Purdue University
Abstract:Streaming reconstruction from uncalibrated monocular video remains challenging, as it requires both high-precision pose estimation and computationally efficient online refinement in dynamic environments. While coupling 3D foundation models with SLAM frameworks is a promising paradigm, a critical bottleneck persists: most multi-view foundation models estimate poses in a feed-forward manner, yielding pixel-level correspondences that lack the requisite precision for rigorous geometric optimization. To address this, we present M^3, which augments the Multi-view foundation model with a dedicated Matching head to facilitate fine-grained dense correspondences and integrates it into a robust Monocular Gaussian Splatting SLAM. M^3 further enhances tracking stability by incorporating dynamic area suppression and cross-inference intrinsic alignment. Extensive experiments on diverse indoor and outdoor benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art accuracy in both pose estimation and scene reconstruction. Notably, M^3 reduces ATE RMSE by 64.3% compared to VGGT-SLAM 2.0 and outperforms ARTDECO by 2.11 dB in PSNR on the ScanNet++ dataset.
Abstract:A commonly used family of RL algorithms for diffusion policies conducts softmax reweighting over the behavior policy, which usually induces an over-greedy policy and fails to leverage feedback from negative samples. In this work, we introduce Signed Measure Policy Optimization (SiMPO), a simple and unified framework that generalizes reweighting scheme in diffusion RL with general monotonic functions. SiMPO revisits diffusion RL via a two-stage measure matching lens. First, we construct a virtual target policy by $f$-divergence regularized policy optimization, where we can relax the non-negativity constraint to allow for a signed target measure. Second, we use this signed measure to guide diffusion or flow models through reweighted matching. This formulation offers two key advantages: a) it generalizes to arbitrary monotonically increasing weighting functions; and b) it provides a principled justification and practical guidance for negative reweighting. Furthermore, we provide geometric interpretations to illustrate how negative reweighting actively repels the policy from suboptimal actions. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that SiMPO achieves superior performance by leveraging these flexible weighting schemes, and we provide practical guidelines for selecting reweighting methods tailored to the reward landscape.
Abstract:Sequential prediction from streaming observations is a fundamental problem in stochastic dynamical systems, where inherent uncertainty often leads to multiple plausible futures. While diffusion and flow-matching models are capable of modeling complex, multi-modal trajectories, their deployment in real-time streaming environments typically relies on repeated sampling from a non-informative initial distribution, incurring substantial inference latency and potential system backlogs. In this work, we introduce Sequential Flow Matching, a principled framework grounded in Bayesian filtering. By treating streaming inference as learning a probability flow that transports the predictive distribution from one time step to the next, our approach naturally aligns with the recursive structure of Bayesian belief updates. We provide theoretical justification that initializing generation from the previous posterior offers a principled warm start that can accelerate sampling compared to naïve re-sampling. Across a wide range of forecasting, decision-making and state estimation tasks, our method achieves performance competitive with full-step diffusion while requiring only one or very few sampling steps, therefore with faster sampling. It suggests that framing sequential inference via Bayesian filtering provides a new and principled perspective towards efficient real-time deployment of flow-based models.
Abstract:The automated generation of interactive 3D cities is a critical challenge with broad applications in autonomous driving, virtual reality, and embodied intelligence. While recent advances in generative models and procedural techniques have improved the realism of city generation, existing methods often struggle with high-fidelity asset creation, controllability, and manipulation. In this work, we introduce CityGenAgent, a natural language-driven framework for hierarchical procedural generation of high-quality 3D cities. Our approach decomposes city generation into two interpretable components, Block Program and Building Program. To ensure structural correctness and semantic alignment, we adopt a two-stage learning strategy: (1) Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). We train BlockGen and BuildingGen to generate valid programs that adhere to schema constraints, including non-self-intersecting polygons and complete fields; (2) Reinforcement Learning (RL). We design Spatial Alignment Reward to enhance spatial reasoning ability and Visual Consistency Reward to bridge the gap between textual descriptions and the visual modality. Benefiting from the programs and the models' generalization, CityGenAgent supports natural language editing and manipulation. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate superior semantic alignment, visual quality, and controllability compared to existing methods, establishing a robust foundation for scalable 3D city generation.
Abstract:Simulating deformable objects under rich interactions remains a fundamental challenge for real-to-sim robot manipulation, with dynamics jointly driven by environmental effects and robot actions. Existing simulators rely on predefined physics or data-driven dynamics without robot-conditioned control, limiting accuracy, stability, and generalization. This paper presents SoMA, a 3D Gaussian Splat simulator for soft-body manipulation. SoMA couples deformable dynamics, environmental forces, and robot joint actions in a unified latent neural space for end-to-end real-to-sim simulation. Modeling interactions over learned Gaussian splats enables controllable, stable long-horizon manipulation and generalization beyond observed trajectories without predefined physical models. SoMA improves resimulation accuracy and generalization on real-world robot manipulation by 20%, enabling stable simulation of complex tasks such as long-horizon cloth folding.
