World action models (WAMs) have recently gained increasing attention as a framework for jointly modeling scene evolution and ego actions in autonomous driving. Most existing WAMs learn scene dynamics in pixel space by combining a video-generation backbone for future-observation prediction with an action head for ego-trajectory prediction. Pixels, however, provide only an indirect representation of these dynamics: they entangle geometry and motion with appearance, texture, and illumination, forcing the model to infer three-dimensional transformations from two-dimensional observations. We argue that geometry, represented by point clouds, offers a more natural state space for driving because it explicitly captures spatial structure and the rigid and non-rigid transformations that govern scene evolution while directly aligning with the space in which driving actions are executed. Building on this insight, we introduce \textbf{GeoWAM}, a visual geometry world action model for autonomous driving. Rather than predicting future images, GeoWAM is pretrained to forecast future scene geometry, yielding representations that jointly encode spatial structure and temporal evolution. A geometry-conditioned action head then leverages these learned geometric dynamics to predict future ego trajectories. Extensive open-loop and closed-loop evaluations show that visual geometry world modeling yields substantially stronger driving policies than image-based alternatives, establishing future-geometry prediction as an effective pretraining objective for autonomous driving.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23486
Recovering an executable parametric CAD program from an observed object is fundamentally ambiguous, because the same final geometry can result from different construction procedures. We study this problem from four types of input: natural-language descriptions, rendered images, point clouds, and STEP/B-Rep geometry. MIRAGE-CAD maps each input to a shared construction representation and mediates program generation through an explicit construction-plan interface. The resulting Python CAD code is executed by an OpenCASCADE kernel to build the solid and export it as STEP. On 2,500 held-out queries per modality, the system achieves 55.4-70.0% build success and 52.3-66.2% STEP export success without retrieval at inference. Controlled comparisons show that strong reconstruction does not depend on expressing the construction representation as text: a decoder conditioned directly on the continuous representation also reconstructs strongly, while an exposure-matched plan-based decoder shows no detected material loss in per-part geometric fidelity. The explicit plan instead provides a readable and separately measurable intermediate representation whose agreement with the reference construction is informative about downstream execution success. Finally, we show that executable validity, geometric fidelity, and parametric responsiveness can diverge substantially and should therefore be evaluated separately.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28669
Dowker homology is a topological tool that may be used to analyze the relative position of two point clouds living in a common space. We investigate whether Dowker homology captures sentence similarity information by treating the embeddings of the tokens that constitute a sentence pair as a pair of point clouds in the latent space of a transformer model, using both models that have and have not been fine-tuned for sentence similarity. We find that Dowker homology captures sentence similarity information, as measured by regressing Dowker homology features onto ground-truth similarity scores, and that it can be used for visual inspection of similarity data and models. In an attempt to make Dowker homology readily applicable, we derive from it single-number summaries that we expect to capture sentence similarity directly. These turn out to work reasonably well, but without outperforming standard sentence similarity measures based on established pooling methods.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22909
We present SiZeUp, a fast and scalable approach for constructing large-scale 3D urban proxy models directly from calibrated oblique aerial imagery. Our method adopts a height-from-footprint representation, reducing 3D building abstraction to a low-dimensional optimization problem in which building footprints are extruded by a single height parameter. To enable efficient and robust height estimation, we introduce an ordinal depth consistency loss that enforces agreement between the relative depth ordering of rendered proxies and depth priors predicted by a monocular depth model. This is realized through a differentiable renderer that maps parametric building proxies into multi-view depth images, allowing gradients to be propagated from depth supervision to building heights. Our ordinal formulation produces stable optimization in practice and avoids explicit feature matching or dense point cloud reconstruction. Rather than relying on metric depth, which can be unreliable under monocular scale ambiguity, our ordinal depth consistency loss operates on relative depths, providing a more reliable signal across views. Combined with an efficient dynamic view selection, our approach achieves a 23-52$\times$ speedup over state-of-the-art proxy reconstruction pipelines while maintaining comparable proxy-level coverage and volume consistency, making it well suited for large-scale urban modeling tasks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22821
