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Aug 17

Enhanced Velocity Field Modeling for Gaussian Video Reconstruction

High-fidelity 3D video reconstruction is essential for enabling real-time rendering of dynamic scenes with realistic motion in virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR). The deformation field paradigm of 3D Gaussian splatting has achieved near-photorealistic results in video reconstruction due to the great representation capability of deep deformation networks. However, in videos with complex motion and significant scale variations, deformation networks often overfit to irregular Gaussian trajectories, leading to suboptimal visual quality. Moreover, the gradient-based densification strategy designed for static scene reconstruction proves inadequate to address the absence of dynamic content. In light of these challenges, we propose a flow-empowered velocity field modeling scheme tailored for Gaussian video reconstruction, dubbed FlowGaussian-VR. It consists of two core components: a velocity field rendering (VFR) pipeline which enables optical flow-based optimization, and a flow-assisted adaptive densification (FAD) strategy that adjusts the number and size of Gaussians in dynamic regions. We validate our model's effectiveness on multi-view dynamic reconstruction and novel view synthesis with multiple real-world datasets containing challenging motion scenarios, demonstrating not only notable visual improvements (over 2.5 dB gain in PSNR) and less blurry artifacts in dynamic textures, but also regularized and trackable per-Gaussian trajectories.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 30, 2025

Physics-informed coherent motions to predict Lagrangian trajectories

Accurate prediction of Lagrangian trajectories in turbulent flow remains challenging due to limited temporal information in transport functions. This paper shows that surrounding coherent motions sharing the same dynamics carry enough information to provide highly probable trajectories even from sparse temporal observations. The proposed coherent predictor builds on Lagrangian coherent structures (LCSs), the advective transport barriers that govern the cohesive motion of neighbouring particles. Coherent trajectories are quantified using a local segmentation with the finite-time Lyapunov exponents (FTLE). The coherent predictor incorporates information from the particle's position history and neighbouring coherent velocity and acceleration into a novel cost function to predict its trajectory. The proposed cost function follows a physics-informed approach where the position history acts as a data fidelity term and the coherent velocity and acceleration act as physics-based regularisation constraints. We assess our proposed approach using both three-dimensional (3D) synthetic and experimental data of the wake behind a smooth cylinder and two-dimensional (2D) homogeneous isotropic turbulent (HIT) flow. The coherent predictor is deemed generic due to its consistent behaviour regardless of flow dimensions, Reynolds number, and flow topology. Our results show that the optimal cost function parameters can be modelled from the measurement uncertainties, giving lower prediction error and uncertainty than current methods. We see direct signatures of flow topology on the prediction error map, including the cylinder leading edge boundary layer, the sideward shear layers, and the vortex formation structures. These topologies are marked by high Lagrangian gradients and 3D directional motions.

  • 2 authors
·
May 5

QuaMo: Quaternion Motions for Vision-based 3D Human Kinematics Capture

Vision-based 3D human motion capture from videos remains a challenge in computer vision. Traditional 3D pose estimation approaches often ignore the temporal consistency between frames, causing implausible and jittery motion. The emerging field of kinematics-based 3D motion capture addresses these issues by estimating the temporal transitioning between poses instead. A major drawback in current kinematics approaches is their reliance on Euler angles. Despite their simplicity, Euler angles suffer from discontinuity that leads to unstable motion reconstructions, especially in online settings where trajectory refinement is unavailable. Contrarily, quaternions have no discontinuity and can produce continuous transitions between poses. In this paper, we propose QuaMo, a novel Quaternion Motions method using quaternion differential equations (QDE) for human kinematics capture. We utilize the state-space model, an effective system for describing real-time kinematics estimations, with quaternion state and the QDE describing quaternion velocity. The corresponding angular acceleration is computed from a meta-PD controller with a novel acceleration enhancement that adaptively regulates the control signals as the human quickly changes to a new pose. Unlike previous work, our QDE is solved under the quaternion unit-sphere constraint that results in more accurate estimations. Experimental results show that our novel formulation of the QDE with acceleration enhancement accurately estimates 3D human kinematics with no discontinuity and minimal implausibilities. QuaMo outperforms comparable state-of-the-art methods on multiple datasets, namely Human3.6M, Fit3D, SportsPose and AIST. The code is available at https://github.com/cuongle1206/QuaMo

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 27

Synthetic Lagrangian Turbulence by Generative Diffusion Models

Lagrangian turbulence lies at the core of numerous applied and fundamental problems related to the physics of dispersion and mixing in engineering, bio-fluids, atmosphere, oceans, and astrophysics. Despite exceptional theoretical, numerical, and experimental efforts conducted over the past thirty years, no existing models are capable of faithfully reproducing statistical and topological properties exhibited by particle trajectories in turbulence. We propose a machine learning approach, based on a state-of-the-art diffusion model, to generate single-particle trajectories in three-dimensional turbulence at high Reynolds numbers, thereby bypassing the need for direct numerical simulations or experiments to obtain reliable Lagrangian data. Our model demonstrates the ability to reproduce most statistical benchmarks across time scales, including the fat-tail distribution for velocity increments, the anomalous power law, and the increased intermittency around the dissipative scale. Slight deviations are observed below the dissipative scale, particularly in the acceleration and flatness statistics. Surprisingly, the model exhibits strong generalizability for extreme events, producing events of higher intensity and rarity that still match the realistic statistics. This paves the way for producing synthetic high-quality datasets for pre-training various downstream applications of Lagrangian turbulence.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 27, 2024

Lagrangian Coherent Track Initialisation (LCTI)

Advances in time-resolved Particle Tracking Velocimetry (4D-PTV) techniques have been consistently revealed more accurate Lagrangian particle motions. A novel track initialisation technique as a complementary part of 4D-PTV, based on local temporal and spatial coherency of neighbour trajectories, is proposed. The proposed Lagrangian Coherent Track Initialisation (LCTI) applies physics-based Finite Time Lyapunov Exponent (FTLE) to build four frame coherent tracks. We locally determine the boundaries (i.e., ridges) of Lagrangian Coherent Structures (LCS) among neighbour trajectories by using FTLE to distinguish clusters of coherent motions. To evaluate the proposed technique, we created an open-access synthetic Lagrangian and Eulerian dataset of the wake downstream of a smooth cylinder at a Reynolds number equal to 3900 obtained from 3D Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS). The dataset is available to the public. Performance of the proposed method based on three characteristic parameters, temporal scale, particle concentration (i.e., density), and noise ratio, showed robust behaviour in finding true tracks compared to the recent initialisation algorithms. Sensitivity of LCTI to the number of untracked and wrong tracks are also discussed. We address the capability of using the proposed method as a function of a 4D-PTV scheme in the Lagrangian Particle Tracking challenge for a flow with high particle densities. Finally, the LCTI behaviour was assessed in a real jet impingement experiment. LCTI was found to be a reliable tracking tool in complex flow motions, with a strength revealed for flows with high particle concentrations.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 21, 2021

Eulerian-Lagrangian particle-based model for diffusional growth for the better parameterization of ISM clouds: A road map for improving climate model through small-scale model using observations

The quantitative prediction of the intensity of rainfall events (light or heavy) has remained a challenge in Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models. For the first time the mean coefficient of diffusional growth rates are calculated using an Eulerian-Lagrangian particle-based small-scale model on in situ airborne measurement data of Cloud Aerosol Interaction and Precipitation Enhancement Experiment (CAIPEEX) during monsoon over Indian sub-continent. The results show that diffusional growth rates varies in the range of 0.00025 - 0.0015(cm/s). The generic problem of the overestimation of light rain in NWP models might be related with the choice of cm in the model. It is also shown from DNS experiment using Eulerian-Lagrangian particle-based small-scale model that the relative dispersion is constrained with average values in the range of ~ 0.2 - 0.37 (~ 0.1- 0.26) in less humid (more humid) conditions. This is in agreement with in situ airborne observation (dispersion ~ 0.36) and previous study over Indian sub-continent. The linear relationship between relative dispersion and cloud droplet number concentration (NC) is obtained from this study using CAIPEEX observation over Indian subcontinent. The dispersion based autoconversion-scheme for Indian region must be useful for the Indian summer monsoon precipitation calculation in the general circulation model. The present study also provide valuable guidance for the parameterization of effective radius, important for radiation scheme.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 2, 2023

