Chenfanfu Jiang

Xuan Li, Yi-Ling Qiao, Peter Yichen Chen et al. · mit

Existing approaches to system identification (estimating the physical parameters of an object) from videos assume known object geometries. This precludes their applicability in a vast majority of scenes where object geometries are complex or unknown. In this work, we aim to identify parameters characterizing a physical system from a set of multi-view videos without any assumption on object geometry or topology. To this end, we propose "Physics Augmented Continuum Neural Radiance Fields" (PAC-NeRF), to estimate both the unknown geometry and physical parameters of highly dynamic objects from multi-view videos. We design PAC-NeRF to only ever produce physically plausible states by enforcing the neural radiance field to follow the conservation laws of continuum mechanics. For this, we design a hybrid Eulerian-Lagrangian representation of the neural radiance field, i.e., we use the Eulerian grid representation for NeRF density and color fields, while advecting the neural radiance fields via Lagrangian particles. This hybrid Eulerian-Lagrangian representation seamlessly blends efficient neural rendering with the material point method (MPM) for robust differentiable physics simulation. We validate the effectiveness of our proposed framework on geometry and physical parameter estimation over a vast range of materials, including elastic bodies, plasticine, sand, Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluids, and demonstrate significant performance gain on most tasks.

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.

Tianyi Xie, Haotian Zhang, Jinhyung Park et al.

Scaling humanoid loco-manipulation requires robot-compatible demonstrations across diverse objects, whole-body motions, and scene geometries, but teleoperation and motion capture are difficult to scale because each collection depends on physical setups, instrumented actors, and robot operation. We present GRAIL, a digital generation pipeline that remains fully virtual until deployment: it composes 3D assets, simulator-ready scenes, and priors from video foundation models (VFMs) to synthesize interactions without rebuilding physical environments or teleoperating the robot. Rather than reconstructing unconstrained in-the-wild videos, GRAIL starts from fully specified 3D configurations in which object geometry, camera parameters, metric scale, environment depth, and a robot-proportioned character are known before video generation and reused during reconstruction. This privileged setup better conditions 4D recovery, allowing model-based object tracking, human motion estimation, and interaction-aware optimization to reconstruct metric 4D human-object interaction (HOI) trajectories with reduced depth ambiguity and morphology mismatch. We retarget the recovered motions to a humanoid robot and train complementary task-general trackers: an object-aware latent adaptor for manipulation and a scene-aware tracker for terrain traversal. GRAIL produces over 20,000 sequences spanning pick-up, object manipulation, sitting, and terrain traversal. Using only GRAIL-generated data, we train egocentric visual policies through a sim-to-real pipeline and deploy them on a Unitree G1 humanoid, achieving 84\% real-world success on diverse object pick-up and 90\% success on stair-climbing.

Chenfanfu Jiang, Craig Schroeder, Joseph Teran

We present a new technique for transferring momentum and velocity between particles and grid with Particle-In-Cell (PIC) calculations which we call Affine-Particle-In-Cell (APIC). APIC represents particle velocities as locally affine, rather than locally constant as in traditional PIC. We show that this representation allows APIC to conserve linear and angular momentum across transfers while also dramatically reducing numerical diffusion usually associated with PIC. Notably, conservation is achieved with lumped mass, as opposed to the more commonly used Fluid Implicit Particle (FLIP) transfers which require a 'full' mass matrix for exact conservation. Furthermore, unlike FLIP, APIC retains a filtering property of the original PIC and thus does not accumulate velocity modes on particles as FLIP does. In particular, we demonstrate that APIC does not experience velocity instabilities that are characteristic of FLIP in a number of Material Point Method (MPM) hyperelasticity calculations. Lastly, we demonstrate that when combined with the midpoint rule for implicit update of grid momentum that linear and angular momentum are exactly conserved.

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.

Tianyi Xie, Zeshun Zong, Yuxing Qiu et al.

We introduce PhysGaussian, a new method that seamlessly integrates physically grounded Newtonian dynamics within 3D Gaussians to achieve high-quality novel motion synthesis. Employing a custom Material Point Method (MPM), our approach enriches 3D Gaussian kernels with physically meaningful kinematic deformation and mechanical stress attributes, all evolved in line with continuum mechanics principles. A defining characteristic of our method is the seamless integration between physical simulation and visual rendering: both components utilize the same 3D Gaussian kernels as their discrete representations. This negates the necessity for triangle/tetrahedron meshing, marching cubes, "cage meshes," or any other geometry embedding, highlighting the principle of "what you see is what you simulate (WS$^2$)." Our method demonstrates exceptional versatility across a wide variety of materials--including elastic entities, metals, non-Newtonian fluids, and granular materials--showcasing its strong capabilities in creating diverse visual content with novel viewpoints and movements. Our project page is at: https://xpandora.github.io/PhysGaussian/

Yutao Feng, Yintong Shang, Xuan Li et al.