HyperbolicCD pioneered hyperbolic geometry for point cloud completion by replacing the Euclidean Chamfer distance with arcosh(1+alpha||x-y||^2), but the reported gains are modest (3-7% Chamfer reduction across SeedFormer, PointAttN and PMP-Net backbones on PCN and ShapeNet-55). We argue the bottleneck lies elsewhere: the loss is hyperbolic but the encoder it back-propagates through is Euclidean, so the position-dependent supervision of the loss is averaged away by the chain rule before it reaches the parameters. We call this a cross-geometry mismatch, and make it testable through two model-agnostic indicators, feature-loss correlation r_FL and effective gradient utilisation u_G. On an SVDFormer backbone trained with HyperbolicCD's loss alone we measure (r_FL, u_G) = (0.68, 39%). We propose Hyper^2, a dual-space consistency framework that extends HyperbolicCD by reusing the identical arcosh(1+alpha d^2) functional form as a positional bias on the refinement attention (a hyperbolic distance encoding), paired with HyperbolicCD's hyperbolic Chamfer loss under a single shared curvature alpha. Both operators are O(N log N) scalar non-linearities on Euclidean distances and together add only ~1.6% FLOPs over SVDFormer. Hyper^2 delivers -22.9% Chamfer on ShapeNet-55 over SVDFormer (well above the 13.2% linear sum of the -12.0% loss-only and -1.2% encoding-only single-space ablations) and -37.5% on the 21 unseen ShapeNet-34 categories. The two indicators remain essentially flat for any single-space configuration but jump together to (0.95, 87%) only when both encoder and loss are hyperbolic, supporting the claim that geometric consistency across encoder and loss, rather than either operator alone, is what enables hyperbolic supervision in point cloud completion. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22238
Craniosynostosis severity analysis increasingly relies on statistical shape models (SSMs) to quantify cranial morphology, but most existing workflows depend on computed tomography or heavily curated three-dimensional (3D) photographs. Raw clinical 3D photographs provide a radiation-free and repeatable alternative, yet often contain shoulders, hands, hair, clothing, scanner noise, and incomplete boundaries that corrupt correspondences. We introduce the Template-constrained Robust Artifact-aware Correspondence Estimation (TRACE) framework, an unsupervised method for constructing SSMs directly from artifact-contaminated clinical 3D head photographs. TRACE predicts sparse anatomically corresponding head-surface control points from the raw point cloud, refines them through a coarse-to-fine Surface-Aware Deformation cascade, and uses thin-plate spline warping to deform a clean template mesh into a subject-specific head reconstruction. This template-constrained formulation keeps dense correspondences on clinically relevant head anatomy while suppressing non-head artifacts. The correspondence module is decoupled from the point-cloud encoder, enabling the same deformation pipeline to be paired with different backbones, including PointNet, DGCNN, and Point Transformer V3. Across all backbones, TRACE substantially improves surface sampling, topology preservation, and shape-model quality over prior SSM methods, providing a scalable foundation for photograph-based craniosynostosis shape analysis and a framework that may extend to other artifact-contaminated surface scans when an appropriate clean template is available.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22131
Graph-based point cloud registration achieves high robustness by identifying geometrically consistent correspondence sets, but constructing second-order compatibility graphs and enumerating candidate cliques remain compute- and memory-intensive. This work presents FlashReg, a GPU-oriented correspondence-to-pose estimator that avoids materializing the dense scored second-order graph. Its Fast First- and Second-Order Graph (FFSOG) construction builds a capacity-bounded sparse second-order graph directly from the binary first-order graph. A dataflow-optimized three-node clique (3-clique) search then selects pivots from compact per-row candidate pools and enumerates triples through sorted sparse-neighborhood intersections. Across indoor and outdoor benchmarks, FlashReg reduces correspondence-to-pose latency by 2--3x relative to TurboReg at comparable registration recall, while using about 50% of its peak allocated tensor memory on an embedded GPU. These results make FlashReg suitable as a high-throughput registration backend within onboard perception pipelines.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21804
