li et al.

Implicit time integration is key to robustly simulating stiff materials and large deformations, but its performance is often dominated by repeatedly solving large linear systems. Adaptive coarsening can reduce this cost by concentrating degrees of freedom (DoF) to where it is most needed, yet conventional explicit remeshing changes connectivity (and often vertex ordering), complicating parallel implementations, harming memory locality, and sometimes being disallowed when it may introduce local geometry intersections. Adaptive subspace approaches avoid topological changes, but basis construction and updates incur irregular data access patterns and typically produce dense system matrices, limiting GPU efficiency and keeping many practical systems CPU-centric. We present algebraic adaptive in-solve coarsening, a GPU-oriented method that dynamically reduces DoF within the Newton solve of implicit time integration without explicit topological modification. Starting from a fine mesh, we express adaptivity as a selective edge-collapse process governed by per-edge tags. Collapsible edges are aggregated in parallel using a warp-level hash mapping scheme that groups fine vertices into coarse super-nodes, while protected edges preserve local detail. This defines an implicit coarse mesh whose linear system is assembled algebraically by mapping and reducing fine-scale gradients and Hessians via efficient GPU reduction kernels. We solve the resulting coarse system with a preconditioned conjugate gradient (PCG) method and then prolongate the solution back to the fine mesh. Our approach integrates seamlessly with IPC's barrier energy and exploits GPU parallelism end-to-end. Across a range of challenging scenarios, we achieve up to 3x speedup over a state-of-the-art GPU IPC solver while producing visually indistinguishable results.

Yuqi Meng, Yihao Shi, Kemeng Huang et al.

We present an efficient B-spline finite element method (FEM) for cloth simulation. While higher-order FEM has long promised higher accuracy, its adoption in cloth simulators has been limited by its larger computational costs while generating results with similar visual quality. Our contribution is a full algorithmic pipeline that makes cloth simulation using quadratic B-spline surfaces faster than standard linear FEM in practice while consistently improving accuracy and visual fidelity. Using quadratic B-spline basis functions, we obtain a globally $C^1$-continuous displacement field that supports consistent discretization of both membrane and bending energies, effectively reducing locking artifacts and mesh dependence common to linear elements. To close the performance gap, we introduce a reduced integration scheme that separately optimizes quadrature rules for membrane and bending energies, an accelerated Hessian assembly procedure tailored to the spline structure, and an optimized linear solver based on partial factorization. Together, these optimizations make high-order, smooth cloth simulation competitive at scale, yielding an average $2\times$ speedup over linear FEM in our tests. Extensive experiments demonstrate improved accuracy, wrinkle detail, and robustness, including contact-rich scenarios, relative to linear FEM and recent higher-order approaches. Our method enables realistic wrinkling dynamics across a wide range of material parameters and supports practical garment animation, providing a new promising spatial discretization for high-quality cloth simulation.

Ying Jiang, Chang Yu, Tianyi Xie et al.

As consumer Virtual Reality (VR) and Mixed Reality (MR) technologies gain momentum, there's a growing focus on the development of engagements with 3D virtual content. Unfortunately, traditional techniques for content creation, editing, and interaction within these virtual spaces are fraught with difficulties. They tend to be not only engineering-intensive but also require extensive expertise, which adds to the frustration and inefficiency in virtual object manipulation. Our proposed VR-GS system represents a leap forward in human-centered 3D content interaction, offering a seamless and intuitive user experience. By developing a physical dynamics-aware interactive Gaussian Splatting in a Virtual Reality setting, and constructing a highly efficient two-level embedding strategy alongside deformable body simulations, VR-GS ensures real-time execution with highly realistic dynamic responses. The components of our Virtual Reality system are designed for high efficiency and effectiveness, starting from detailed scene reconstruction and object segmentation, advancing through multi-view image in-painting, and extending to interactive physics-based editing. The system also incorporates real-time deformation embedding and dynamic shadow casting, ensuring a comprehensive and engaging virtual experience.Our project page is available at: https://yingjiang96.github.io/VR-GS/.

Zhaofeng Luo, Minchen Li, Yupeng Jiang

We propose an overlapping Schwarz space-time refinement framework for the material point method (OS-MPM) to improve computational efficiency in problems with strongly localized deformation, contact, and large geometric nonlinearity. The method decomposes the domain into overlapping coarse and fine subdomains with heterogeneous spatial and temporal resolutions, while retaining standard MPM discretizations within each subdomain. Coarse-fine coupling is achieved through an MPM-specific Schwarz iteration combining mass-weighted spatial transmission and temporal interpolation for sub-cycling. In contrast to refinement strategies based on modified basis functions, transition kernels, or strongly enforced interface constraints, the proposed approach preserves the modular structure of standard MPM and shifts the coupling complexity to nonmatching-grid interface operators within the Schwarz alternating procedure. Numerical examples, including a gravity-driven cantilever beam, Hertzian contact, and an elastic inclusion problem, show that the method reproduces analytical or fine-resolution reference solutions with good accuracy and convergence behavior. In the inclusion benchmark, the proposed framework achieves comparable or slightly lower error than single-domain fine simulations at the finest tested resolutions, while reducing computational cost by up to 9.15 times. A three-dimensional folding example further demonstrates the generality of the framework. These results indicate that the proposed method provides an accurate, modular, and efficient route for local space-time refinement in MPM.