We show that physics-based simulations can be seamlessly integrated with NeRF to generate high-quality elastodynamics of real-world objects. Unlike existing methods, we discretize nonlinear hyperelasticity in a meshless way, obviating the necessity for intermediate auxiliary shape proxies like a tetrahedral mesh or voxel grid. A quadratic generalized moving least square (Q-GMLS) is employed to capture nonlinear dynamics and large deformation on the implicit model. Such meshless integration enables versatile simulations of complex and codimensional shapes. We adaptively place the least-square kernels according to the NeRF density field to significantly reduce the complexity of the nonlinear simulation. As a result, physically realistic animations can be conveniently synthesized using our method for a wide range of hyperelastic materials at an interactive rate. For more information, please visit our project page at https://fytalon.github.io/pienerf/.

Yidong Zhao, Lars Blatny, Xiang Feng et al.

The material point method (MPM) is a hybrid particle-grid method widely used for simulating large deformation with history-dependent behavior. Standard MPM often relies on a dense background grid, which can be highly inefficient when material occupies a small fraction of the computational domain. Such sparsity is common in many large-scale problems, from geophysical mass flows over large terrain domains to visual-computing applications. Here, we introduce a unified sparse background-grid framework for large-scale MPM simulation. The framework treats sparse grid construction as a general active-node indexing problem. We develop two architecture-specific implementations to realize the same sparse framework: a scan-based strategy for CPUs and a hash-based strategy for GPUs. Through benchmark problems and a large-scale landslide simulation, we show that the framework provides the same results as standard dense MPM while reducing computational time and memory usage by one to two orders of magnitude in strongly sparse cases.

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.

Yumeng He, Xiaoying Wang, Peihao Li et al.

Large-scale controllable 3D assets are critical for computer graphics, embodied AI, robotics, and interactive content creation, yet creating diverse 3D assets remains challenging due to the high cost of manual modeling and rigging. Shape deformation offers a natural way to generate variations from existing meshes, but existing data-driven methods often rely on sparse user inputs, while parametric editing frameworks require manually designed control structures and category-specific configurations. Inspired by natural creatures, where a central spine governs global shape and cross-sectional ribs control local variation, we introduce Fishbone, a unified rib-spine representation for general shapes that supports controllable parametric mesh deformation, reduced-space dynamics, and animation. Given an input mesh, Fishbone computes a geodesic scalar field with an adaptive heat method, extracts iso-contours as cross-sectional ribs, constructs a smooth geometry-aware spine through rib centers, and associates surface vertices with nearby rib and spine structures using Gaussian-weighted skinning. The resulting representation enables real-time and predictable deformation: ribs control local profiles such as thickness, orientation, and cross-sectional variation, while the spine controls global bending, twisting, and stretching. The same structure also supports reduced-space simulation and keyframe animation. We further construct Fishbone-136K by augmenting Hunyuan3D with rib-spine structures, and demonstrate applications in controllable 3D generation, deformation-based data augmentation for robot learning, interactive mesh editing, and agentic generation. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, and versatility of the proposed framework.

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.

Yusi Sun, Ying Jiang, Jiayin Lu et al.

Many everyday tasks rely on external tutorials such as manuals and videos, requiring users to constantly switch between reading instructions and performing actions, which disrupts workflow and increases cognitive load. Augmented reality (AR) enables in-situ guidance, while recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) make it possible to automatically generate such guidance. However, existing AI-powered AR tutorial systems primarily focus on physical procedural tasks and provide limited support for hybrid physical and virtual workspaces. To address this gap, we conduct a formative study of cross-reality tasks and identify key requirements for state awareness and cross-reality coordination. We present JARVIS, a VLM-driven AR instruction system that generates contextual, step-by-step guidance from a single prompt, with real-time state verification and adaptive visual feedback. To inform the system design, we conducted a formative study to understand guidance needs across cross-reality tasks, which we categorize into four types, real-to-real (R2R), real-to-virtual (R2V), virtual-to-real (V2R), and virtual-to-virtual (V2V). A within-subjects study (N=14) across four domains shows JARVIS improves usability, workload, success rate, and visualization effectiveness over baselines.

Jiayin Lu, Ying Jiang, Yin Yang et al.

