Stroke3D: Lifting 2D strokes into rigged 3D model via latent diffusion models

Rigged 3D assets are fundamental to 3D deformation and animation. However, existing 3D generation methods face challenges in generating animatable geometry, while rigging techniques lack fine-grained structural control over skeleton creation. To address these limitations, we introduce Stroke3D, a novel framework that directly generates rigged meshes from user inputs: 2D drawn strokes and a descriptive text prompt. Our approach pioneers a two-stage pipeline that separates the generation into: 1) Controllable Skeleton Generation, we employ the Skeletal Graph VAE (Sk-VAE) to encode the skeleton's graph structure into a latent space, where the Skeletal Graph DiT (Sk-DiT) generates a skeletal embedding. The generation process is conditioned on both the text for semantics and the 2D strokes for explicit structural control, with the VAE's decoder reconstructing the final high-quality 3D skeleton; and 2) Enhanced Mesh Synthesis via TextuRig and SKA-DPO, where we then synthesize a textured mesh conditioned on the generated skeleton. For this stage, we first enhance an existing skeleton-to-mesh model by augmenting its training data with TextuRig: a dataset of textured and rigged meshes with captions, curated from Objaverse-XL. Additionally, we employ a preference optimization strategy, SKA-DPO, guided by a skeleton-mesh alignment score, to further improve geometric fidelity. Together, our framework enables a more intuitive workflow for creating ready to animate 3D content. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to generate rigged 3D meshes conditioned on user-drawn 2D strokes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Stroke3D produces plausible skeletons and high-quality meshes.

SARS: A Novel Face and Body Shape and Appearance Aware 3D Reconstruction System extends Morphable Models

Morphable Models (3DMMs) are a type of morphable model that takes 2D images as inputs and recreates the structure and physical appearance of 3D objects, especially human faces and bodies. 3DMM combines identity and expression blendshapes with a basic face mesh to create a detailed 3D model. The variability in the 3D Morphable models can be controlled by tuning diverse parameters. They are high-level image descriptors, such as shape, texture, illumination, and camera parameters. Previous research in 3D human reconstruction concentrated solely on global face structure or geometry, ignoring face semantic features such as age, gender, and facial landmarks characterizing facial boundaries, curves, dips, and wrinkles. In order to accommodate changes in these high-level facial characteristics, this work introduces a shape and appearance-aware 3D reconstruction system (named SARS by us), a c modular pipeline that extracts body and face information from a single image to properly rebuild the 3D model of the human full body.

SurfPhase: 3D Interfacial Dynamics in Two-Phase Flows from Sparse Videos

Interfacial dynamics in two-phase flows govern momentum, heat, and mass transfer, yet remain difficult to measure experimentally. Classical techniques face intrinsic limitations near moving interfaces, while existing neural rendering methods target single-phase flows with diffuse boundaries and cannot handle sharp, deformable liquid-vapor interfaces. We propose SurfPhase, a novel model for reconstructing 3D interfacial dynamics from sparse camera views. Our approach integrates dynamic Gaussian surfels with a signed distance function formulation for geometric consistency, and leverages a video diffusion model to synthesize novel-view videos to refine reconstruction from sparse observations. We evaluate on a new dataset of high-speed pool boiling videos, demonstrating high-quality view synthesis and velocity estimation from only two camera views. Project website: https://yuegao.me/SurfPhase.

Towards Next-Generation SLAM: A Survey on 3DGS-SLAM Focusing on Performance, Robustness, and Future Directions

Traditional Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) systems often face limitations including coarse rendering quality, insufficient recovery of scene details, and poor robustness in dynamic environments. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), with its efficient explicit representation and high-quality rendering capabilities, offers a new reconstruction paradigm for SLAM. This survey comprehensively reviews key technical approaches for integrating 3DGS with SLAM. We analyze performance optimization of representative methods across four critical dimensions: rendering quality, tracking accuracy, reconstruction speed, and memory consumption, delving into their design principles and breakthroughs. Furthermore, we examine methods for enhancing the robustness of 3DGS-SLAM in complex environments such as motion blur and dynamic environments. Finally, we discuss future challenges and development trends in this area. This survey aims to provide a technical reference for researchers and foster the development of next-generation SLAM systems characterized by high fidelity, efficiency, and robustness.

Diff-PC: Identity-preserving and 3D-aware Controllable Diffusion for Zero-shot Portrait Customization

Portrait customization (PC) has recently garnered significant attention due to its potential applications. However, existing PC methods lack precise identity (ID) preservation and face control. To address these tissues, we propose Diff-PC, a diffusion-based framework for zero-shot PC, which generates realistic portraits with high ID fidelity, specified facial attributes, and diverse backgrounds. Specifically, our approach employs the 3D face predictor to reconstruct the 3D-aware facial priors encompassing the reference ID, target expressions, and poses. To capture fine-grained face details, we design ID-Encoder that fuses local and global facial features. Subsequently, we devise ID-Ctrl using the 3D face to guide the alignment of ID features. We further introduce ID-Injector to enhance ID fidelity and facial controllability. Finally, training on our collected ID-centric dataset improves face similarity and text-to-image (T2I) alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Diff-PC surpasses state-of-the-art methods in ID preservation, facial control, and T2I consistency. Furthermore, our method is compatible with multi-style foundation models.