Qirui Fu, Yupeng Jiang, Minchen Li

The numerical performance of the material point method (MPM) is strongly governed by the particle-grid kernel, which controls the trade-off among smoothness, locality, numerical diffusion, contact accuracy, and computational cost. Although wide-support smooth kernels can effectively suppress cell-crossing instability, they often introduce increased numerical diffusion, artificial contact gaps, and higher transfer cost. In contrast, the suitability of compact-kernel designs for implicit computational solid mechanics remains unclear. In this work, we develop an implicit formulation of the Compact-Kernel Material Point Method (CK-MPM) and assess its performance through benchmark problems in linear and nonlinear solid mechanics, including cantilever bending, Hertzian contact, narrow-clearance free fall, and colliding hyperelastic rings. The results show that implicit CK-MPM retains the advantages of compact support while preserving the smoothness required for robust large-deformation simulation. Compared with linear MPM, it reduces cell-crossing-induced stress noise and excessive numerical dissipation; compared with quadratic B-spline MPM, it improves contact locality and reduces artificial contact gaps and early-contact artifacts while maintaining comparable overall smoothness and accuracy. These results indicate that CK-MPM provides a viable implicit MPM framework for computational mechanics.

Guying Lin, Kemeng Huang, Michael Liu et al.

We introduce PAT3D, the first physics-augmented text-to-3D scene generation framework that integrates vision-language models with physics-based simulation to produce physically plausible, simulation-ready, and intersection-free 3D scenes. Given a text prompt, PAT3D generates 3D objects, infers their spatial relations, and organizes them into a hierarchical scene tree, which is then converted into initial conditions for simulation. A differentiable rigid-body simulator ensures realistic object interactions under gravity, driving the scene toward static equilibrium without interpenetrations. To further enhance scene quality, we introduce a simulation-in-the-loop optimization procedure that guarantees physical stability and non-intersection, while improving semantic consistency with the input prompt. Experiments demonstrate that PAT3D substantially outperforms prior approaches in physical plausibility, semantic consistency, and visual quality. Beyond high-quality generation, PAT3D uniquely enables simulation-ready 3D scenes for downstream tasks such as scene editing and robotic manipulation. Code and data will be released upon acceptance.

Hanke Chen, Yuan Liu, Minchen Li

Text-driven 3D scene generation holds promise for a wide range of applications, from virtual prototyping to AR/VR and simulation. However, existing methods are often constrained to single-object generation, require domain-specific training, or lack support for full 360-degree viewability. In this work, we present a training-free approach to 3D scene synthesis by repurposing general-purpose text-to-3D object diffusion models as modular tile generators. We reformulate scene generation as a multi-tile denoising problem, where overlapping 3D regions are independently generated and seamlessly blended via weighted averaging. This enables scalable synthesis of large, coherent scenes while preserving local semantic control. Our method eliminates the need for scene-level datasets or retraining, relies on minimal heuristics, and inherits the generalization capabilities of object-level priors. We demonstrate that our approach supports diverse scene layouts, efficient generation, and flexible editing, establishing a simple yet powerful foundation for general-purpose, language-driven 3D scene construction.

Hangxin Liu, Zeyu Zhang, Ziyuan Jiao et al.

In this work, we present a reconfigurable data glove design to capture different modes of human hand-object interactions, which are critical in training embodied artificial intelligence (AI) agents for fine manipulation tasks. To achieve various downstream tasks with distinct features, our reconfigurable data glove operates in three modes sharing a unified backbone design that reconstructs hand gestures in real time. In the tactile-sensing mode, the glove system aggregates manipulation force via customized force sensors made from a soft and thin piezoresistive material; this design minimizes interference during complex hand movements. The virtual reality (VR) mode enables real-time interaction in a physically plausible fashion: A caging-based approach is devised to determine stable grasps by detecting collision events. Leveraging a state-of-the-art finite element method (FEM), the simulation mode collects data on fine-grained 4D manipulation events comprising hand and object motions in 3D space and how the object's physical properties (e.g., stress and energy) change in accordance with manipulation over time. Notably, the glove system presented here is the first to use high-fidelity simulation to investigate the unobservable physical and causal factors behind manipulation actions. In a series of experiments, we characterize our data glove in terms of individual sensors and the overall system. More specifically, we evaluate the system's three modes by (i) recording hand gestures and associated forces, (ii) improving manipulation fluency in VR, and (iii) producing realistic simulation effects of various tool uses, respectively. Based on these three modes, our reconfigurable data glove collects and reconstructs fine-grained human grasp data in both physical and virtual environments, thereby opening up new avenues for the learning of manipulation skills for embodied AI agents.

Xuan Li, Jessica McWilliams, Minchen Li et al.

Unmanned aerial vehicles have been demonstrated successfully in a variety of tasks, including surveying and sampling tasks over large areas. These vehicles can take many forms. Quadrotors' agility and ability to hover makes them well suited for navigating potentially tight spaces, while fixed wing aircraft are capable of efficient flight over long distances. Hybrid aerial vehicles (HAVs) attempt to achieve both of these benefits by exhibiting multiple modes; however, morphing HAVs typically require extra actuators which add mass, reducing both agility and efficiency. We propose a morphing HAV with folding wings that exhibits both a quadrotor and a fixed wing mode without requiring any extra actuation. This is achieved by leveraging the motion of a bistable mechanism at the center of the aircraft to drive folding of the wing using only the existing motors and the inertia of the system. We optimize both the bistable mechanism and the folding wing using a topology optimization approach. The resulting mechanisms were fabricated on a 3D printer and attached to an existing quadrotor frame. Our prototype successfully transitions between both modes and our experiments demonstrate that the behavior of the fabricated prototype is consistent with that of the simulation.