We present VoroLight, a differentiable framework for 3D shape reconstruction based on Voronoi meshing. Our approach generates smooth, watertight surfaces and topologically consistent volumetric meshes directly from diverse inputs, including images, implicit shape level-set fields, point clouds and meshes. VoroLight operates in three stages: it first initializes a surface using a differentiable Voronoi formulation, then refines surface quality through a polygon-face sphere training stage, and finally reuses the differentiable Voronoi formulation for volumetric optimization with additional interior generator points. Project page: https://jiayinlu19960224.github.io/vorolight/

Yumeng He, Ying Jiang, Jiayin Lu et al.

Articulated 3D objects are critical for embodied AI, robotics, and interactive scene understanding, yet creating simulation-ready assets remains labor-intensive and requires expert modeling of part hierarchies and motion structures. We introduce SPARK, a framework for reconstructing physically consistent, kinematic part-level articulated objects from a single RGB image. Given an input image, we first leverage VLMs to extract coarse URDF parameters and generate part-level reference images. We then integrate the part-image guidance and the inferred structure graph into a generative diffusion transformer to synthesize consistent part and complete shapes of articulated objects. To further refine the URDF parameters, we incorporate differentiable forward kinematics and differentiable rendering to optimize joint types, axes, and origins under VLM-generated open-state supervision. Extensive experiments show that SPARK produces high-quality, simulation-ready articulated assets across diverse categories, enabling downstream applications such as robotic manipulation and interaction modeling. Project page: https://heyumeng.com/SPARK/index.html.

Zeng Tao, Ying Jiang, Yunuo Chen et al.

Recent advances in garment pattern generation have shown promising progress. However, existing feed-forward methods struggle with diverse poses and viewpoints, while optimization-based approaches are computationally expensive and difficult to scale. This paper focuses on sewing pattern generation for garment modeling and fabrication applications that demand editable, separable, and simulation-ready garments. We propose DressWild, a novel feed-forward pipeline that reconstructs physics-consistent 2D sewing patterns and the corresponding 3D garments from a single in-the-wild image. Given an input image, our method leverages vision-language models (VLMs) to normalize pose variations at the image level, then extract pose-aware, 3D-informed garment features. These features are fused through a transformer-based encoder and subsequently used to predict sewing pattern parameters, which can be directly applied to physical simulation, texture synthesis, and multi-layer virtual try-on. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach robustly recovers diverse sewing patterns and the corresponding 3D garments from in-the-wild images without requiring multi-view inputs or iterative optimization, offering an efficient and scalable solution for realistic garment simulation and animation.

Xiaoying Wang, Yumeng He, Jingkai Shi et al.

Monocular depth estimation remains challenging for transparent objects, where refraction and transmission are difficult to model and break the appearance assumptions used by depth networks. As a result, state-of-the-art estimators often produce unstable or incorrect depth predictions for transparent materials. We propose SeeClear, a novel framework that converts transparent objects into generative opaque images, enabling stable monocular depth estimation for transparent objects. Given an input image, we first localize transparent regions and transform their refractive appearance into geometrically consistent opaque shapes using a diffusion-based generative opacification module. The processed image is then fed into an off-the-shelf monocular depth estimator without retraining or architectural changes. To train the opacification model, we construct SeeClear-396k, a synthetic dataset containing 396k paired transparent-opaque renderings. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets show that SeeClear significantly improves depth estimation for transparent objects. Project page: https://heyumeng.com/SeeClear-web/

Caoliwen Wang, Minghao Guo, Siyuan Chen et al.

A unified simulator that can model diverse physical phenomena without solver-specific redesign is a long-standing goal across simulation science. We present a learning-based particle simulator built on a single transformer architecture to model cloth, elastic solds, Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluids, granular materials, and molecular dynamics. Our model follows a prediction-correction design on a shared Lagrangian particle representation. An explicit predictor first advances particles under the known external forces, producing an intermediate state that captures externally driven motion but not inter-particle interactions. A learned corrector then predicts the residual position and velocity updates through three stages: a particle tokenizer that encodes local particle-particle, particle-boundary, and topology-guided interactions; a super-token encoder that hierarchically merges particle tokens into a compact set of super tokens via alternating self-attention and token merging; and a super-token decoder that lifts these super tokens back to particle resolution through cross-attention to predict per-particle position and velocity corrections. Progressive token merging reduces the attention cost at successive encoder layers by halving the token count at each level, and the decoder communicates through the compact super-token set rather than full particle-to-particle attention. Across the six dynamics categories, the same architecture generalizes to unseen materials, boundary configurations, initial conditions, and external forces. We further demonstrate downstream interactive control, inverse design, and learning from real-world manipulation data, reducing the need for per-phenomenon solver engineering.

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/.

