new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

byAK and the research community

Apr 21

CFDBench: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Machine Learning Methods in Fluid Dynamics

In recent years, applying deep learning to solve physics problems has attracted much attention. Data-driven deep learning methods produce fast numerical operators that can learn approximate solutions to the whole system of partial differential equations (i.e., surrogate modeling). Although these neural networks may have lower accuracy than traditional numerical methods, they, once trained, are orders of magnitude faster at inference. Hence, one crucial feature is that these operators can generalize to unseen PDE parameters without expensive re-training.In this paper, we construct CFDBench, a benchmark tailored for evaluating the generalization ability of neural operators after training in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) problems. It features four classic CFD problems: lid-driven cavity flow, laminar boundary layer flow in circular tubes, dam flows through the steps, and periodic Karman vortex street. The data contains a total of 302K frames of velocity and pressure fields, involving 739 cases with different operating condition parameters, generated with numerical methods. We evaluate the effectiveness of popular neural operators including feed-forward networks, DeepONet, FNO, U-Net, etc. on CFDBnech by predicting flows with non-periodic boundary conditions, fluid properties, and flow domain shapes that are not seen during training. Appropriate modifications were made to apply popular deep neural networks to CFDBench and enable the accommodation of more changing inputs. Empirical results on CFDBench show many baseline models have errors as high as 300% in some problems, and severe error accumulation when performing autoregressive inference. CFDBench facilitates a more comprehensive comparison between different neural operators for CFD compared to existing benchmarks.

Unified Adversarial Patch for Cross-modal Attacks in the Physical World

Recently, physical adversarial attacks have been presented to evade DNNs-based object detectors. To ensure the security, many scenarios are simultaneously deployed with visible sensors and infrared sensors, leading to the failures of these single-modal physical attacks. To show the potential risks under such scenes, we propose a unified adversarial patch to perform cross-modal physical attacks, i.e., fooling visible and infrared object detectors at the same time via a single patch. Considering different imaging mechanisms of visible and infrared sensors, our work focuses on modeling the shapes of adversarial patches, which can be captured in different modalities when they change. To this end, we design a novel boundary-limited shape optimization to achieve the compact and smooth shapes, and thus they can be easily implemented in the physical world. In addition, to balance the fooling degree between visible detector and infrared detector during the optimization process, we propose a score-aware iterative evaluation, which can guide the adversarial patch to iteratively reduce the predicted scores of the multi-modal sensors. We finally test our method against the one-stage detector: YOLOv3 and the two-stage detector: Faster RCNN. Results show that our unified patch achieves an Attack Success Rate (ASR) of 73.33% and 69.17%, respectively. More importantly, we verify the effective attacks in the physical world when visible and infrared sensors shoot the objects under various settings like different angles, distances, postures, and scenes.

A Robust and Efficient Boundary Point Detection Method by Measuring Local Direction Dispersion

Boundary point detection aims to outline the external contour structure of clusters and enhance the inter-cluster discrimination, thus bolstering the performance of the downstream classification and clustering tasks. However, existing boundary point detectors are sensitive to density heterogeneity or cannot identify boundary points in concave structures and high-dimensional manifolds. In this work, we propose a robust and efficient boundary point detection method based on Local Direction Dispersion (LoDD). The core of boundary point detection lies in measuring the difference between boundary points and internal points. It is a common observation that an internal point is surrounded by its neighbors in all directions, while the neighbors of a boundary point tend to be distributed only in a certain directional range. By considering this observation, we adopt density-independent K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) method to determine neighboring points and design a centrality metric LoDD using the eigenvalues of the covariance matrix to depict the distribution uniformity of KNN. We also develop a grid-structure assumption of data distribution to determine the parameters adaptively. The effectiveness of LoDD is demonstrated on synthetic datasets, real-world benchmarks, and application of training set split for deep learning model and hole detection on point cloud data. The datasets and toolkit are available at: https://github.com/ZPGuiGroupWhu/lodd.