3D Dynamic Fluid Assets from Single-View Videos with Generative Gaussian Splatting

While the generation of 3D content from single-view images has been extensively studied, the creation of physically consistent 3D dynamic scenes from videos remains in its early stages. We propose a novel framework leveraging generative 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) models to extract and re-simulate 3D dynamic fluid objects from single-view videos using simulation methods. The fluid geometry represented by 3DGS is initially generated and optimized from single-view images, then denoised, densified, and aligned across frames. We estimate the fluid surface velocity using optical flow, propose a mainstream extraction algorithm to refine it. The 3D volumetric velocity field is then derived from the velocity of the fluid's enclosed surface. The velocity field is therewith converted into a divergence-free, grid-based representation, enabling the optimization of simulation parameters through its differentiability across frames. This process outputs simulation-ready fluid assets with physical dynamics closely matching those observed in the source video. Our approach is applicable to various liquid fluids, including inviscid and viscous types, and allows users to edit the output geometry or extend movement durations seamlessly. This automatic method for creating 3D dynamic fluid assets from single-view videos, easily obtainable from the internet, shows great potential for generating large-scale 3D fluid assets at a low cost.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 29, 2025

On the statistical theory of self-gravitating collisionless dark matter flow: Scale and redshift variation of velocity and density distributions

This paper studies the scale and redshift variation of density and velocity distributions in self-gravitating collisionless dark matter flow by a halo-based non-projection approach. All particles are divided into halo and out-of-halo particles for redshift variation of distributions. Without projecting particle fields onto a structured grid, the scale variation is analyzed by identifying all particle pairs on different scales r. We demonstrate that: i) Delaunay tessellation can be used to reconstruct the density field. The density correlation, spectrum, and dispersion functions were obtained, modeled, and compared with the N-body simulation; ii) the velocity distributions are symmetric on both small and large scales and are non-symmetric with a negative skewness on intermediate scales due to the inverse energy cascade at a constant rate varepsilon_u; iii) On small scales, the even order moments of pairwise velocity Delta u_L follow a two-thirds law (-varepsilon_ur)^{2/3}, while the odd order moments follow a linear scaling langle(Delta u_L)^{2n+1}rangle=(2n+1)langle(Delta u_L)^{2n}ranglelangleDelta u_Lrangler; iv) The scale variation of the velocity distributions was studied for longitudinal velocities u_L or u_L^{'}, pairwise velocity (velocity difference) Delta u_L=u_L^{'}-u_L and velocity sum Sigma u_L=u^{'}_L+u_L. Fully developed velocity fields are never Gaussian on any scale, despite that they can initially be Gaussian; v) On small scales, u_L and Sigma u_L can be modeled by a X distribution to maximize the system entropy; vi) On large scales, Delta u_L and Sigma u_L can be modeled by a logistic or a X distribution; vii) the redshift variation of the velocity distributions follows the evolution of the X distribution involving a shape parameter alpha(z) decreasing with time.

  • 1 authors
·
Feb 14, 2022

The Geometric Nature and a Free Proxy for Flow-Matching Uncertainty

Flow matching (FM) has become a popular action head paradigm for modern embodied models. However, as a conditional generative model, it does not explicitly expose its inherent uncertainty, producing faulty action chunks even when it misinterprets the scene or encounters out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs. Therefore, determining when an FM-generated action can be trusted is essential for safe deployment, yet existing uncertainty estimation methods on real-time control suffer from several issues: extra training budget, high computational overhead, and low generalization ability. In this work, we provide a geometric interpretation of FM uncertainty in the velocity field, showing that uncertainty manifests as deviation from an ideal affine-isotropic contraction field. Building on this observation, we introduce denoising acceleration (accel), a highly-generalizable and cost-free uncertainty proxy that measures the bending of the denoising trajectory from a single forward pass, without additional model evaluations, training, or resampling. We theoretically and empirically demonstrate that accel is a faithful proxy for FM uncertainty and further test its utility in online failure detection. Results show that accel identifies failing rollouts well before termination, matching or even outperforming costly resampling- and training-based baselines across settings under realistic deployment budget. Code and demos available at: https://github.com/rrrrrrzy/fm-geometry.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 29

FlowAWR: Online Adaptive Flow Reinforcement via Advantage-Weighted Rectification

Aligning generative flow models on continuous spaces via online reinforcement learning is constrained by intractable trajectory likelihoods. Existing density-approximated policy gradient methods rely on stochastic SDE samplers to construct tractable transition kernels, which introduce training-inference inconsistencies and necessitates Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG). While implicit frameworks such as DiffusionNFT directly optimize forward-process velocity fields, its heuristic fixed-magnitude corrections prevent optimization strength from relative intra-group quality. We propose Flow Advantage-Weighted Rectification (FlowAWR), a paradigm that recasts continuous generative policy optimization as supervised regression toward a theoretically optimal velocity field. Starting from the optimal policy of a KL-constrained reward maximization, FlowAWR derives the optimal velocity field that admits a magnitude-aware, advantage-weighted rectification form, yielding SDE-free optimization and CFG-free generation. In comparative evaluations on SD3.5-Medium, FlowAWR achieves improved alignment performance alongside a 2times to 5times convergence acceleration over DiffusionNFT (e.g., reaching a 24.12 PickScore in 1.2k steps, versus 23.82 in 2.0k steps for DiffusionNFT and 23.50 in >4k steps for FlowGRPO). Under multi-reward constraints, FlowAWR sustains generation quality, satisfying structural rules while maintaining stable out-of-domain performance.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 28

ODEWorld: A Continuous Predictive Architecture via Physical-Time Flow

In the physical world we inhabit, space and time are fundamentally continuous. However, existing machine learning paradigms for world modeling are largely confined to discrete-time prediction, thereby exhibiting significant inefficiency in capturing the dynamics of physical world. We introduce Physical-Time Flow (PT-Flow), a novel approach that learns a continuous latent velocity field operating in physical time. Crucially, the underlying dynamics of sequential data are parameterized by an ordinary differential equation (ODE) embedded in a well-structured representation space. Under this paradigm, the prediction of future can be recast as temporal integration via an ODE solver in the compressed latent space. Building upon PT-Flow, we construct ODEWorld, a continuous-time latent world model that is both efficient and versatile. By extracting time-variant features and enforcing ODE properties on both the dynamical representation space and the latent velocity field, ODEWorld effectively addresses the long-standing representation collapse issue in latent world model literature. This also enables high-quality image reconstruction even after long-horizon prediction. Moreover, its continuous nature allows for arbitrary temporal resolution and even backward prediction, which is impossible for most discrete-time models. Lastly, ODEWorld can provide rich planning-oriented information to facilitate downstream policy learning. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that ODEWorld successfully reconciles planning-conducive dynamics abstraction with visual realism, excelling in both video generation and robotic control. https://dstate.github.io/odeworld_website/{Project Website}.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 29 2

How to build a consistency model: Learning flow maps via self-distillation

Flow-based generative models achieve state-of-the-art sample quality, but require the expensive solution of a differential equation at inference time. Flow map models, commonly known as consistency models, encompass many recent efforts to improve inference-time efficiency by learning the solution operator of this differential equation. Yet despite their promise, these models lack a unified description that clearly explains how to learn them efficiently in practice. Here, building on the methodology proposed in Boffi et. al. (2024), we present a systematic algorithmic framework for directly learning the flow map associated with a flow or diffusion model. By exploiting a relationship between the velocity field underlying a continuous-time flow and the instantaneous rate of change of the flow map, we show how to convert any distillation scheme into a direct training algorithm via self-distillation, eliminating the need for pre-trained teachers. We introduce three algorithmic families based on different mathematical characterizations of the flow map: Eulerian, Lagrangian, and Progressive methods, which we show encompass and extend all known distillation and direct training schemes for consistency models. We find that the novel class of Lagrangian methods, which avoid both spatial derivatives and bootstrapping from small steps by design, achieve significantly more stable training and higher performance than more standard Eulerian and Progressive schemes. Our methodology unifies existing training schemes under a single common framework and reveals new design principles for accelerated generative modeling. Associated code is available at https://github.com/nmboffi/flow-maps.