Recently, open-vocabulary zero-shot 3D scene understanding using vision foundation models has emerged as a promising alternative to data-intensive supervised methods. However, deploying these models in real-world scenarios is severely hindered by their inability to efficiently handle streaming RGB-D inputs and their inherent vulnerability to noise 2D segmentation masks. To address these critical limitations, we propose Stream3Dv2, a novel training-free framework designed for robust streaming 3D perception. Stream3Dv2 processes sequential data through an original nested local-to-historical architecture, capturing multi-view consistency while circumventing the high computational overhead so as to support timely responses. At its core, we introduce a comprehensive geometric-semantic fusion mechanism that resolves geometric noise and semantic ambiguity by explicitly utilizing semantic guidance and formulating 3D segmentation as solving point-and-set merging and partitioning problems. Furthermore, we present an innovative manifold-distance-based point cloud refinement strategy. This approach leverages local manifold graphs for point-to-manifold optimization that mitigates the boundary delineation failures caused by Euclidean-distance metrics, and employs geometric bounding boxes to dynamically activate and update historical instances for achieving rapid manifold-to-manifold refinement. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate that Stream3Dv2 consistently outperforms existing baselines in foundational open-vocabulary streaming 3D segmentation and detection. Finally, we show that integrating our framework with an LLM-based agent enables advanced language-driven 3D scene understanding, underscoring its potential for open-world embodied intelligence. Code will be updated at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21136
We present a vision-only state estimation system for X-configuration quadcopters equipped with a canonical stereo camera pair and no inertial sensors. The system operates entirely in the body frame, requiring only synchronised stereo images and motor thrust commands. A continuous-discrete extended Kalman filter on a composite manifold state $\langle SE(3), \mathbb{R}^3, \ldots \rangle$ maintains estimates of body-frame pose, velocity, angular velocity, gravity, and disturbances, using stationary scene points as implicit inertial references. Feature points are detected (FAST, Shi-Tomasi), tracked temporally (SSD, Lucas-Kanade) and matched across cameras (NCC), with search regions predicted from filter-derived pose and point uncertainty. Chi-squared gating on the normalised innovation admits only stationary points to the filter. The system also produces a sparse 3D point cloud carrying per-point position, velocity and joint covariance. These come from a 4-view (two stereo pairs at two timestamps) full bundle adjustment that jointly estimates position and velocity from stereo disparity and temporal parallax, with the filter-derived relative pose as a prior. Feature points in the EKF do not enter the solver; their information is reflected through the pose prior. Point cloud density is spatially adaptive: an external focus point directs allocation, producing dense coverage in the region of attention and sparse coverage elsewhere. The output is a body-frame state estimate, a calibrated pose change, and a sparse scene flow. It is intended as a measurement source for a downstream world model anchored in the current body frame, without dependence on GPS, IMU, or any world-frame infrastructure, though the architecture accommodates their future integration.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20891
State-of-the-art 3D reconstruction models, whether from visual, range, or both, tend to underperform on thin objects. This is partially due to the small amount of space such objects occupy in RGB images and in 3D point clouds. To test the extent of their errors, we collected the first thin object dataset comprising of synchronized RGB images, depth maps, and tactile response maps, where each frame is associated with inertial measurements, camera pose and calibration, and groundtruth depth and segmentation maps obtained from laser scanning of thin objects. We hypothesize that tactile data can aid in the reconstruction of thin objects as their response maps provide local shape and deformation information. Our dataset, termed VisTa3D, comprises of 387 scenes covering 70 thin objects over 17 environments. We benchmarked current 3D reconstruction models on VisTa3D and found that, indeed, they exhibit low fidelity on thin objects. To test if tactile data can help, we introduce the first visual-range-tactile 3D reconstruction model as a baseline. Code and data: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20740