Xingqiao Li, Kui Wu, Haozhe Su et al.

Simulating fluid-granular flows is crucial for understanding natural disasters, industrial processes, and visually realistic phenomena in computer graphics. These systems are challenging to simulate because of the strong nonlinear coupling between continuum fluids and discrete granular media, making it difficult to achieve both physical fidelity and computational efficiency at large scales. In this work, we present a unified framework for large-scale fluid-granular simulation that couples the Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) for fluids with the Material Point Method (MPM) for granular materials such as sand and snow. We introduce an adaptive block-based multi-level HOME-LBM solver based on solid geometric structures, enabling efficient memory usage and computational performance across multiple lattice resolutions. Consistent rescaling laws for moments allow accurate transfer of macroscopic quantities across refinement interfaces, while a GPU-based algorithm dynamically maintains the multi-level blocks in response to particle motion. By enforcing that all MPM particles reside within the finest fluid nodes, we achieve accurate two-way coupling between fluid and granular phases. Our framework supports a wide range of large-scale phenomena, including snow avalanches, sandstorms, and sand migration, demonstrating high physical fidelity and computational efficiency.

Siyuan Qi, Yixin Zhu, Siyuan Huang et al.

We present a human-centric method to sample and synthesize 3D room layouts and 2D images thereof, to obtain large-scale 2D/3D image data with perfect per-pixel ground truth. An attributed spatial And-Or graph (S-AOG) is proposed to represent indoor scenes. The S-AOG is a probabilistic grammar model, in which the terminal nodes are object entities. Human contexts as contextual relations are encoded by Markov Random Fields (MRF) on the terminal nodes. We learn the distributions from an indoor scene dataset and sample new layouts using Monte Carlo Markov Chain. Experiments demonstrate that our method can robustly sample a large variety of realistic room layouts based on three criteria: (i) visual realism comparing to a state-of-the-art room arrangement method, (ii) accuracy of the affordance maps with respect to groundtruth, and (ii) the functionality and naturalness of synthesized rooms evaluated by human subjects. The code is available at https://github.com/SiyuanQi/human-centric-scene-synthesis.

Boqian Li, Xuan Li, Ying Jiang et al.

Traditional 3D garment creation is labor-intensive, involving sketching, modeling, UV mapping, and texturing, which are time-consuming and costly. Recent advances in diffusion-based generative models have enabled new possibilities for 3D garment generation from text prompts, images, and videos. However, existing methods either suffer from inconsistencies among multi-view images or require additional processes to separate cloth from the underlying human model. In this paper, we propose GarmentDreamer, a novel method that leverages 3D Gaussian Splatting (GS) as guidance to generate wearable, simulation-ready 3D garment meshes from text prompts. In contrast to using multi-view images directly predicted by generative models as guidance, our 3DGS guidance ensures consistent optimization in both garment deformation and texture synthesis. Our method introduces a novel garment augmentation module, guided by normal and RGBA information, and employs implicit Neural Texture Fields (NeTF) combined with Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) to generate diverse geometric and texture details. We validate the effectiveness of our approach through comprehensive qualitative and quantitative experiments, showcasing the superior performance of GarmentDreamer over state-of-the-art alternatives. Our project page is available at: https://xuan-li.github.io/GarmentDreamerDemo/.

Xiyang Tan, Ying Jiang, Xuan Li et al.

We introduce PhysMotion, a novel framework that leverages principled physics-based simulations to guide intermediate 3D representations generated from a single image and input conditions (e.g., applied force and torque), producing high-quality, physically plausible video generation. By utilizing continuum mechanics-based simulations as a prior knowledge, our approach addresses the limitations of traditional data-driven generative models and result in more consistent physically plausible motions. Our framework begins by reconstructing a feed-forward 3D Gaussian from a single image through geometry optimization. This representation is then time-stepped using a differentiable Material Point Method (MPM) with continuum mechanics-based elastoplasticity models, which provides a strong foundation for realistic dynamics, albeit at a coarse level of detail. To enhance the geometry, appearance and ensure spatiotemporal consistency, we refine the initial simulation using a text-to-image (T2I) diffusion model with cross-frame attention, resulting in a physically plausible video that retains intricate details comparable to the input image. We conduct comprehensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations to validate the efficacy of our method. Our project page is available at: https://supertan0204.github.io/physmotion_website/.

Yutao Feng, Xiang Feng, Yintong Shang et al.

