Scheduling the Off-Diagonal Weingarten Loss of Neural SDFs for CAD Models
This work addresses robust geometric reconstruction for CAD models, presenting an incremental improvement over prior methods.
The paper tackled the problem of suboptimal fixed regularization in neural signed distance functions for CAD model reconstruction by introducing time-varying scheduling strategies for the Off-Diagonal Weingarten loss, achieving up to a 35% improvement in Chamfer Distance over the baseline.
Neural signed distance functions (SDFs) have become a powerful representation for geometric reconstruction from point clouds, yet they often require both gradient- and curvature-based regularization to suppress spurious warp and preserve structural fidelity. FlatCAD introduced the Off-Diagonal Weingarten (ODW) loss as an efficient second-order prior for CAD surfaces, approximating full-Hessian regularization at roughly half the computational cost. However, FlatCAD applies a fixed ODW weight throughout training, which is suboptimal: strong regularization stabilizes early optimization but suppresses detail recovery in later stages. We present scheduling strategies for the ODW loss that assign a high initial weight to stabilize optimization and progressively decay it to permit fine-scale refinement. We investigate constant, linear, quintic, and step interpolation schedules, as well as an increasing warm-up variant. Experiments on the ABC CAD dataset demonstrate that time-varying schedules consistently outperform fixed weights. Our method achieves up to a 35% improvement in Chamfer Distance over the FlatCAD baseline, establishing scheduling as a simple yet effective extension of curvature regularization for robust CAD reconstruction.