  • 3 authors
·
May 24, 2025

SMF: Template-free and Rig-free Animation Transfer using Kinetic Codes

Animation retargetting applies sparse motion description (e.g., keypoint sequences) to a character mesh to produce a semantically plausible and temporally coherent full-body mesh sequence. Existing approaches come with restrictions -- they require access to template-based shape priors or artist-designed deformation rigs, suffer from limited generalization to unseen motion and/or shapes, or exhibit motion jitter. We propose Self-supervised Motion Fields (SMF), a self-supervised framework that is trained with only sparse motion representations, without requiring dataset-specific annotations, templates, or rigs. At the heart of our method are Kinetic Codes, a novel autoencoder-based sparse motion encoding, that exposes a semantically rich latent space, simplifying large-scale training. Our architecture comprises dedicated spatial and temporal gradient predictors, which are jointly trained in an end-to-end fashion. The combined network, regularized by the Kinetic Codes' latent space, has good generalization across both unseen shapes and new motions. We evaluated our method on unseen motion sampled from AMASS, D4D, Mixamo, and raw monocular video for animation transfer on various characters with varying shapes and topology. We report a new SoTA on the AMASS dataset in the context of generalization to unseen motion. Code, weights, and supplementary are available on the project webpage at https://motionfields.github.io/

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 7, 2025

A Physics-Informed Fourier-Wavelet Transformer for Multiscale Computational Fluid Dynamics Surrogate Modeling

Physics-informed surrogate models can accelerate computational fluid dynamics simulations. However, many existing methods reproduce global flow patterns more reliably than localized multiscale structures. This study presents a physics-informed Fourier-wavelet transformer for next-step velocity-field reconstruction in real-world flow benchmarks. The proposed formulation combines hybrid Fourier-wavelet spectral encoding with physics-biased self-attention based on partial differential equation residual diagnostics. It also uses self-supervised pretraining through Masked Physics Prediction and Equation Consistency Prediction. The experiments are conducted on two real benchmark cases: cylinder-wake flow and fluid-structure interaction. All approaches are evaluated under a shared local protocol and compared with spectral, transformer-based, operator-learning, and physics-informed neural-network baselines. On the cylinder-wake benchmark, the proposed model achieves the best aggregate accuracy, with an all-channel normalized mean-squared error of 0.05875 and an all-channel Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.97019. On the fluid-structure-interaction benchmark, it gives the lowest all-channel normalized mean-squared error of 2.70 times 10^{-4}, compared with 4.02 times 10^{-4} for the strongest baseline. Component-wise field comparisons and scale-separated diagnostics further show stronger recovery of localized wake structures, including near-body, wake-core, and far-wake features. The results demonstrate improved real-world flow reconstruction while maintaining a practical accuracy-cost tradeoff.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 22

Improving Classifier-Free Guidance of Flow Matching via Manifold Projection

Classifier-free guidance (CFG) is a widely used technique for controllable generation in diffusion and flow-based models. Despite its empirical success, CFG relies on a heuristic linear extrapolation that is often sensitive to the guidance scale. In this work, we provide a principled interpretation of CFG through the lens of optimization. We demonstrate that the velocity field in flow matching corresponds to the gradient of a sequence of smoothed distance functions, which guides latent variables toward the scaled target image set. This perspective reveals that the standard CFG formulation is an approximation of this gradient, where the prediction gap, the discrepancy between conditional and unconditional outputs, governs guidance sensitivity. Leveraging this insight, we reformulate the CFG sampling as a homotopy optimization with a manifold constraint. This formulation necessitates a manifold projection step, which we implement via an incremental gradient descent scheme during sampling. To improve computational efficiency and stability, we further enhance this iterative process with Anderson Acceleration without requiring additional model evaluations. Our proposed methods are training-free and consistently refine generation fidelity, prompt alignment, and robustness to the guidance scale. We validate their effectiveness across diverse benchmarks, demonstrating significant improvements on large-scale models such as DiT-XL-2-256, Flux, and Stable Diffusion 3.5.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 29

A Point-Cloud Deep Learning Framework for Prediction of Fluid Flow Fields on Irregular Geometries

We present a novel deep learning framework for flow field predictions in irregular domains when the solution is a function of the geometry of either the domain or objects inside the domain. Grid vertices in a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) domain are viewed as point clouds and used as inputs to a neural network based on the PointNet architecture, which learns an end-to-end mapping between spatial positions and CFD quantities. Using our approach, (i) the network inherits desirable features of unstructured meshes (e.g., fine and coarse point spacing near the object surface and in the far field, respectively), which minimizes network training cost; (ii) object geometry is accurately represented through vertices located on object boundaries, which maintains boundary smoothness and allows the network to detect small changes between geometries; and (iii) no data interpolation is utilized for creating training data; thus accuracy of the CFD data is preserved. None of these features are achievable by extant methods based on projecting scattered CFD data into Cartesian grids and then using regular convolutional neural networks. Incompressible laminar steady flow past a cylinder with various shapes for its cross section is considered. The mass and momentum of predicted fields are conserved. We test the generalizability of our network by predicting the flow around multiple objects as well as an airfoil, even though only single objects and no airfoils are observed during training. The network predicts the flow fields hundreds of times faster than our conventional CFD solver, while maintaining excellent to reasonable accuracy.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 15, 2021

Euphonium: Steering Video Flow Matching via Process Reward Gradient Guided Stochastic Dynamics

While online Reinforcement Learning has emerged as a crucial technique for aligning flow matching models with human preferences, current approaches are hindered by inefficient exploration during training rollouts. Relying on undirected stochasticity and sparse outcome rewards, these methods struggle to discover high-reward samples, resulting in data-inefficient and slow optimization. To address these limitations, we propose Euphonium, a novel framework that steers generation via process reward gradient guided dynamics. Our key insight is to formulate the sampling process as a theoretically principled Stochastic Differential Equation that explicitly incorporates the gradient of a Process Reward Model into the flow drift. This design enables dense, step-by-step steering toward high-reward regions, advancing beyond the unguided exploration in prior works, and theoretically encompasses existing sampling methods (e.g., Flow-GRPO, DanceGRPO) as special cases. We further derive a distillation objective that internalizes the guidance signal into the flow network, eliminating inference-time dependency on the reward model. We instantiate this framework with a Dual-Reward Group Relative Policy Optimization algorithm, combining latent process rewards for efficient credit assignment with pixel-level outcome rewards for final visual fidelity. Experiments on text-to-video generation show that Euphonium achieves better alignment compared to existing methods while accelerating training convergence by 1.66x.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 4