We demonstrate the feasibility of integrating physics-based animations of solids and fluids with 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) to create novel effects in virtual scenes reconstructed using 3DGS. Leveraging the coherence of the Gaussian Splatting and Position-Based Dynamics (PBD) in the underlying representation, we manage rendering, view synthesis, and the dynamics of solids and fluids in a cohesive manner. Similar to GaussianShader, we enhance each Gaussian kernel with an added normal, aligning the kernel's orientation with the surface normal to refine the PBD simulation. This approach effectively eliminates spiky noises that arise from rotational deformation in solids. It also allows us to integrate physically based rendering to augment the dynamic surface reflections on fluids. Consequently, our framework is capable of realistically reproducing surface highlights on dynamic fluids and facilitating interactions between scene objects and fluids from new views. For more information, please visit our project page at \url{https://gaussiansplashing.github.io/}.

Tianyi Xie, Yiwei Zhao, Ying Jiang et al.

Creating hand-drawn animation sequences is labor-intensive and demands professional expertise. We introduce PhysAnimator, a novel approach for generating physically plausible meanwhile anime-stylized animation from static anime illustrations. Our method seamlessly integrates physics-based simulations with data-driven generative models to produce dynamic and visually compelling animations. To capture the fluidity and exaggeration characteristic of anime, we perform image-space deformable body simulations on extracted mesh geometries. We enhance artistic control by introducing customizable energy strokes and incorporating rigging point support, enabling the creation of tailored animation effects such as wind interactions. Finally, we extract and warp sketches from the simulation sequence, generating a texture-agnostic representation, and employ a sketch-guided video diffusion model to synthesize high-quality animation frames. The resulting animations exhibit temporal consistency and visual plausibility, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method in creating dynamic anime-style animations. See our project page for more demos: https://xpandora.github.io/PhysAnimator/

Yutao Feng, Yintong Shang, Xiang Feng et al.

We present ElastoGen, a knowledge-driven AI model that generates physically accurate 4D elastodynamics. Unlike deep models that learn from video- or image-based observations, ElastoGen leverages the principles of physics and learns from established mathematical and optimization procedures. The core idea of ElastoGen is converting the differential equation, corresponding to the nonlinear force equilibrium, into a series of iterative local convolution-like operations, which naturally fit deep architectures. We carefully build our network module following this overarching design philosophy. ElastoGen is much more lightweight in terms of both training requirements and network scale than deep generative models. Because of its alignment with actual physical procedures, ElastoGen efficiently generates accurate dynamics for a wide range of hyperelastic materials and can be easily integrated with upstream and downstream deep modules to enable end-to-end 4D generation.

Xiang Feng, Chang Yu, Zoubin Bi et al.

Recent image-to-3D reconstruction models have greatly advanced geometry generation, but they still struggle to faithfully generate realistic appearance. To address this, we introduce ARM, a novel method that reconstructs high-quality 3D meshes and realistic appearance from sparse-view images. The core of ARM lies in decoupling geometry from appearance, processing appearance within the UV texture space. Unlike previous methods, ARM improves texture quality by explicitly back-projecting measurements onto the texture map and processing them in a UV space module with a global receptive field. To resolve ambiguities between material and illumination in input images, ARM introduces a material prior that encodes semantic appearance information, enhancing the robustness of appearance decomposition. Trained on just 8 H100 GPUs, ARM outperforms existing methods both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Yunuo Chen, Junli Cao, Vidit Goel et al.

We present a novel video generation framework that integrates 3-dimensional geometry and dynamic awareness. To achieve this, we augment 2D videos with 3D point trajectories and align them in pixel space. The resulting 3D-aware video dataset, PointVid, is then used to fine-tune a latent diffusion model, enabling it to track 2D objects with 3D Cartesian coordinates. Building on this, we regularize the shape and motion of objects in the video to eliminate undesired artifacts, e.g., non-physical deformation. Consequently, we enhance the quality of generated RGB videos and alleviate common issues like object morphing, which are prevalent in current video models due to a lack of shape awareness. With our 3D augmentation and regularization, our model is capable of handling contact-rich scenarios such as task-oriented videos, where 3D information is essential for perceiving shape and motion of interacting solids. Our method can be seamlessly integrated into existing video diffusion models to improve their visual plausibility.

Yuyang Li, Wenxin Du, Chang Yu et al.

