Daily Papers

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in a wide range of code generation tasks. However, generating code for certain domains remains challenging. One such domain is Computer-Aided Design (CAD) program, where the goal is to produce scripted parametric models that define object geometry for precise design and manufacturing applications. A key challenge in LLM-based CAD program generation is the limited geometric complexity of generated shapes compared to those found in real-world industrial designs. This shortfall is in part due to the lack of diversity in the available CAD program training data. To address this, we propose a novel data augmentation paradigm that prompts an LLM to generate CAD programs conditioned on a reference surface program and a modeling procedure - an idea inspired by practices in industrial design. By varying the reference surface using a collection of organic shapes, our method enriches the geometric distribution of generated CAD models. In particular, it introduces edges and faces defined by spline-based curvature, which are typically missing or underrepresented in existing open-source CAD program datasets. Experiments show that our method produces CAD samples with significantly greater geometric diversity and a higher resemblance to industry-grade CAD designs in terms of the proportion of organic shape primitives. This enhancement makes our CAD data augmentation approach a useful tool for training LLMs and other deep learning models in CAD generation.

Methods for designing organic materials with desired properties have high potential impact across fields such as medicine, renewable energy, petrochemical engineering, and agriculture. However, using generative modeling to design substances with desired properties is difficult because candidate compounds must satisfy multiple constraints, including synthetic accessibility and other metrics that are intuitive to domain experts but challenging to quantify. We propose C5T5, a novel self-supervised pretraining method that enables transformers to make zero-shot select-and-replace edits, altering organic substances towards desired property values. C5T5 operates on IUPAC names -- a standardized molecular representation that intuitively encodes rich structural information for organic chemists but that has been largely ignored by the ML community. Our technique requires no edited molecule pairs to train and only a rough estimate of molecular properties, and it has the potential to model long-range dependencies and symmetric molecular structures more easily than graph-based methods. C5T5 also provides a powerful interface to domain experts: it grants users fine-grained control over the generative process by selecting and replacing IUPAC name fragments, which enables experts to leverage their intuitions about structure-activity relationships. We demonstrate C5T5's effectiveness on four physical properties relevant for drug discovery, showing that it learns successful and chemically intuitive strategies for altering molecules towards desired property values.

We present a computational framework that transforms single images into 3D physical objects. The visual geometry of a physical object in an image is determined by three orthogonal attributes: mechanical properties, external forces, and rest-shape geometry. Existing single-view 3D reconstruction methods often overlook this underlying composition, presuming rigidity or neglecting external forces. Consequently, the reconstructed objects fail to withstand real-world physical forces, resulting in instability or undesirable deformation -- diverging from their intended designs as depicted in the image. Our optimization framework addresses this by embedding physical compatibility into the reconstruction process. We explicitly decompose the three physical attributes and link them through static equilibrium, which serves as a hard constraint, ensuring that the optimized physical shapes exhibit desired physical behaviors. Evaluations on a dataset collected from Objaverse demonstrate that our framework consistently enhances the physical realism of 3D models over existing methods. The utility of our framework extends to practical applications in dynamic simulations and 3D printing, where adherence to physical compatibility is paramount.

We introduce a new approach for generating realistic 3D models with UV maps through a representation termed "Object Images." This approach encapsulates surface geometry, appearance, and patch structures within a 64x64 pixel image, effectively converting complex 3D shapes into a more manageable 2D format. By doing so, we address the challenges of both geometric and semantic irregularity inherent in polygonal meshes. This method allows us to use image generation models, such as Diffusion Transformers, directly for 3D shape generation. Evaluated on the ABO dataset, our generated shapes with patch structures achieve point cloud FID comparable to recent 3D generative models, while naturally supporting PBR material generation.

The 3D CAD shapes in current 3D benchmarks are mostly collected from online model repositories. Thus, they typically have insufficient geometric details and less informative textures, making them less attractive for comprehensive and subtle research in areas such as high-quality 3D mesh and texture recovery. This paper presents 3D Furniture shape with TextURE (3D-FUTURE): a richly-annotated and large-scale repository of 3D furniture shapes in the household scenario. At the time of this technical report, 3D-FUTURE contains 20,240 clean and realistic synthetic images of 5,000 different rooms. There are 9,992 unique detailed 3D instances of furniture with high-resolution textures. Experienced designers developed the room scenes, and the 3D CAD shapes in the scene are used for industrial production. Given the well-organized 3D-FUTURE, we provide baseline experiments on several widely studied tasks, such as joint 2D instance segmentation and 3D object pose estimation, image-based 3D shape retrieval, 3D object reconstruction from a single image, and texture recovery for 3D shapes, to facilitate related future researches on our database.

Many patterns in nature exhibit self-similarity: they can be compactly described via self-referential transformations. Said patterns commonly appear in natural and artificial objects, such as molecules, shorelines, galaxies and even images. In this work, we investigate the role of learning in the automated discovery of self-similarity and in its utilization for downstream tasks. To this end, we design a novel class of implicit operators, Neural Collages, which (1) represent data as the parameters of a self-referential, structured transformation, and (2) employ hypernetworks to amortize the cost of finding these parameters to a single forward pass. We investigate how to leverage the representations produced by Neural Collages in various tasks, including data compression and generation. Neural Collages image compressors are orders of magnitude faster than other self-similarity-based algorithms during encoding and offer compression rates competitive with implicit methods. Finally, we showcase applications of Neural Collages for fractal art and as deep generative models.

Existing visual parsers for molecule diagrams translate pixel-based raster images such as PNGs to chemical structure representations (e.g., SMILES). However, PDFs created by word processors including LaTeX and Word provide explicit locations and shapes for characters, lines, and polygons. We extract symbols from born-digital PDF molecule images and then apply simple graph transformations to capture both visual and chemical structure in editable ChemDraw files (CDXML). Our fast ( PDF rightarrow visual graph rightarrow chemical graph ) pipeline does not require GPUs, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) or vectorization. We evaluate on standard benchmarks using SMILES strings, along with a novel evaluation that provides graph-based metrics and error compilation using LgEval. The geometric information in born-digital PDFs produces a highly accurate parser, motivating generating training data for visual parsers that recognize from raster images, with extracted graphics, visual structure, and chemical structure as annotations. To do this we render SMILES strings in Indigo, parse molecule structure, and then validate recognized structure to select correct files.

"Theory figures" are a staple of theoretical visualization research. Common shapes such as Cartesian planes and flowcharts can be used not only to explain conceptual contributions, but to think through and refine the contribution itself. Yet, theory figures tend to be limited to a set of standard shapes, limiting the creative and expressive potential of visualization theory. In this work, we explore how the shapes used in theory figures afford different understandings and explanations of their underlying phenomena. We speculate on the value of visualizing theories using more expressive configurations, such as icebergs, horseshoes, M\"obius strips, and BLT sandwiches. By reflecting on figure-making's generative role in the practice of theorizing, we conclude that theory is, in fact, shapes.