PFGM++: Unlocking the Potential of Physics-Inspired Generative Models

We introduce a new family of physics-inspired generative models termed PFGM++ that unifies diffusion models and Poisson Flow Generative Models (PFGM). These models realize generative trajectories for N dimensional data by embedding paths in N{+}D dimensional space while still controlling the progression with a simple scalar norm of the D additional variables. The new models reduce to PFGM when D{=}1 and to diffusion models when D{to}infty. The flexibility of choosing D allows us to trade off robustness against rigidity as increasing D results in more concentrated coupling between the data and the additional variable norms. We dispense with the biased large batch field targets used in PFGM and instead provide an unbiased perturbation-based objective similar to diffusion models. To explore different choices of D, we provide a direct alignment method for transferring well-tuned hyperparameters from diffusion models (D{to} infty) to any finite D values. Our experiments show that models with finite D can be superior to previous state-of-the-art diffusion models on CIFAR-10/FFHQ 64{times}64 datasets, with FID scores of 1.91/2.43 when D{=}2048/128. In class-conditional setting, D{=}2048 yields current state-of-the-art FID of 1.74 on CIFAR-10. In addition, we demonstrate that models with smaller D exhibit improved robustness against modeling errors. Code is available at https://github.com/Newbeeer/pfgmpp

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 8, 2023

A Third-Order Gaussian Process Trajectory Representation Framework with Closed-Form Kinematics for Continuous-Time Motion Estimation

In this paper, we propose a third-order, i.e., white-noise-on-jerk, Gaussian Process (GP) Trajectory Representation (TR) framework for continuous-time (CT) motion estimation (ME) tasks. Our framework features a unified trajectory representation that encapsulates the kinematic models of both SO(3)timesR^3 and SE(3) pose representations. This encapsulation strategy allows users to use the same implementation of measurement-based factors for either choice of pose representation, which facilitates experimentation and comparison to achieve the best model for the ME task. In addition, unique to our framework, we derive the kinematic models with the closed-form temporal derivatives of the local variable of SO(3) and SE(3), which so far has only been approximated based on the Taylor expansion in the literature. Our experiments show that these kinematic models can improve the estimation accuracy in high-speed scenarios. All analytical Jacobians of the interpolated states with respect to the support states of the trajectory representation, as well as the motion prior factors, are also provided for accelerated Gauss-Newton (GN) optimization. Our experiments demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of the framework in various motion estimation tasks such as localization, calibration, and odometry, facilitating fast prototyping for ME researchers. We release the source code for the benefit of the community. Our project is available at https://github.com/brytsknguyen/gptr.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 30, 2024

MotionPro: A Precise Motion Controller for Image-to-Video Generation

Animating images with interactive motion control has garnered popularity for image-to-video (I2V) generation. Modern approaches typically rely on large Gaussian kernels to extend motion trajectories as condition without explicitly defining movement region, leading to coarse motion control and failing to disentangle object and camera moving. To alleviate these, we present MotionPro, a precise motion controller that novelly leverages region-wise trajectory and motion mask to regulate fine-grained motion synthesis and identify target motion category (i.e., object or camera moving), respectively. Technically, MotionPro first estimates the flow maps on each training video via a tracking model, and then samples the region-wise trajectories to simulate inference scenario. Instead of extending flow through large Gaussian kernels, our region-wise trajectory approach enables more precise control by directly utilizing trajectories within local regions, thereby effectively characterizing fine-grained movements. A motion mask is simultaneously derived from the predicted flow maps to capture the holistic motion dynamics of the movement regions. To pursue natural motion control, MotionPro further strengthens video denoising by incorporating both region-wise trajectories and motion mask through feature modulation. More remarkably, we meticulously construct a benchmark, i.e., MC-Bench, with 1.1K user-annotated image-trajectory pairs, for the evaluation of both fine-grained and object-level I2V motion control. Extensive experiments conducted on WebVid-10M and MC-Bench demonstrate the effectiveness of MotionPro. Please refer to our project page for more results: https://zhw-zhang.github.io/MotionPro-page/.

  • 7 authors
·
May 26, 2025 3

Neural Voxel Dynamics: Learning Implicit 3D Physics via Volumetric Feature Advection

We present a self-supervised framework for learning implicit 3D physical dynamics directly from video-derived supervisory signals. While current generative video models achieve high visual fidelity, they lack a 3D geometric foundation, often resulting in physical inconsistencies and a failure to maintain object permanence. We address this by shifting the predictive bottleneck from 2D image space to a `lifted' 3D Volumetric Latent Space. Our method unprojects semantic features from a Video Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (V-JEPA) into a voxelized grid, grounded by monocular depth priors. This lifting enables a Volumetric Feature Advection to learn an action-conditioned transition operator that treats physics as a spatio-temporal state advection problem, i.e., learn implicit 3D physics. Unlike state-of-the-art hybrid models that rely on explicit classical simulators for training and/or inference, our architecture tracks material states implicitly within high-dimensional V-JEPA features. This allows for the emergent simulation of heterogeneous phenomena (e.g., rigid body motion in fluid flow) within a single, unified pipeline. Supervised solely via end-to-end video-derived signal plus action conditions, without access to physics engine internal states, labels, or surrogate models, our model demonstrates good long-term structural stability and physical plausibility on multiple benchmarks (CLEVERER, PhysInOne, PhysGaia). We believe that this work opens a scalable pathway toward general-purpose dynamic world models that internalize the 3D invariants of the physical world solely through passive observation of monocular videos.

  • 2 authors
·
Jun 23

FMPose3D: monocular 3D pose estimation via flow matching

Monocular 3D pose estimation is fundamentally ill-posed due to depth ambiguity and occlusions, thereby motivating probabilistic methods that generate multiple plausible 3D pose hypotheses. In particular, diffusion-based models have recently demonstrated strong performance, but their iterative denoising process typically requires many timesteps for each prediction, making inference computationally expensive. In contrast, we leverage Flow Matching (FM) to learn a velocity field defined by an Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE), enabling efficient generation of 3D pose samples with only a few integration steps. We propose a novel generative pose estimation framework, FMPose3D, that formulates 3D pose estimation as a conditional distribution transport problem. It continuously transports samples from a standard Gaussian prior to the distribution of plausible 3D poses conditioned only on 2D inputs. Although ODE trajectories are deterministic, FMPose3D naturally generates various pose hypotheses by sampling different noise seeds. To obtain a single accurate prediction from those hypotheses, we further introduce a Reprojection-based Posterior Expectation Aggregation (RPEA) module, which approximates the Bayesian posterior expectation over 3D hypotheses. FMPose3D surpasses existing methods on the widely used human pose estimation benchmarks Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP, and further achieves state-of-the-art performance on the 3D animal pose datasets Animal3D and CtrlAni3D, demonstrating strong performance across both 3D pose domains. The code is available at https://github.com/AdaptiveMotorControlLab/FMPose3D.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 5

Steering Rectified Flow Models in the Vector Field for Controlled Image Generation

Diffusion models (DMs) excel in photorealism, image editing, and solving inverse problems, aided by classifier-free guidance and image inversion techniques. However, rectified flow models (RFMs) remain underexplored for these tasks. Existing DM-based methods often require additional training, lack generalization to pretrained latent models, underperform, and demand significant computational resources due to extensive backpropagation through ODE solvers and inversion processes. In this work, we first develop a theoretical and empirical understanding of the vector field dynamics of RFMs in efficiently guiding the denoising trajectory. Our findings reveal that we can navigate the vector field in a deterministic and gradient-free manner. Utilizing this property, we propose FlowChef, which leverages the vector field to steer the denoising trajectory for controlled image generation tasks, facilitated by gradient skipping. FlowChef is a unified framework for controlled image generation that, for the first time, simultaneously addresses classifier guidance, linear inverse problems, and image editing without the need for extra training, inversion, or intensive backpropagation. Finally, we perform extensive evaluations and show that FlowChef significantly outperforms baselines in terms of performance, memory, and time requirements, achieving new state-of-the-art results. Project Page: https://flowchef.github.io.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 27, 2024 8

Equivariant Eikonal Neural Networks: Grid-Free, Scalable Travel-Time Prediction on Homogeneous Spaces

We introduce Equivariant Neural Eikonal Solvers, a novel framework that integrates Equivariant Neural Fields (ENFs) with Neural Eikonal Solvers. Our approach employs a single neural field where a unified shared backbone is conditioned on signal-specific latent variables - represented as point clouds in a Lie group - to model diverse Eikonal solutions. The ENF integration ensures equivariant mapping from these latent representations to the solution field, delivering three key benefits: enhanced representation efficiency through weight-sharing, robust geometric grounding, and solution steerability. This steerability allows transformations applied to the latent point cloud to induce predictable, geometrically meaningful modifications in the resulting Eikonal solution. By coupling these steerable representations with Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs), our framework accurately models Eikonal travel-time solutions while generalizing to arbitrary Riemannian manifolds with regular group actions. This includes homogeneous spaces such as Euclidean, position-orientation, spherical, and hyperbolic manifolds. We validate our approach through applications in seismic travel-time modeling of 2D, 3D, and spherical benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate superior performance, scalability, adaptability, and user controllability compared to existing Neural Operator-based Eikonal solver methods.