Tactile sensing is crucial for achieving human-level robotic capabilities in manipulation tasks. As a promising solution, Vision-Based Tactile Sensors (VBTSs) offer high spatial resolution and cost-effectiveness, but present unique challenges in robotics for their complex physical characteristics and visual signal processing requirements. The lack of efficient and accurate simulation tools for VBTSs has significantly limited the scale and scope of tactile robotics research. We present Taccel, a high-performance simulation platform that integrates IPC and ABD to model robots, tactile sensors, and objects with both accuracy and unprecedented speed, achieving an 18-fold acceleration over real-time across thousands of parallel environments. Unlike previous simulators that operate at sub-real-time speeds with limited parallelization, Taccel provides precise physics simulation and realistic tactile signals while supporting flexible robot-sensor configurations through user-friendly APIs. Through extensive validation in object recognition, robotic grasping, and articulated object manipulation, we demonstrate precise simulation and successful sim-to-real transfer. These capabilities position Taccel as a powerful tool for scaling up tactile robotics research and development, potentially transforming how robots interact with and understand their physical environment.

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.

Yaowei Guo, Jiazheng Xing, Xiaojun Hou et al.

Video summarization, by selecting the most informative and/or user-relevant parts of original videos to create concise summary videos, has high research value and consumer demand in today's video proliferation era. Multi-modal video summarization that accomodates user input has become a research hotspot. However, current multi-modal video summarization methods suffer from two limitations. First, existing methods inadequately fuse information from different modalities and cannot effectively utilize modality-unique features. Second, most multi-modal methods focus on video and text modalities, neglecting the audio modality, despite the fact that audio information can be very useful in certain types of videos. In this paper we propose CFSum, a transformer-based multi-modal video summarization framework with coarse-fine fusion. CFSum exploits video, text, and audio modal features as input, and incorporates a two-stage transformer-based feature fusion framework to fully utilize modality-unique information. In the first stage, multi-modal features are fused simultaneously to perform initial coarse-grained feature fusion, then, in the second stage, video and audio features are explicitly attended with the text representation yielding more fine-grained information interaction. The CFSum architecture gives equal importance to each modality, ensuring that each modal feature interacts deeply with the other modalities. Our extensive comparative experiments against prior methods and ablation studies on various datasets confirm the effectiveness and superiority of CFSum.

Xuan Li, Qianli Ma, Tsung-Yi Lin et al.

We present Articulated Kinematics Distillation (AKD), a framework for generating high-fidelity character animations by merging the strengths of skeleton-based animation and modern generative models. AKD uses a skeleton-based representation for rigged 3D assets, drastically reducing the Degrees of Freedom (DoFs) by focusing on joint-level control, which allows for efficient, consistent motion synthesis. Through Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) with pre-trained video diffusion models, AKD distills complex, articulated motions while maintaining structural integrity, overcoming challenges faced by 4D neural deformation fields in preserving shape consistency. This approach is naturally compatible with physics-based simulation, ensuring physically plausible interactions. Experiments show that AKD achieves superior 3D consistency and motion quality compared with existing works on text-to-4D generation. Project page: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/dir/akd/

Zhiyong He, Dewen Guo, Minghao Guo et al.

Simulating large-scale articulated assemblies poses a significant challenge due to the numerical stiffness and geometric complexity of jointed structures. Conventional rigid body solvers struggle with the high nonlinearity induced by rotation parameterization. This difficulty becomes more pronounced for multiple two-way-coupled bodies. This paper introduces a novel framework that leverages the linear kinematic mapping of Affine Body Dynamics (ABD). As ABD targets near-rigid objects, the constitutive variations of different materials become negligible, which justifies a co-rotational approach to isolate geometric nonlinearities of the system. This insight enables the use of constant system matrices that can be pre-factorized throughout the simulation, even with fully implicit integration schemes. To manage the high DOF counts of large-scale systems, we map primal body coordinates onto a compact dual space defined by minimal joint degrees of freedom. By solving the resulting KKT systems, our method ensures exact constraint enforcement and physically accurate motion propagation. We provide a suite of specialized solvers tailored for diverse joint topologies, including chains, trees, closed loops, and irregular networks. Experimental results show that our approach achieves interactive rates for systems with hundreds of thousands of bodies on a single CPU core, while maintaining excellent stability at large time steps.

Yanjia Huang, Yunuo Chen, Ying Jiang et al.

The ability to transform a flat sheet into a complex three-dimensional structure is a fundamental test of physical intelligence. Unlike cloth manipulation, origami is governed by strict geometric axioms and hard kinematic constraints, where a single invalid crease or collision can invalidate the entire folding sequence. As a result, origami demands long-horizon constructive reasoning that jointly satisfies precise physical laws and high-level semantic intent. Existing approaches fall into two disjoint paradigms: optimization-based methods enforce physical validity but require dense, precisely specified inputs, making them unsuitable for sparse natural language descriptions, while generative foundation models excel at semantic and perceptual synthesis yet fail to produce long-horizon, physics-consistent folding processes. Consequently, generating valid origami folding sequences directly from text remains an open challenge. To address this gap, we introduce Learn2Fold, a neuro-symbolic framework that formulates origami folding as conditional program induction over a crease-pattern graph. Our key insight is to decouple semantic proposal from physical verification. A large language model generates candidate folding programs from abstract text prompts, while a learned graph-structured world model serves as a differentiable surrogate simulator that predicts physical feasibility and failure modes before execution. Integrated within a lookahead planning loop, Learn2Fold enables robust generation of physically valid folding sequences for complex and out-of-distribution patterns, demonstrating that effective spatial intelligence arises from the synergy between symbolic reasoning and grounded physical simulation.