While three-dimensional (3D) point clouds are widely used in civil engineering, mainstream LiDAR systems such as Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) are physically constrained to laboratory environments. Since their laser spot size typically exceeds the width of microcracks, the beam physically bridges over voids, rendering TLS unsuitable for fine-scale defect analysis. Alternatively, close-range photogrammetry utilising Structure-from-Motion (SfM) and Multi-View Stereo (MVS) algorithms offers a solution for testing highly tortuous materials, and its utility at fine-scale remains underexplored. This study adapts photogrammetric workflows specifically for rubberised concrete (RuC), a sustainable composite exhibiting high ductility and complex fracture morphologies. High-resolution image sets were captured using a Canon DSLR and an iPhone 16 to generate dense 3D models. Comparisons revealed that the DSLR-based reconstruction achieved sub-millimetre resolution, demonstrating superior performance for fine-scale surface monitoring. An RGB-guided crack extraction method was developed to enhance the identification of surface defects and isolate potential crack areas from the background. The extracted crack regions were visually distinguishable and provided a well-structured geometrical representation of defect morphology. Furthermore, a Pre and Post-Test deformation analysis was conducted to quantify surface displacement across testing stages. The results confirm that this close-range photogrammetry workflow is a flexible, high-resolution alternative to LiDAR for surface inspection and deformation monitoring of specimens in laboratory settings. Ultimately, this approach establishes a robust geometric baseline for future automated 3D feature characterisation and material performance evaluation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21468
Learning-based global point cloud registration has achieved remarkable progress, yet its reliance on geometric representations makes existing methods sensitive to variations in point density, scan pattern, viewpoint, and sensor characteristics. We propose CVSD-Reg, a robust global LiDAR registration framework that distills visual semantic priors from a vision foundation model into LiDAR representations. In Stage 1, a Point Transformer V3 student learns from a frozen DINOv2 teacher through contrastive distillation and spherical-manifold alignment, which preserves the hyperspherical geometry of the teacher embedding space. Self-supervised InfoNCE consistency and soft $\mathrm{SE}(3)$ invariance further encourage viewpoint-robust descriptors. In Stage 2, the distilled representation is adapted to registration through correspondence learning, density-aware point-dropout augmentation, and end-to-end pose optimization. With a single checkpoint, CVSD-Reg generalizes to both single-sensor and zero-shot cross-sensor scenarios without sensor-specific adaptation and remains entirely camera-free at inference. On KITTI, nuScenes, and HeLiPR, CVSD-Reg achieves strict success rate (SR@0.5\,m/$1^\circ$) of 97.7$\%$, 99.0$\%$, and 99.3$\%$, respectively, including 97.3$\%$ on sparse 16-beam Velodyne scans. It outperforms state-of-the-art geometric registration methods by up to 44.0 percentage points without requiring camera inputs or post-hoc ICP refinement.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19536
Dual-arm robotic grasping is essential for manipulating large, heavy, and geometrically complex objects that cannot be reliably handled using a single manipulator. These large objects often contain only sparse graspable regions determined by local geometric properties such as thickness, edge structure, and gripper clearance. Prior bimanual grasping methods assume access to a full point cloud of the object which inherently contains this geometric information, but may not be accessible in real scenarios. This work proposes PartialBiGrasp, a dual-arm grasp generation framework that operates directly on partial point cloud observations. Our model learns geometric features implicitly through convolutional occupancy networks, enabling local reasoning about graspability, collision-free contact regions, and object thickness. We leverage this understanding to generate force-closure compliant grasp pairs, which are further refined using a sampling-based optimization to correct for ambiguity caused by incomplete geometry. We evaluate our approach using analytical force-closure metrics, large-scale simulation experiments, and real-world robot evaluations on noisy partial point clouds of novel objects, demonstrating robust and physically stable dual-arm grasp generation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19188