From Blurry to Believable: Enhancing Low-quality Talking Heads with 3D Generative Priors

Creating high-fidelity, animatable 3D talking heads is crucial for immersive applications, yet often hindered by the prevalence of low-quality image or video sources, which yield poor 3D reconstructions. In this paper, we introduce SuperHead, a novel framework for enhancing low-resolution, animatable 3D head avatars. The core challenge lies in synthesizing high-quality geometry and textures, while ensuring both 3D and temporal consistency during animation and preserving subject identity. Despite recent progress in image, video and 3D-based super-resolution (SR), existing SR techniques are ill-equipped to handle dynamic 3D inputs. To address this, SuperHead leverages the rich priors from pre-trained 3D generative models via a novel dynamics-aware 3D inversion scheme. This process optimizes the latent representation of the generative model to produce a super-resolved 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) head model, which is subsequently rigged to an underlying parametric head model (e.g., FLAME) for animation. The inversion is jointly supervised using a sparse collection of upscaled 2D face renderings and corresponding depth maps, captured from diverse facial expressions and camera viewpoints, to ensure realism under dynamic facial motions. Experiments demonstrate that SuperHead generates avatars with fine-grained facial details under dynamic motions, significantly outperforming baseline methods in visual quality.

LightCity: An Urban Dataset for Outdoor Inverse Rendering and Reconstruction under Multi-illumination Conditions

Inverse rendering in urban scenes is pivotal for applications like autonomous driving and digital twins. Yet, it faces significant challenges due to complex illumination conditions, including multi-illumination and indirect light and shadow effects. However, the effects of these challenges on intrinsic decomposition and 3D reconstruction have not been explored due to the lack of appropriate datasets. In this paper, we present LightCity, a novel high-quality synthetic urban dataset featuring diverse illumination conditions with realistic indirect light and shadow effects. LightCity encompasses over 300 sky maps with highly controllable illumination, varying scales with street-level and aerial perspectives over 50K images, and rich properties such as depth, normal, material components, light and indirect light, etc. Besides, we leverage LightCity to benchmark three fundamental tasks in the urban environments and conduct a comprehensive analysis of these benchmarks, laying a robust foundation for advancing related research.

VAMOS-OCTA: Vessel-Aware Multi-Axis Orthogonal Supervision for Inpainting Motion-Corrupted OCT Angiography Volumes

Handheld Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography (OCTA) enables noninvasive retinal imaging in uncooperative or pediatric subjects, but is highly susceptible to motion artifacts that severely degrade volumetric image quality. Sudden motion during 3D acquisition can lead to unsampled retinal regions across entire B-scans (cross-sectional slices), resulting in blank bands in en face projections. We propose VAMOS-OCTA, a deep learning framework for inpainting motion-corrupted B-scans using vessel-aware multi-axis supervision. We employ a 2.5D U-Net architecture that takes a stack of neighboring B-scans as input to reconstruct a corrupted center B-scan, guided by a novel Vessel-Aware Multi-Axis Orthogonal Supervision (VAMOS) loss. This loss combines vessel-weighted intensity reconstruction with axial and lateral projection consistency, encouraging vascular continuity in native B-scans and across orthogonal planes. Unlike prior work that focuses primarily on restoring the en face MIP, VAMOS-OCTA jointly enhances both cross-sectional B-scan sharpness and volumetric projection accuracy, even under severe motion corruptions. We trained our model on both synthetic and real-world corrupted volumes and evaluated its performance using both perceptual quality and pixel-wise accuracy metrics. VAMOS-OCTA consistently outperforms prior methods, producing reconstructions with sharp capillaries, restored vessel continuity, and clean en face projections. These results demonstrate that multi-axis supervision offers a powerful constraint for restoring motion-degraded 3D OCTA data. Our source code is available at https://github.com/MedICL-VU/VAMOS-OCTA.

Lightweight High-Fidelity Low-Bitrate Talking Face Compression for 3D Video Conference

The demand for immersive and interactive communication has driven advancements in 3D video conferencing, yet achieving high-fidelity 3D talking face representation at low bitrates remains a challenge. Traditional 2D video compression techniques fail to preserve fine-grained geometric and appearance details, while implicit neural rendering methods like NeRF suffer from prohibitive computational costs. To address these challenges, we propose a lightweight, high-fidelity, low-bitrate 3D talking face compression framework that integrates FLAME-based parametric modeling with 3DGS neural rendering. Our approach transmits only essential facial metadata in real time, enabling efficient reconstruction with a Gaussian-based head model. Additionally, we introduce a compact representation and compression scheme, including Gaussian attribute compression and MLP optimization, to enhance transmission efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves superior rate-distortion performance, delivering high-quality facial rendering at extremely low bitrates, making it well-suited for real-time 3D video conferencing applications.

V2X-DSC: Multi-Agent Collaborative Perception with Distributed Source Coding Guided Communication

Collaborative perception improves 3D understanding by fusing multi-agent observations, yet intermediate-feature sharing faces strict bandwidth constraints as dense BEV features saturate V2X links. We observe that collaborators view the same physical world, making their features strongly correlated; thus receivers only need innovation beyond their local context. Revisiting this from a distributed source coding perspective, we propose V2X-DSC, a framework with a Conditional Codec (DCC) for bandwidth-constrained fusion. The sender compresses BEV features into compact codes, while the receiver performs conditional reconstruction using its local features as side information, allocating bits to complementary cues rather than redundant content. This conditional structure regularizes learning, encouraging incremental representation and yielding lower-noise features. Experiments on DAIR-V2X, OPV2V, and V2X-Real demonstrate state-of-the-art accuracy-bandwidth trade-offs under KB-level communication, and generalizes as a plug-and-play communication layer across multiple fusion backbones.