PhysiFormer: Learning to Simulate Mechanics in World Space

We present PhysiFormer, a diffusion transformer for physically-plausible 3D object motion. Unlike video world models that operate in view-dependent pixel space, PhysiFormer represents objects as 3D meshes expressed in world coordinates. Given the initial vertex positions and velocities, as well as object material type, rigid or elastic, the model samples future vertex trajectories. While related neural physics approaches build on ad-hoc latent spaces or explicitly enforce rigidity and causality, PhysiFormer shows that excellent results can be obtained without any such inductive biases, by casting vertex trajectory prediction as a single denoising diffusion process directly in world coordinates. The probabilistic formulation captures uncertainty in the learned dynamics, enabling diverse plausible futures from initial conditions, making this framework potentially useful for applications with unobserved uncertainty. The model features attention factorised over time, space, and objects for efficiency, enabling permutation-invariant multi-object reasoning without needing explicit object encoding. Trained on over 100k simulated trajectories, PhysiFormer generates rigid and elastic mechanics, and generalises to mixed-material settings, unseen real-world geometries, and larger object counts. It substantially outperforms autoregressive baselines in trajectory accuracy, rigidity preservation, and momentum-based physical consistency. Our results position coordinate-space diffusion as a promising step toward view-invariant, geometry-aware world modelling for robotics, graphics, and physical design. Visualisations, code, and models are available at https://yimingc9.github.io/physiformer.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 24 1

Vision-Only Robot Navigation in a Neural Radiance World

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for the representation of natural, complex 3D scenes. NeRFs represent continuous volumetric density and RGB values in a neural network, and generate photo-realistic images from unseen camera viewpoints through ray tracing. We propose an algorithm for navigating a robot through a 3D environment represented as a NeRF using only an on-board RGB camera for localization. We assume the NeRF for the scene has been pre-trained offline, and the robot's objective is to navigate through unoccupied space in the NeRF to reach a goal pose. We introduce a trajectory optimization algorithm that avoids collisions with high-density regions in the NeRF based on a discrete time version of differential flatness that is amenable to constraining the robot's full pose and control inputs. We also introduce an optimization based filtering method to estimate 6DoF pose and velocities for the robot in the NeRF given only an onboard RGB camera. We combine the trajectory planner with the pose filter in an online replanning loop to give a vision-based robot navigation pipeline. We present simulation results with a quadrotor robot navigating through a jungle gym environment, the inside of a church, and Stonehenge using only an RGB camera. We also demonstrate an omnidirectional ground robot navigating through the church, requiring it to reorient to fit through the narrow gap. Videos of this work can be found at https://mikh3x4.github.io/nerf-navigation/ .

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 30, 2021

FISC: A Fluid-Inspired Framework for Decentralized and Scalable Swarm Control

Achieving scalable coordination in large robotic swarms is often constrained by reliance on inter-agent communication, which introduces latency, bandwidth limitations, and vulnerability to failure. To address this gap, a decentralized approach for outer-loop control of large multi-agent systems based on the paradigm of how a fluid moves through a volume is proposed and evaluated. A relationship between fundamental fluidic element properties and individual robotic agent states is developed such that the corresponding swarm "flows" through a space, akin to a fluid when forced via a pressure boundary condition. By ascribing fluid-like properties to subsets of agents, the swarm evolves collectively while maintaining desirable structure and coherence without explicit communication of agent states within or outside of the swarm. The approach is evaluated using simulations involving O(10^3) quadcopter agents and compared against Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) solutions for a converging-diverging domain. Quantitative agreement between swarm-derived and CFD fields is assessed using Root-Mean-Square Error (RMSE), yielding normalized errors of 0.15-0.9 for velocity, 0.61-0.98 for density, 0-0.937 for pressure. These results demonstrate the feasibility of treating large robotic swarms as continuum systems that retain the macroscopic structure derived from first principles, providing a basis for scalable and decentralized control.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 30

Coherent Structures Governing Transport at Turbulent Interfaces

In an experiment on a turbulent jet, we detect interfacial turbulent layers in a frame that moves, on average, along with the \tnti. This significantly prolongs the observation time of scalar and velocity structures and enables the measurement of two types of Lagrangian coherent structures. One structure, the finite-time Lyapunov field (FTLE), quantifies advective transport barriers of fluid parcels while the other structure highlights barriers of diffusive momentum transport. These two complementary structures depend on large-scale and small-scale motion and are therefore associated with the growth of the turbulent region through engulfment or nibbling, respectively. We detect the \tnti\ from cluster analysis, where we divide the measured scalar field into four clusters. Not only the \tnti\ can be found this way, but also the next, internal, turbulent-turbulent interface. Conditional averages show that these interfaces are correlated with barriers of advective and diffusive transport when the Lagrangian integration time is smaller than the integral time scale. Diffusive structures decorrelate faster since they have a smaller timescale. Conditional averages of these structures at internal turbulent-turbulent interfaces show the same pattern with a more pronounced jump at the interface indicative of a shear layer. This is quite an unexpected outcome, as the internal interface is now defined not by the presence or absence of vorticity, but by conditional vorticity corresponding to two uniform concentration zones. The long-time diffusive momentum flux along Lagrangian paths represents the growth of the turbulent flow into the irrotational domain, a direct demonstration of nibbling. The diffusive flux parallel to the \tnti\ appears to be concentrated in a diffusive superlayer whose width is comparable with the Taylor microscale, which is relatively invariant in time.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 17, 2024

VeCoR -- Velocity Contrastive Regularization for Flow Matching

Flow Matching (FM) has recently emerged as a principled and efficient alternative to diffusion models. Standard FM encourages the learned velocity field to follow a target direction; however, it may accumulate errors along the trajectory and drive samples off the data manifold, leading to perceptual degradation, especially in lightweight or low-step configurations. To enhance stability and generalization, we extend FM into a balanced attract-repel scheme that provides explicit guidance on both "where to go" and "where not to go." To be formal, we propose Velocity Contrastive Regularization (VeCoR), a complementary training scheme for flow-based generative modeling that augments the standard FM objective with contrastive, two-sided supervision. VeCoR not only aligns the predicted velocity with a stable reference direction (positive supervision) but also pushes it away from inconsistent, off-manifold directions (negative supervision). This contrastive formulation transforms FM from a purely attractive, one-sided objective into a two-sided training signal, regularizing trajectory evolution and improving perceptual fidelity across datasets and backbones. On ImageNet-1K 256times256, VeCoR yields 22\% and 35\% relative FID reductions on SiT-XL/2 and REPA-SiT-XL/2 backbones, respectively, and achieves further FID gains (32\% relative) on MS-COCO text-to-image generation, demonstrating consistent improvements in stability, convergence, and image quality, particularly in low-step and lightweight settings. Project page: https://p458732.github.io/VeCoR_Project_Page/

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 24, 2025

FinePhys: Fine-grained Human Action Generation by Explicitly Incorporating Physical Laws for Effective Skeletal Guidance

Despite significant advances in video generation, synthesizing physically plausible human actions remains a persistent challenge, particularly in modeling fine-grained semantics and complex temporal dynamics. For instance, generating gymnastics routines such as "switch leap with 0.5 turn" poses substantial difficulties for current methods, often yielding unsatisfactory results. To bridge this gap, we propose FinePhys, a Fine-grained human action generation framework that incorporates Physics to obtain effective skeletal guidance. Specifically, FinePhys first estimates 2D poses in an online manner and then performs 2D-to-3D dimension lifting via in-context learning. To mitigate the instability and limited interpretability of purely data-driven 3D poses, we further introduce a physics-based motion re-estimation module governed by Euler-Lagrange equations, calculating joint accelerations via bidirectional temporal updating. The physically predicted 3D poses are then fused with data-driven ones, offering multi-scale 2D heatmap guidance for the diffusion process. Evaluated on three fine-grained action subsets from FineGym (FX-JUMP, FX-TURN, and FX-SALTO), FinePhys significantly outperforms competitive baselines. Comprehensive qualitative results further demonstrate FinePhys's ability to generate more natural and plausible fine-grained human actions.

