Manmohan Chandraker

Kunal Gupta, Gaurav Joshi, Yen-Ru Chen et al.

Procedural material creation underpins applications in digital content creation, visual effects, and 3D asset design. Achieving high-quality results requires more than reproducing node graphs -- it demands understanding the process by which experts construct materials. We formulate procedural material generation as retrieval-time process reasoning over expert demonstrations, elevating process to a first-class representation beyond graph-only synthesis. Concretely, we represent expert workflows as process traces: textual records of construction steps, parameters, and design intent. To instantiate this idea, we use a pretrained LLM-based ProcessSynthesizer to synthesize a process trace aligned with a user's intent and a pretrained LLM-based Compiler to ground the process trace into an executable Blender material graph. Because procedural expertise is most naturally conveyed through demonstrations, we leverage tutorial videos as a source of process knowledge and extract textual, LLM-compatible traces using automated video analysis tools. In an expert study with five Blender artists (avg. 7.5 years of experience), materials generated by reflecting expert demonstrations were found to produce workflows requiring fewer edits, and more closely match professional design strategies than methods operating solely on static artifacts. A user study with 150 participants further shows that our approach achieves superior generation and editing performance compared to prior procedural systems. All code, models, and data will be available at https://materialapprentice.github.io

Hanan Gani, Tejal Kulkarni, Madhoolika Chodavarapu et al.

Pretrained video generative models are promising backbones for visuomotor control, but their imagined futures often drift from task intent and are not reliably action-conditional. As a result, these models can be difficult to use for planning or policy extraction. To address these limitations, we propose RoboTALES, a single-stage framework that learns task-aligned simulated futures and uses them to train robot policies. Our approach introduces two key innovations: (1) a hierarchical LLM-based planner that breaks complex tasks into a sequence of subgoals to guide the model's imagination; and (2) a VLM-based critic that evaluates these ``imagined'' futures and uses reward-based feedback to keep the model's internal representations focused on the goal. By anchoring the video generator in abstract reasoning, we produce temporally consistent rollouts and more coherent actions. We evaluate RoboTALES on diverse manipulation tasks from RoboCasa and LIBERO10, and show that our method consistently outperforms existing methods, especially in long-horizon tasks. Our code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/hananshafi/RoboTALES.

Abhishek Aich, Sparsh Garg, Vijay Kumar BG et al.

Driving vision-language models (VLMs) must accurately understand scenes across diverse conditions defined by Operational Design Domains (ODDs), yet verification remains sparse: many slices are missing, making empirical failure rates unreliable. We propose SliceScorer, a deterministic scoring rule for missing-slice recommendation that combines (i) an exposure-based coverage prior to prioritize rare, under-tested regions, and (ii) a neighbor-failure prior that propagates risk from similar tested conditions. SliceScorer is deliberately simple - interpretable, auditable, and conservative - properties essential for safety-critical validation. For stress testing beyond the declared ODD, we embed SliceScorer within SliceNav, an LLM-orchestrated verification pipeline where the model interprets developer queries to select relevant operators (triage, scoring, acquisition, evaluation) and vocabulary extensions, composing verification workflows while keeping all scoring deterministic and auditable. Experiments on three driving VLMs (WiseAD, DriveMM, Cosmos-Reason2-2B) show that SliceNav surfaces high-risk coverage gaps more effectively than prior slice-discovery methods while maintaining diverse recommendations across the condition space. Ablations confirm both scoring components contribute, and qualitative analysis demonstrates end-to-end workflows from developer query to targeted evaluation.

Haodong Li, Lulu Shao, Haolin Lu et al.

Reconstructing compositional 3D scenes from a single image is a fundamental challenge in 3D world modeling. Recent methods can recover high-fidelity, complete 3D objects and predict plausible scene arrangements, but most still treat scene reconstruction primarily as a visual and geometric prediction problem. Their outputs may therefore contain floating objects, interpenetrations, or unstable-contact artifacts, limiting their physical validity and downstream usability in simulation, robotics, and interactive environments. We present $ϕ$-Scene, a physically grounded approach to open-vocabulary and compositional image-to-3D scene reconstruction. The key premise is that a reconstructed scene should not be treated merely as a set of objects with predicted poses, but as a stable physical system. Accordingly, $ϕ$-Scene formulates reconstruction as topology-driven physical assembly: it infers how objects support one another, orders them accordingly, and progressively settles each object against its already stabilized support context. For each object in topological order, SDF-based optimization first resolves penetrations against the pre-settled support context, and rigid-body simulation then settles the object into a stable contact configuration under real-world physical constraints. Experiments on 3D-Front show that $ϕ$-Scene achieves the strongest overall performance among out-of-domain methods and remains highly competitive with in-domain baselines. Human and VLM evaluations further show strong preference for $ϕ$-Scene in visual quality, reference alignment, and physical plausibility. Finally, dedicated physical plausibility metrics covering static contact quality and dynamic stability demonstrate that $ϕ$-Scene substantially reduces penetration artifacts while producing much lower post-simulation drift, indicating more stable and physically grounded 3D scenes.