4D understanding and reasoning is a fundamental capability for embodied AI agents operating in dynamic physical environments. However, existing vision encoders are largely limited to static 2D images or 3D point clouds without temporal modeling, or to 2D videos that lack accurate geometric depth reasoning. Consequently, current approaches fail to jointly capture spatial structure and motion evolution in dynamic scenes. We present CL4D, the first foundational 4D vision encoder that directly operates on dynamic point clouds, trained with a contrastive learning objective to align spatio-temporal geometric representations with natural language descriptions. By learning a shared embedding space between text and 4D scene dynamics, CL4D enables zero-shot motion-to-text and text-to-motion retrieval in dynamic environments and serves as a foundational 4D vision encoder for downstream 4D vision-language tasks. Building on this encoder, we introduce 4DVLM, a 4D vision-language model that conditions language generation on dynamic geometric representations. 4DVLM is the first VLM designed to operate directly on 4D point clouds without relying on 2D images, 2D videos, or static 3D point clouds. We train CL4D and subsequently 4DVLM on a newly constructed dataset termed DynAction4D capturing diverse human motions across varying object interactions and scene environments. Extensive experiments across multiple 4D human action benchmarks demonstrate that CL4D achieves state-of-the-art performance, with improvements of approximately ~16.75% over prior methods. Furthermore, 4DVLM outperforms frontier video VLMs such as Gemini and GPT-5 even when these models are provided with RGB video sequences corresponding to the same scenes represented as 4D point clouds for 4DVLM.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18734
No-reference point cloud quality assessment (PCQA) has been an active topic in recent years and is used to measure and optimize the visual experience of point clouds. However, large multimodal models (LMMs) have rarely been explored in this area. Previous LMM-based methods mainly rely on supervised fine-tuning to directly predict numerical quality scores, lacking the ability to generalize across datasets with heterogeneous MOS scales and limited annotations. A key difficulty is that absolute MOS regression can be brittle across datasets with different score scales and distortion distributions, whereas relative quality ranking is more stable under such shifts. In this paper, we present PCQA-R1, the first reinforcement learning LMM for 3D point cloud quality assessment to simultaneously model quality understanding and scoring. Built upon the group relative policy optimization (GRPO) strategy, PCQA-R1 first constructs a chain-of-thought dataset, PCQA-CoT, which serves as cold-start training data through a reverse reasoning strategy that teaches the LMM to generate its reasoning process. We further introduce a Gaussian proximity reward that prevents calibration drift by anchoring score predictions to the source MOS range. Experimental results demonstrate that PCQA-R1 achieves state-of-the-art cross-dataset generalization across five benchmarks and competitive in-domain accuracy. Ablation studies support the role of ranking, Gaussian reward, and cold-start traces.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18627
Semantic segmentation of aerial point cloud is trapped in a generalization crisis under distinct domain shifts. While test-time adaptation offers a privacy-preserving and computationally efficient way to adapt pre-trained models to unlabeled target-domain data during inference, existing methods, bound to closed-set label assumptions and non-scalable point-wise segmentation pipelines, still struggle with semantic shifts. We ask: can we adapt any given pre-trained aerial point cloud segmentation model to a shifted target domain at the inference phase alone, without additional training, while segmenting target-specific categories beyond the source label space on demand? This paper introduces COSTA, which breaks this limitation by shifting from closed-set point-wise adaptation to cluster-centric open-set semantic propagation. Our core discovery is that, once effectively adapted at test time, the rich feature distribution of aerial point clouds can be distilled into a compact set of well-separated semantic centroids that are transferable across label spaces. COSTA leverages this to reformulate open-set semantic segmentation as a cluster-level propagating process: it first bridges the domain gap through proven test-time adaptation, then groups each batch of target-domain points into a small set of semantic clusters based on the similarity distribution in the adapted feature space, and finally propagates high-confidence pseudo labels obtained from an open-vocabulary vision-language model to all points through cluster-level voting. This cluster-centric paradigm enables test-time adaptation of aerial point clouds under significant domain gaps with mixed semantic shifts. With DALES as the source domain, COSTA enables on-demand segmentation across three aerial point cloud benchmarks with distinct domains and heterogeneous category spaces, achieving up to 70.09% mIoU under this new setting.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18479