  • 6 authors
·
May 19, 2025 1

Controllable Longer Image Animation with Diffusion Models

Generating realistic animated videos from static images is an important area of research in computer vision. Methods based on physical simulation and motion prediction have achieved notable advances, but they are often limited to specific object textures and motion trajectories, failing to exhibit highly complex environments and physical dynamics. In this paper, we introduce an open-domain controllable image animation method using motion priors with video diffusion models. Our method achieves precise control over the direction and speed of motion in the movable region by extracting the motion field information from videos and learning moving trajectories and strengths. Current pretrained video generation models are typically limited to producing very short videos, typically less than 30 frames. In contrast, we propose an efficient long-duration video generation method based on noise reschedule specifically tailored for image animation tasks, facilitating the creation of videos over 100 frames in length while maintaining consistency in content scenery and motion coordination. Specifically, we decompose the denoise process into two distinct phases: the shaping of scene contours and the refining of motion details. Then we reschedule the noise to control the generated frame sequences maintaining long-distance noise correlation. We conducted extensive experiments with 10 baselines, encompassing both commercial tools and academic methodologies, which demonstrate the superiority of our method. Our project page: https://wangqiang9.github.io/Controllable.github.io/

  • 5 authors
·
May 27, 2024

A 5-Point Minimal Solver for Event Camera Relative Motion Estimation

Event-based cameras are ideal for line-based motion estimation, since they predominantly respond to edges in the scene. However, accurately determining the camera displacement based on events continues to be an open problem. This is because line feature extraction and dynamics estimation are tightly coupled when using event cameras, and no precise model is currently available for describing the complex structures generated by lines in the space-time volume of events. We solve this problem by deriving the correct non-linear parametrization of such manifolds, which we term eventails, and demonstrate its application to event-based linear motion estimation, with known rotation from an Inertial Measurement Unit. Using this parametrization, we introduce a novel minimal 5-point solver that jointly estimates line parameters and linear camera velocity projections, which can be fused into a single, averaged linear velocity when considering multiple lines. We demonstrate on both synthetic and real data that our solver generates more stable relative motion estimates than other methods while capturing more inliers than clustering based on spatio-temporal planes. In particular, our method consistently achieves a 100% success rate in estimating linear velocity where existing closed-form solvers only achieve between 23% and 70%. The proposed eventails contribute to a better understanding of spatio-temporal event-generated geometries and we thus believe it will become a core building block of future event-based motion estimation algorithms.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 29, 2023

Steady-Forcing: Balancing Spatial Persistence and Motion Continuity in Long-Horizon Nature Video Diffusion

Autoregressive video diffusion models enable streaming generation but often degrade over long rollouts: static scene layouts drift, while mechanisms that improve spatial stability tend to suppress motion, causing natural flows such as water, fire, or smoke to stagnate. We study this stability-motion trade-off in fixed-camera long-horizon nature video generation, where the two failure modes can be more clearly separated than in moving-camera settings. We propose Steady-Forcing, a memory and training framework combining a persistent visual anchor (V-Sink), an exponential moving-average motion memory (EMA-Sink), block-relative temporal encoding, periodic cache purification, and distillation from a Wan2.1-14B teacher with motion-rewarded priors under task-focused configurations. Together, these components are designed to preserve background identity while sustaining visually plausible fluid dynamics over multi-minute autoregressive rollouts. Evaluations across seven baselines show that Steady-Forcing improves long horizon background consistency and imaging quality, while a blind user study indicates stronger perceived stability and motion continuity. The benchmark evaluation further suggest that generic VBench aggregate scores under-penalize fixed-camera artifacts as well as rewarding drift-induced optical flow as Dynamic Degree while not directly penalizing texture hardening or flow stagnation - motivating future task-specific benchmarks for static-camera nature-flow evaluation. Project page: https://minar09.github.io/steadyforcing/

BioMoDiffuse: Physics-Guided Biomechanical Diffusion for Controllable and Authentic Human Motion Synthesis

Human motion generation holds significant promise in fields such as animation, film production, and robotics. However, existing methods often fail to produce physically plausible movements that adhere to biomechanical principles. While recent autoregressive and diffusion models have improved visual quality, they frequently overlook essential biodynamic features, such as muscle activation patterns and joint coordination, leading to motions that either violate physical laws or lack controllability. This paper introduces BioMoDiffuse, a novel biomechanics-aware diffusion framework that addresses these limitations. It features three key innovations: (1) A lightweight biodynamic network that integrates muscle electromyography (EMG) signals and kinematic features with acceleration constraints, (2) A physics-guided diffusion process that incorporates real-time biomechanical verification via modified Euler-Lagrange equations, and (3) A decoupled control mechanism that allows independent regulation of motion speed and semantic context. We also propose a set of comprehensive evaluation protocols that combines traditional metrics (FID, R-precision, etc.) with new biomechanical criteria (smoothness, foot sliding, floating, etc.). Our approach bridges the gap between data-driven motion synthesis and biomechanical authenticity, establishing new benchmarks for physically accurate motion generation.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 8, 2025

Particle-Grid Neural Dynamics for Learning Deformable Object Models from RGB-D Videos

Modeling the dynamics of deformable objects is challenging due to their diverse physical properties and the difficulty of estimating states from limited visual information. We address these challenges with a neural dynamics framework that combines object particles and spatial grids in a hybrid representation. Our particle-grid model captures global shape and motion information while predicting dense particle movements, enabling the modeling of objects with varied shapes and materials. Particles represent object shapes, while the spatial grid discretizes the 3D space to ensure spatial continuity and enhance learning efficiency. Coupled with Gaussian Splattings for visual rendering, our framework achieves a fully learning-based digital twin of deformable objects and generates 3D action-conditioned videos. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our model learns the dynamics of diverse objects -- such as ropes, cloths, stuffed animals, and paper bags -- from sparse-view RGB-D recordings of robot-object interactions, while also generalizing at the category level to unseen instances. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art learning-based and physics-based simulators, particularly in scenarios with limited camera views. Furthermore, we showcase the utility of our learned models in model-based planning, enabling goal-conditioned object manipulation across a range of tasks. The project page is available at https://kywind.github.io/pgnd .