Ying Jiang, Jiayin Lu, Yunuo Chen et al.

Painting embodies a unique form of visual storytelling, where the creation process is as significant as the final artwork. Although recent advances in generative models have enabled visually compelling painting synthesis, most existing methods focus solely on final image generation or patch-based process simulation, lacking explicit stroke structure and failing to produce smooth, realistic shading. In this work, we present a differentiable stroke reconstruction framework that unifies painting, stylized texturing, and smudging to faithfully reproduce the human painting-smudging loop. Given an input image, our framework first optimizes single- and dual-color Bezier strokes through a parallel differentiable paint renderer, followed by a style generation module that synthesizes geometry-conditioned textures across diverse painting styles. We further introduce a differentiable smudge operator to enable natural color blending and shading. Coupled with a coarse-to-fine optimization strategy, our method jointly optimizes stroke geometry, color, and texture under geometric and semantic guidance. Extensive experiments on oil, watercolor, ink, and digital paintings demonstrate that our approach produces realistic and expressive stroke reconstructions, smooth tonal transitions, and richly stylized appearances, offering a unified model for expressive digital painting creation. See our project page for more demos: https://yingjiang96.github.io/DiffPaintWebsite/.

Xuan Li, Chang Yu, Wenxin Du et al.

Recent advances in large models have significantly advanced image-to-3D reconstruction. However, the generated models are often fused into a single piece, limiting their applicability in downstream tasks. This paper focuses on 3D garment generation, a key area for applications like virtual try-on with dynamic garment animations, which require garments to be separable and simulation-ready. We introduce Dress-1-to-3, a novel pipeline that reconstructs physics-plausible, simulation-ready separated garments with sewing patterns and humans from an in-the-wild image. Starting with the image, our approach combines a pre-trained image-to-sewing pattern generation model for creating coarse sewing patterns with a pre-trained multi-view diffusion model to produce multi-view images. The sewing pattern is further refined using a differentiable garment simulator based on the generated multi-view images. Versatile experiments demonstrate that our optimization approach substantially enhances the geometric alignment of the reconstructed 3D garments and humans with the input image. Furthermore, by integrating a texture generation module and a human motion generation module, we produce customized physics-plausible and realistic dynamic garment demonstrations. Project page: https://dress-1-to-3.github.io/

Junli Cao, Vidit Goel, Chaoyang Wang et al.

Recent approaches representing 3D objects and scenes using Gaussian splats show increased rendering speed across a variety of platforms and devices. While rendering such representations is indeed extremely efficient, storing and transmitting them is often prohibitively expensive. To represent large-scale scenes, one often needs to store millions of 3D Gaussians, occupying gigabytes of disk space. This poses a very practical limitation, prohibiting widespread adoption.Several solutions have been proposed to strike a balance between disk size and rendering quality, noticeably reducing the visual quality. In this work, we propose a new representation that dramatically reduces the hard drive footprint while featuring similar or improved quality when compared to the standard 3D Gaussian splats. When compared to other compact solutions, ours offers higher quality renderings with significantly reduced storage, being able to efficiently run on a mobile device in real-time. Our key observation is that nearby points in the scene can share similar representations. Hence, only a small ratio of 3D points needs to be stored. We introduce an approach to identify such points which are called parent points. The discarded points called children points along with attributes can be efficiently predicted by tiny MLPs.

Hritik Bansal, Zongyu Lin, Tianyi Xie et al.

Recent advances in internet-scale video data pretraining have led to the development of text-to-video generative models that can create high-quality videos across a broad range of visual concepts, synthesize realistic motions and render complex objects. Hence, these generative models have the potential to become general-purpose simulators of the physical world. However, it is unclear how far we are from this goal with the existing text-to-video generative models. To this end, we present VideoPhy, a benchmark designed to assess whether the generated videos follow physical commonsense for real-world activities (e.g. marbles will roll down when placed on a slanted surface). Specifically, we curate diverse prompts that involve interactions between various material types in the physical world (e.g., solid-solid, solid-fluid, fluid-fluid). We then generate videos conditioned on these captions from diverse state-of-the-art text-to-video generative models, including open models (e.g., CogVideoX) and closed models (e.g., Lumiere, Dream Machine). Our human evaluation reveals that the existing models severely lack the ability to generate videos adhering to the given text prompts, while also lack physical commonsense. Specifically, the best performing model, CogVideoX-5B, generates videos that adhere to the caption and physical laws for 39.6% of the instances. VideoPhy thus highlights that the video generative models are far from accurately simulating the physical world. Finally, we propose an auto-evaluator, VideoCon-Physics, to assess the performance reliably for the newly released models.