Surf-D: High-Quality Surface Generation for Arbitrary Topologies using Diffusion Models

In this paper, we present Surf-D, a novel method for generating high-quality 3D shapes as Surfaces with arbitrary topologies using Diffusion models. Specifically, we adopt Unsigned Distance Field (UDF) as the surface representation, as it excels in handling arbitrary topologies, enabling the generation of complex shapes. While the prior methods explored shape generation with different representations, they suffer from limited topologies and geometry details. Moreover, it's non-trivial to directly extend prior diffusion models to UDF because they lack spatial continuity due to the discrete volume structure. However, UDF requires accurate gradients for mesh extraction and learning. To tackle the issues, we first leverage a point-based auto-encoder to learn a compact latent space, which supports gradient querying for any input point through differentiation to effectively capture intricate geometry at a high resolution. Since the learning difficulty for various shapes can differ, a curriculum learning strategy is employed to efficiently embed various surfaces, enhancing the whole embedding process. With pretrained shape latent space, we employ a latent diffusion model to acquire the distribution of various shapes. Our approach demonstrates superior performance in shape generation across multiple modalities and conducts extensive experiments in unconditional generation, category conditional generation, 3D reconstruction from images, and text-to-shape tasks.

GridFormer: Point-Grid Transformer for Surface Reconstruction

Implicit neural networks have emerged as a crucial technology in 3D surface reconstruction. To reconstruct continuous surfaces from discrete point clouds, encoding the input points into regular grid features (plane or volume) has been commonly employed in existing approaches. However, these methods typically use the grid as an index for uniformly scattering point features. Compared with the irregular point features, the regular grid features may sacrifice some reconstruction details but improve efficiency. To take full advantage of these two types of features, we introduce a novel and high-efficiency attention mechanism between the grid and point features named Point-Grid Transformer (GridFormer). This mechanism treats the grid as a transfer point connecting the space and point cloud. Our method maximizes the spatial expressiveness of grid features and maintains computational efficiency. Furthermore, optimizing predictions over the entire space could potentially result in blurred boundaries. To address this issue, we further propose a boundary optimization strategy incorporating margin binary cross-entropy loss and boundary sampling. This approach enables us to achieve a more precise representation of the object structure. Our experiments validate that our method is effective and outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches under widely used benchmarks by producing more precise geometry reconstructions. The code is available at https://github.com/list17/GridFormer.

VoroMesh: Learning Watertight Surface Meshes with Voronoi Diagrams

In stark contrast to the case of images, finding a concise, learnable discrete representation of 3D surfaces remains a challenge. In particular, while polygon meshes are arguably the most common surface representation used in geometry processing, their irregular and combinatorial structure often make them unsuitable for learning-based applications. In this work, we present VoroMesh, a novel and differentiable Voronoi-based representation of watertight 3D shape surfaces. From a set of 3D points (called generators) and their associated occupancy, we define our boundary representation through the Voronoi diagram of the generators as the subset of Voronoi faces whose two associated (equidistant) generators are of opposite occupancy: the resulting polygon mesh forms a watertight approximation of the target shape's boundary. To learn the position of the generators, we propose a novel loss function, dubbed VoroLoss, that minimizes the distance from ground truth surface samples to the closest faces of the Voronoi diagram which does not require an explicit construction of the entire Voronoi diagram. A direct optimization of the Voroloss to obtain generators on the Thingi32 dataset demonstrates the geometric efficiency of our representation compared to axiomatic meshing algorithms and recent learning-based mesh representations. We further use VoroMesh in a learning-based mesh prediction task from input SDF grids on the ABC dataset, and show comparable performance to state-of-the-art methods while guaranteeing closed output surfaces free of self-intersections.

Mosaic-SDF for 3D Generative Models

Current diffusion or flow-based generative models for 3D shapes divide to two: distilling pre-trained 2D image diffusion models, and training directly on 3D shapes. When training a diffusion or flow models on 3D shapes a crucial design choice is the shape representation. An effective shape representation needs to adhere three design principles: it should allow an efficient conversion of large 3D datasets to the representation form; it should provide a good tradeoff of approximation power versus number of parameters; and it should have a simple tensorial form that is compatible with existing powerful neural architectures. While standard 3D shape representations such as volumetric grids and point clouds do not adhere to all these principles simultaneously, we advocate in this paper a new representation that does. We introduce Mosaic-SDF (M-SDF): a simple 3D shape representation that approximates the Signed Distance Function (SDF) of a given shape by using a set of local grids spread near the shape's boundary. The M-SDF representation is fast to compute for each shape individually making it readily parallelizable; it is parameter efficient as it only covers the space around the shape's boundary; and it has a simple matrix form, compatible with Transformer-based architectures. We demonstrate the efficacy of the M-SDF representation by using it to train a 3D generative flow model including class-conditioned generation with the 3D Warehouse dataset, and text-to-3D generation using a dataset of about 600k caption-shape pairs.