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 18, 2025

Deep Stochastic Kinematic Models for Probabilistic Motion Forecasting in Traffic

In trajectory forecasting tasks for traffic, future output trajectories can be computed by advancing the ego vehicle's state with predicted actions according to a kinematics model. By unrolling predicted trajectories via time integration and models of kinematic dynamics, predicted trajectories should not only be kinematically feasible but also relate uncertainty from one timestep to the next. While current works in probabilistic prediction do incorporate kinematic priors for mean trajectory prediction, variance is often left as a learnable parameter, despite uncertainty in one time step being inextricably tied to uncertainty in the previous time step. In this paper, we show simple and differentiable analytical approximations describing the relationship between variance at one timestep and that at the next with the kinematic bicycle model. These approximations can be easily incorporated with negligible additional overhead into any existing trajectory forecasting framework utilizing probabilistic predictions, whether it is autoregressive or one-shot prediction. In our results, we find that encoding the relationship between variance across timesteps works especially well in unoptimal settings, such as with small or noisy datasets. We observe up to a 50% performance boost in partial dataset settings and up to an 8% performance boost in large-scale learning compared to previous kinematic prediction methods on SOTA trajectory forecasting architectures out-of-the-box, with no fine-tuning. In this paper, we show four analytical formulations of probabilistic kinematic priors which can be used for any Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM)-based deep learning models, quantify the error bound on linear approximations applied during trajectory unrolling, and show results to evaluate each formulation in trajectory forecasting.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 3, 2024

ReynoldsFlow: Exquisite Flow Estimation via Reynolds Transport Theorem

Optical flow is a fundamental technique for motion estimation, widely applied in video stabilization, interpolation, and object tracking. Traditional optical flow estimation methods rely on restrictive assumptions like brightness constancy and slow motion constraints. Recent deep learning-based flow estimations require extensive training on large domain-specific datasets, making them computationally demanding. Also, artificial intelligence (AI) advances have enabled deep learning models to take advantage of optical flow as an important feature for object tracking and motion analysis. Since optical flow is commonly encoded in HSV for visualization, its conversion to RGB for neural network processing is nonlinear and may introduce perceptual distortions. These transformations amplify the sensitivity to estimation errors, potentially affecting the predictive accuracy of the networks. To address these challenges that are influential to the performance of downstream network models, we propose Reynolds flow, a novel training-free flow estimation inspired by the Reynolds transport theorem, offering a principled approach to modeling complex motion dynamics. In addition to conventional HSV-based visualization of Reynolds flow, we also introduce an RGB-encoded representation of Reynolds flow designed to improve flow visualization and feature enhancement for neural networks. We evaluated the effectiveness of Reynolds flow in video-based tasks. Experimental results on three benchmarks, tiny object detection on UAVDB, infrared object detection on Anti-UAV, and pose estimation on GolfDB, demonstrate that networks trained with RGB-encoded Reynolds flow achieve SOTA performance, exhibiting improved robustness and efficiency across all tasks.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 6, 2025

H3D-DGS: Exploring Heterogeneous 3D Motion Representation for Deformable 3D Gaussian Splatting

Dynamic scene reconstruction poses a persistent challenge in 3D vision. Deformable 3D Gaussian Splatting has emerged as an effective method for this task, offering real-time rendering and high visual fidelity. This approach decomposes a dynamic scene into a static representation in a canonical space and time-varying scene motion. Scene motion is defined as the collective movement of all Gaussian points, and for compactness, existing approaches commonly adopt implicit neural fields or sparse control points. However, these methods predominantly rely on gradient-based optimization for all motion information. Due to the high degree of freedom, they struggle to converge on real-world datasets exhibiting complex motion. To preserve the compactness of motion representation and address convergence challenges, this paper proposes heterogeneous 3D control points, termed H3D control points, whose attributes are obtained using a hybrid strategy combining optical flow back-projection and gradient-based methods. This design decouples directly observable motion components from those that are geometrically occluded. Specifically, components of 3D motion that project onto the image plane are directly acquired via optical flow back projection, while unobservable portions are refined through gradient-based optimization. Experiments on the Neu3DV and CMU-Panoptic datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art deformable 3D Gaussian splatting techniques. Remarkably, our method converges within just 100 iterations and achieves a per-frame processing speed of 2 seconds on a single NVIDIA RTX 4070 GPU.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 23, 2024

AI CFD Scientist: Toward Open-Ended Computational Fluid Dynamics Discovery with Physics-Aware AI Agents

Recent LLM-based agents have closed substantial portions of the scientific discovery loop in software-only machine-learning research, in chemistry, and in biology. Extending the same loop to high-fidelity physical simulators is harder, because solver completion does not imply physical validity and many failure modes appear only in field-level imagery rather than in solver logs. We present AI CFD Scientist, an open-source AI scientist for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) that, to our knowledge, is the first to span literature-grounded ideation, validated execution, vision-based physics verification, source-code modification, and figure-grounded writing within a single inspectable workflow. Three coupled pathways cover parameter sweeps within a fixed solver, case-local C++ library compilation for new physical models, and open-ended hypothesis search against a reference comparator, all running on OpenFOAM through Foam-Agent. At the center of the framework is a vision-language physics-verification gate that inspects rendered flow fields before any result is accepted, rerun, or written into a manuscript. On five tasks under a shared GPT-5.5 backbone, AI CFD Scientist autonomously discovers a Spalart-Allmaras runtime correction that reduces lower-wall Cf RMSE against DNS by 7.89% on the periodic hill at Reh=5600; under matched LLM cost, two strong general AI-scientist baselines (ARIS, DeepScientist) execute partial CFD workflows but lack the domain-specific validity gates needed to convert runs into defensible scientific claims; and a controlled planted-failure ablation shows that the vision-language gate detects 14 of 16 silent failures missed by solver-level checks. Code, prompts, and run artifacts are released at https://github.com/csml-rpi/cfd-scientist.

DriveMRP: Enhancing Vision-Language Models with Synthetic Motion Data for Motion Risk Prediction

Autonomous driving has seen significant progress, driven by extensive real-world data. However, in long-tail scenarios, accurately predicting the safety of the ego vehicle's future motion remains a major challenge due to uncertainties in dynamic environments and limitations in data coverage. In this work, we aim to explore whether it is possible to enhance the motion risk prediction capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLM) by synthesizing high-risk motion data. Specifically, we introduce a Bird's-Eye View (BEV) based motion simulation method to model risks from three aspects: the ego-vehicle, other vehicles, and the environment. This allows us to synthesize plug-and-play, high-risk motion data suitable for VLM training, which we call DriveMRP-10K. Furthermore, we design a VLM-agnostic motion risk estimation framework, named DriveMRP-Agent. This framework incorporates a novel information injection strategy for global context, ego-vehicle perspective, and trajectory projection, enabling VLMs to effectively reason about the spatial relationships between motion waypoints and the environment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that by fine-tuning with DriveMRP-10K, our DriveMRP-Agent framework can significantly improve the motion risk prediction performance of multiple VLM baselines, with the accident recognition accuracy soaring from 27.13% to 88.03%. Moreover, when tested via zero-shot evaluation on an in-house real-world high-risk motion dataset, DriveMRP-Agent achieves a significant performance leap, boosting the accuracy from base_model's 29.42% to 68.50%, which showcases the strong generalization capabilities of our method in real-world scenarios.

  • 14 authors
·
Jun 28, 2025

Stochastic acceleration in arbitrary astrophysical environments

Turbulent magnetic fields are to some extent a universal feature in astrophysical phenomena. Charged particles that encounter these turbulence get on average accelerated according to the so-called second-order Fermi process. However, in most astrophysical environments there are additional competing processes, such as different kinds of first-order energy changes and particle escape, that effect the resulting momentum distribution of the particles. In this work we provide to our knowledge the first semi-analytical solution of the isotropic steady-state momentum diffusion equation including continuous and catastrophic momentum changes that can be applied to any arbitrary astrophysical system of interest. Here, we adopt that the assigned magnetic turbulence is constrained on a finite range and the particle flux vanishes beyond these boundaries. Consequently, we show that the so-called pile-up bump -- that has for some special cases long been established -- is a universal feature of stochastic acceleration that emerges around the momentum chi_{rm eq} where acceleration and continuous loss are in equilibrium if the particle's residence time in the system is sufficient at chi_{rm eq}. In general, the impact of continuous and catastrophic momentum changes plays a crucial role in the shape of the steady-state momentum distribution of the accelerated particles, where simplified unbroken power-law approximations are often not adequate.