Abstract:Recent reconstruction methods based on radiance field such as NeRF and 3DGS reproduce indoor scenes with high visual fidelity, but break down under scene editing due to baked illumination and the lack of explicit light transport. In contrast, physically based inverse rendering relies on mesh representations and path tracing, which enforce correct light transport but place strong requirements on geometric fidelity, becoming a practical bottleneck for real indoor scenes. In this work, we propose Emission-Aware Gaussians and Path Tracing (EAG-PT), aiming for physically based light transport with a unified 2D Gaussian representation. Our design is based on three cores: (1) using 2D Gaussians as a unified scene representation and transport-friendly geometry proxy that avoids reconstructed mesh, (2) explicitly separating emissive and non-emissive components during reconstruction for further scene editing, and (3) decoupling reconstruction from final rendering by using efficient single-bounce optimization and high-quality multi-bounce path tracing after scene editing. Experiments on synthetic and real indoor scenes show that EAG-PT produces more natural and physically consistent renders after editing than radiant scene reconstructions, while preserving finer geometric detail and avoiding mesh-induced artifacts compared to mesh-based inverse path tracing. These results suggest promising directions for future use in interior design, XR content creation, and embodied AI.
Abstract:Streaming reconstruction from monocular image sequences remains challenging, as existing methods typically favor either high-quality rendering or accurate geometry, but rarely both. We present PLANING, an efficient on-the-fly reconstruction framework built on a hybrid representation that loosely couples explicit geometric primitives with neural Gaussians, enabling geometry and appearance to be modeled in a decoupled manner. This decoupling supports an online initialization and optimization strategy that separates geometry and appearance updates, yielding stable streaming reconstruction with substantially reduced structural redundancy. PLANING improves dense mesh Chamfer-L2 by 18.52% over PGSR, surpasses ARTDECO by 1.31 dB PSNR, and reconstructs ScanNetV2 scenes in under 100 seconds, over 5x faster than 2D Gaussian Splatting, while matching the quality of offline per-scene optimization. Beyond reconstruction quality, the structural clarity and computational efficiency of \modelname~make it well suited for a broad range of downstream applications, such as enabling large-scale scene modeling and simulation-ready environments for embodied AI. Project page: https://city-super.github.io/PLANING/ .
Abstract:Self-supervised learning (SSL) have improved empirical performance by unleashing the power of unlabeled data for practical applications. Specifically, SSL extracts the representation from massive unlabeled data, which will be transferred to a plenty of down streaming tasks with limited data. The significant improvement on diverse applications of representation learning has attracted increasing attention, resulting in a variety of dramatically different self-supervised learning objectives for representation extraction, with an assortment of learning procedures, but the lack of a clear and unified understanding. Such an absence hampers the ongoing development of representation learning, leaving a theoretical understanding missing, principles for efficient algorithm design unclear, and the use of representation learning methods in practice unjustified. The urgency for a unified framework is further motivated by the rapid growth in representation learning methods. In this paper, we are therefore compelled to develop a principled foundation of representation learning. We first theoretically investigate the sufficiency of the representation from a spectral representation view, which reveals the spectral essence of the existing successful SSL algorithms and paves the path to a unified framework for understanding and analysis. Such a framework work also inspires the development of more efficient and easy-to-use representation learning algorithms with principled way in real-world applications.
Abstract:Retargeting motion between characters with different skeleton structures is a fundamental challenge in computer animation. When source and target characters have vastly different bone arrangements, maintaining the original motion's semantics and quality becomes increasingly difficult. We present PALUM, a novel approach that learns common motion representations across diverse skeleton topologies by partitioning joints into semantic body parts and applying attention mechanisms to capture spatio-temporal relationships. Our method transfers motion to target skeletons by leveraging these skeleton-agnostic representations alongside target-specific structural information. To ensure robust learning and preserve motion fidelity, we introduce a cycle consistency mechanism that maintains semantic coherence throughout the retargeting process. Extensive experiments demonstrate superior performance in handling diverse skeletal structures while maintaining motion realism and semantic fidelity, even when generalizing to previously unseen skeleton-motion combinations. We will make our implementation publicly available to support future research.
Abstract:Soft actor-critic (SAC) is a popular algorithm for max-entropy reinforcement learning. In practice, the energy-based policies in SAC are often approximated using simple policy classes for efficiency, sacrificing the expressiveness and robustness. In this paper, we propose a variant of the SAC algorithm that parameterizes the policy with flow-based models, leveraging their rich expressiveness. In the algorithm, we evaluate the flow-based policy utilizing the instantaneous change-of-variable technique and update the policy with an online variant of flow matching developed in this paper. This online variant, termed importance sampling flow matching (ISFM), enables policy update with only samples from a user-specified sampling distribution rather than the unknown target distribution. We develop a theoretical analysis of ISFM, characterizing how different choices of sampling distributions affect the learning efficiency. Finally, we conduct a case study of our algorithm on the max-entropy linear quadratic regulator problems, demonstrating that the proposed algorithm learns the optimal action distribution.