Generative novel view synthesis from sparse input images is rarely all reconstruction or all generation: pixels visible in some source view have a unique correct value modulated only by view-dependent shading, while pixels in disocclusions or beyond the captured volume admit a distribution of plausible completions. Existing generative novel-view-synthesis methods conflate these regimes under a single uniform loss, blurring the line between geometric fidelity and creative hallucinations even when scene geometry is injected through warped point clouds or projected depth. We introduce GenRec, a multi-view flow matching model that builds the reconstruction--generation split directly into its architecture, supervision, and gradient flow. Guided by an observation mask derived from the source cameras and a monocular depth estimator, a flow matching backbone jointly denoises RGB and scene-coordinate maps across all target views, while a pixel-space refinement stage restores high-frequency detail on observed pixels; the same mask gates supervision so regression signals do not contaminate the generative prior. Across RealEstate10K, DL3DV-10K, and Mip-NeRF~360, in both single-view extrapolation and two-view interpolation, GenRec attains the best reconstruction fidelity in observed regions while also surpassing purely generative baselines on perceptual quality in unobserved ones, showing the effectiveness of our approach.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17832
Recent 3D foundation models provide powerful feature representations for point cloud learning by controlling spatial granularity. However, relying on a fixed spatial granularity severely limits generalization in applications like plant phenotyping, where organ morphology and size vary substantially across species and growth stages. To address this, we propose AGS-PlantSeg, a few-shot 3D plant organ segmentation method that leverages the frozen Utonia (arXiv:2603.03283) foundation model combined with Adaptive Granularity Selection. By dynamically selecting the best granularity levels for each specific plant model, our method extracts optimized geometric features for a lightweight MLP segmentation head. Extensive experiments across PLANesT-3D (arXiv:2407.21150), Pheno4D , and Crops3D demonstrate that AGS-PlantSeg significantly improves cross-species generalization, achieving 88.9% average mIoU performance and outperforming fixed-granularity baselines by 2.5 mIoU points. Despite requiring minimal annotated data, our approach is highly competitive with fully supervised, plant-specific architectures.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17803
Class imbalance in LiDAR point clouds poses challenges for semantic segmentation in autonomous navigation and urban mapping. While 2D vision has numerous mitigation techniques, their effectiveness in 3D remains unclear. We benchmark six reweighting schemes and five imbalance-aware losses across three datasets (DALES, S3DIS, STPLS3D) using two architectures (KPConv, RandLA-Net). Inverse-frequency weighting degrades performance by up to 12% compared to uniform weighting, with catastrophic failures in minority classes. Uniform weighting performs within 2% of complex losses for structured sampling (KPConv) but benefits less for random sampling (RandLA-Net, up to 4.6% gap). Loss landscape analysis reveals a complex interplay: for structured sampling, imbalance ratio determines landscape geometry on real LiDAR data but decouples from it on synthetic data; for random sampling, landscapes show high sensitivity to dataset geometry regardless of imbalance ratio. For the two evaluated point-based architectures, these results suggest that the interaction between sampling strategy (structured vs. random), imbalance severity, and data acquisition characteristics shapes which mitigation approaches are effective.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16673
Conventionally, robotic perception relies heavily on cameras due to the rich semantic texture they provide. However, their performance degrades significantly in low-light or high-dynamic-range environments. Conversely, while Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) captures illumination-invariant geometric and intensity properties, the resulting data are typically single-channel and sparse, creating a significant modality gap when applying vision models pre-trained on RGB datasets. In this paper, we propose Cyclops, a framework that translates sparse Non-Repetitive Scanning LiDAR (NRS-LiDAR) intensity into RGB video, enabling camera-free inference for all-day perception tasks. Our approach first converts sparse LiDAR intensity projections into dense representations via a frozen pre-trained densification module, serving as a geometrically rich source condition. The dense intensity latent is then transported toward the target RGB distribution through Latent Bridge Matching (LBM) with a learned velocity field in a few ODE integration steps. To mitigate inter-frame flickering, we inject prior-frame context via temporal attention layers and further formulate the velocity field as a policy optimized by a differentiable terminal reward that encourages terminal fidelity through backpropagation along the ODE trajectory. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the synthesized RGB, including those generated under near-dark conditions, enable standard RGB-based perception models to substantially outperform both LiDAR baselines and conventional cameras on semantic segmentation, lane detection, and point cloud colorization across diverse lighting conditions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16264