  • 2 authors
·
Nov 22, 2024

Motion-I2V: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Generation with Explicit Motion Modeling

We introduce Motion-I2V, a novel framework for consistent and controllable image-to-video generation (I2V). In contrast to previous methods that directly learn the complicated image-to-video mapping, Motion-I2V factorizes I2V into two stages with explicit motion modeling. For the first stage, we propose a diffusion-based motion field predictor, which focuses on deducing the trajectories of the reference image's pixels. For the second stage, we propose motion-augmented temporal attention to enhance the limited 1-D temporal attention in video latent diffusion models. This module can effectively propagate reference image's feature to synthesized frames with the guidance of predicted trajectories from the first stage. Compared with existing methods, Motion-I2V can generate more consistent videos even at the presence of large motion and viewpoint variation. By training a sparse trajectory ControlNet for the first stage, Motion-I2V can support users to precisely control motion trajectories and motion regions with sparse trajectory and region annotations. This offers more controllability of the I2V process than solely relying on textual instructions. Additionally, Motion-I2V's second stage naturally supports zero-shot video-to-video translation. Both qualitative and quantitative comparisons demonstrate the advantages of Motion-I2V over prior approaches in consistent and controllable image-to-video generation.

  • 12 authors
·
Jan 29, 2024 8

Physics-Informed Image Restoration via Progressive PDE Integration

Motion blur, caused by relative movement between camera and scene during exposure, significantly degrades image quality and impairs downstream computer vision tasks such as object detection, tracking, and recognition in dynamic environments. While deep learning-based motion deblurring methods have achieved remarkable progress, existing approaches face fundamental challenges in capturing the long-range spatial dependencies inherent in motion blur patterns. Traditional convolutional methods rely on limited receptive fields and require extremely deep networks to model global spatial relationships. These limitations motivate the need for alternative approaches that incorporate physical priors to guide feature evolution during restoration. In this paper, we propose a progressive training framework that integrates physics-informed PDE dynamics into state-of-the-art restoration architectures. By leveraging advection-diffusion equations to model feature evolution, our approach naturally captures the directional flow characteristics of motion blur while enabling principled global spatial modeling. Our PDE-enhanced deblurring models achieve superior restoration quality with minimal overhead, adding only approximately 1\% to inference GMACs while providing consistent improvements in perceptual quality across multiple state-of-the-art architectures. Comprehensive experiments on standard motion deblurring benchmarks demonstrate that our physics-informed approach improves PSNR and SSIM significantly across four diverse architectures, including FFTformer, NAFNet, Restormer, and Stripformer. These results validate that incorporating mathematical physics principles through PDE-based global layers can enhance deep learning-based image restoration, establishing a promising direction for physics-informed neural network design in computer vision applications.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 9, 2025

Open-source Flux Transport (OFT). I. HipFT -- High-performance Flux Transport

Global solar photospheric magnetic maps play a critical role in solar and heliospheric physics research. Routine magnetograph measurements of the field occur only along the Sun-Earth line, leaving the far-side of the Sun unobserved. Surface Flux Transport (SFT) models attempt to mitigate this by modeling the surface evolution of the field. While such models have long been established in the community (with several releasing public full-Sun maps), none are open source. The Open Source Flux Transport (OFT) model seeks to fill this gap by providing an open and user-extensible SFT model that also builds on the knowledge of previous models with updated numerical and data acquisition/assimilation methods along with additional user-defined features. In this first of a series of papers on OFT, we introduce its computational core: the High-performance Flux Transport (HipFT) code (github.com/predsci/hipft). HipFT implements advection, diffusion, and data assimilation in a modular design that supports a variety of flow models and options. It can compute multiple realizations in a single run across model parameters to create ensembles of maps for uncertainty quantification and is high-performance through the use of multi-CPU and multi-GPU parallelism. HipFT is designed to enable users to easily write extensions, enhancing its flexibility and adaptability. We describe HipFT's model features, validations of its numerical methods, performance of its parallel and GPU-accelerated code implementation, analysis/post-processing options, and example use cases.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 10, 2025

Meta Flow Matching: Integrating Vector Fields on the Wasserstein Manifold

Numerous biological and physical processes can be modeled as systems of interacting entities evolving continuously over time, e.g. the dynamics of communicating cells or physical particles. Learning the dynamics of such systems is essential for predicting the temporal evolution of populations across novel samples and unseen environments. Flow-based models allow for learning these dynamics at the population level - they model the evolution of the entire distribution of samples. However, current flow-based models are limited to a single initial population and a set of predefined conditions which describe different dynamics. We argue that multiple processes in natural sciences have to be represented as vector fields on the Wasserstein manifold of probability densities. That is, the change of the population at any moment in time depends on the population itself due to the interactions between samples. In particular, this is crucial for personalized medicine where the development of diseases and their respective treatment response depends on the microenvironment of cells specific to each patient. We propose Meta Flow Matching (MFM), a practical approach to integrating along these vector fields on the Wasserstein manifold by amortizing the flow model over the initial populations. Namely, we embed the population of samples using a Graph Neural Network (GNN) and use these embeddings to train a Flow Matching model. This gives MFM the ability to generalize over the initial distributions unlike previously proposed methods. We demonstrate the ability of MFM to improve prediction of individual treatment responses on a large scale multi-patient single-cell drug screen dataset.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 26, 2024 2

Towards Universal Mesh Movement Networks

Solving complex Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) accurately and efficiently is an essential and challenging problem in all scientific and engineering disciplines. Mesh movement methods provide the capability to improve the accuracy of the numerical solution without increasing the overall mesh degree of freedom count. Conventional sophisticated mesh movement methods are extremely expensive and struggle to handle scenarios with complex boundary geometries. However, existing learning-based methods require re-training from scratch given a different PDE type or boundary geometry, which limits their applicability, and also often suffer from robustness issues in the form of inverted elements. In this paper, we introduce the Universal Mesh Movement Network (UM2N), which -- once trained -- can be applied in a non-intrusive, zero-shot manner to move meshes with different size distributions and structures, for solvers applicable to different PDE types and boundary geometries. UM2N consists of a Graph Transformer (GT) encoder for extracting features and a Graph Attention Network (GAT) based decoder for moving the mesh. We evaluate our method on advection and Navier-Stokes based examples, as well as a real-world tsunami simulation case. Our method outperforms existing learning-based mesh movement methods in terms of the benchmarks described above. In comparison to the conventional sophisticated Monge-Amp\`ere PDE-solver based method, our approach not only significantly accelerates mesh movement, but also proves effective in scenarios where the conventional method fails. Our project page is at https://erizmr.github.io/UM2N/.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 29, 2024

The Principles of Diffusion Models

This monograph presents the core principles that have guided the development of diffusion models, tracing their origins and showing how diverse formulations arise from shared mathematical ideas. Diffusion modeling starts by defining a forward process that gradually corrupts data into noise, linking the data distribution to a simple prior through a continuum of intermediate distributions. The goal is to learn a reverse process that transforms noise back into data while recovering the same intermediates. We describe three complementary views. The variational view, inspired by variational autoencoders, sees diffusion as learning to remove noise step by step. The score-based view, rooted in energy-based modeling, learns the gradient of the evolving data distribution, indicating how to nudge samples toward more likely regions. The flow-based view, related to normalizing flows, treats generation as following a smooth path that moves samples from noise to data under a learned velocity field. These perspectives share a common backbone: a time-dependent velocity field whose flow transports a simple prior to the data. Sampling then amounts to solving a differential equation that evolves noise into data along a continuous trajectory. On this foundation, the monograph discusses guidance for controllable generation, efficient numerical solvers, and diffusion-motivated flow-map models that learn direct mappings between arbitrary times. It provides a conceptual and mathematically grounded understanding of diffusion models for readers with basic deep-learning knowledge.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 23, 2025 3