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.

Siyuan Shen, Yang Yin, Tianjia Shao et al.

This paper provides a new avenue for exploiting deep neural networks to improve physics-based simulation. Specifically, we integrate the classic Lagrangian mechanics with a deep autoencoder to accelerate elastic simulation of deformable solids. Due to the inertia effect, the dynamic equilibrium cannot be established without evaluating the second-order derivatives of the deep autoencoder network. This is beyond the capability of off-the-shelf automatic differentiation packages and algorithms, which mainly focus on the gradient evaluation. Solving the nonlinear force equilibrium is even more challenging if the standard Newton's method is to be used. This is because we need to compute a third-order derivative of the network to obtain the variational Hessian. We attack those difficulties by exploiting complex-step finite difference, coupled with reverse automatic differentiation. This strategy allows us to enjoy the convenience and accuracy of complex-step finite difference and in the meantime, to deploy complex-value perturbations as collectively as possible to save excessive network passes. With a GPU-based implementation, we are able to wield deep autoencoders (e.g., $10+$ layers) with a relatively high-dimension latent space in real-time. Along this pipeline, we also design a sampling network and a weighting network to enable \emph{weight-varying} Cubature integration in order to incorporate nonlinearity in the model reduction. We believe this work will inspire and benefit future research efforts in nonlinearly reduced physical simulation problems.

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.

Siyuan Shen, Tianjia Shao, Kun Zhou et al.

While the superior performance of second-order optimization methods such as Newton's method is well known, they are hardly used in practice for deep learning because neither assembling the Hessian matrix nor calculating its inverse is feasible for large-scale problems. Existing second-order methods resort to various diagonal or low-rank approximations of the Hessian, which often fail to capture necessary curvature information to generate a substantial improvement. On the other hand, when training becomes batch-based (i.e., stochastic), noisy second-order information easily contaminates the training procedure unless expensive safeguard is employed. In this paper, we adopt a numerical algorithm for second-order neural network training. We tackle the practical obstacle of Hessian calculation by using the complex-step finite difference (CSFD) -- a numerical procedure adding an imaginary perturbation to the function for derivative computation. CSFD is highly robust, efficient, and accurate (as accurate as the analytic result). This method allows us to literally apply any known second-order optimization methods for deep learning training. Based on it, we design an effective Newton Krylov procedure. The key mechanism is to terminate the stochastic Krylov iteration as soon as a disturbing direction is found so that unnecessary computation can be avoided. During the optimization, we monitor the approximation error in the Taylor expansion to adjust the step size. This strategy combines advantages of line search and trust region methods making our method preserves good local and global convergency at the same time. We have tested our methods in various deep learning tasks. The experiments show that our method outperforms exiting methods, and it often converges one-order faster. We believe our method will inspire a wide-range of new algorithms for deep learning and numerical optimization.

Chenfanfu Jiang, Siyuan Qi, Yixin Zhu et al.

We propose a systematic learning-based approach to the generation of massive quantities of synthetic 3D scenes and arbitrary numbers of photorealistic 2D images thereof, with associated ground truth information, for the purposes of training, benchmarking, and diagnosing learning-based computer vision and robotics algorithms. In particular, we devise a learning-based pipeline of algorithms capable of automatically generating and rendering a potentially infinite variety of indoor scenes by using a stochastic grammar, represented as an attributed Spatial And-Or Graph, in conjunction with state-of-the-art physics-based rendering. Our pipeline is capable of synthesizing scene layouts with high diversity, and it is configurable inasmuch as it enables the precise customization and control of important attributes of the generated scenes. It renders photorealistic RGB images of the generated scenes while automatically synthesizing detailed, per-pixel ground truth data, including visible surface depth and normal, object identity, and material information (detailed to object parts), as well as environments (e.g., illuminations and camera viewpoints). We demonstrate the value of our synthesized dataset, by improving performance in certain machine-learning-based scene understanding tasks--depth and surface normal prediction, semantic segmentation, reconstruction, etc.--and by providing benchmarks for and diagnostics of trained models by modifying object attributes and scene properties in a controllable manner.