Zixuan Lu

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.

Lei Lan, Tianjia Shao, Zixuan Lu et al.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a mainstream solution for novel view synthesis and 3D reconstruction. By explicitly encoding a 3D scene using a collection of Gaussian kernels, 3DGS achieves high-quality rendering with superior efficiency. As a learning-based approach, 3DGS training has been dealt with the standard stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method, which offers at most linear convergence. Consequently, training often requires tens of minutes, even with GPU acceleration. This paper introduces a (near) second-order convergent training algorithm for 3DGS, leveraging its unique properties. Our approach is inspired by two key observations. First, the attributes of a Gaussian kernel contribute independently to the image-space loss, which endorses isolated and local optimization algorithms. We exploit this by splitting the optimization at the level of individual kernel attributes, analytically constructing small-size Newton systems for each parameter group, and efficiently solving these systems on GPU threads. This achieves Newton-like convergence per training image without relying on the global Hessian. Second, kernels exhibit sparse and structured coupling across input images. This property allows us to effectively utilize spatial information to mitigate overshoot during stochastic training. Our method converges an order faster than standard GPU-based 3DGS training, requiring over $10\times$ fewer iterations while maintaining or surpassing the quality of the compared with the SGD-based 3DGS reconstructions.