CADDreamer: CAD object Generation from Single-view Images

Diffusion-based 3D generation has made remarkable progress in recent years. However, existing 3D generative models often produce overly dense and unstructured meshes, which stand in stark contrast to the compact, structured, and sharply-edged Computer-Aided Design (CAD) models crafted by human designers. To address this gap, we introduce CADDreamer, a novel approach for generating boundary representations (B-rep) of CAD objects from a single image. CADDreamer employs a primitive-aware multi-view diffusion model that captures both local geometric details and high-level structural semantics during the generation process. By encoding primitive semantics into the color domain, the method leverages the strong priors of pre-trained diffusion models to align with well-defined primitives. This enables the inference of multi-view normal maps and semantic maps from a single image, facilitating the reconstruction of a mesh with primitive labels. Furthermore, we introduce geometric optimization techniques and topology-preserving extraction methods to mitigate noise and distortion in the generated primitives. These enhancements result in a complete and seamless B-rep of the CAD model. Experimental results demonstrate that our method effectively recovers high-quality CAD objects from single-view images. Compared to existing 3D generation techniques, the B-rep models produced by CADDreamer are compact in representation, clear in structure, sharp in edges, and watertight in topology.

Ghost on the Shell: An Expressive Representation of General 3D Shapes

The creation of photorealistic virtual worlds requires the accurate modeling of 3D surface geometry for a wide range of objects. For this, meshes are appealing since they 1) enable fast physics-based rendering with realistic material and lighting, 2) support physical simulation, and 3) are memory-efficient for modern graphics pipelines. Recent work on reconstructing and statistically modeling 3D shape, however, has critiqued meshes as being topologically inflexible. To capture a wide range of object shapes, any 3D representation must be able to model solid, watertight, shapes as well as thin, open, surfaces. Recent work has focused on the former, and methods for reconstructing open surfaces do not support fast reconstruction with material and lighting or unconditional generative modelling. Inspired by the observation that open surfaces can be seen as islands floating on watertight surfaces, we parameterize open surfaces by defining a manifold signed distance field on watertight templates. With this parameterization, we further develop a grid-based and differentiable representation that parameterizes both watertight and non-watertight meshes of arbitrary topology. Our new representation, called Ghost-on-the-Shell (G-Shell), enables two important applications: differentiable rasterization-based reconstruction from multiview images and generative modelling of non-watertight meshes. We empirically demonstrate that G-Shell achieves state-of-the-art performance on non-watertight mesh reconstruction and generation tasks, while also performing effectively for watertight meshes.

Deep Implicit Surface Point Prediction Networks

Deep neural representations of 3D shapes as implicit functions have been shown to produce high fidelity models surpassing the resolution-memory trade-off faced by the explicit representations using meshes and point clouds. However, most such approaches focus on representing closed shapes. Unsigned distance function (UDF) based approaches have been proposed recently as a promising alternative to represent both open and closed shapes. However, since the gradients of UDFs vanish on the surface, it is challenging to estimate local (differential) geometric properties like the normals and tangent planes which are needed for many downstream applications in vision and graphics. There are additional challenges in computing these properties efficiently with a low-memory footprint. This paper presents a novel approach that models such surfaces using a new class of implicit representations called the closest surface-point (CSP) representation. We show that CSP allows us to represent complex surfaces of any topology (open or closed) with high fidelity. It also allows for accurate and efficient computation of local geometric properties. We further demonstrate that it leads to efficient implementation of downstream algorithms like sphere-tracing for rendering the 3D surface as well as to create explicit mesh-based representations. Extensive experimental evaluation on the ShapeNet dataset validate the above contributions with results surpassing the state-of-the-art.

OReX: Object Reconstruction from Planar Cross-sections Using Neural Fields

Reconstructing 3D shapes from planar cross-sections is a challenge inspired by downstream applications like medical imaging and geographic informatics. The input is an in/out indicator function fully defined on a sparse collection of planes in space, and the output is an interpolation of the indicator function to the entire volume. Previous works addressing this sparse and ill-posed problem either produce low quality results, or rely on additional priors such as target topology, appearance information, or input normal directions. In this paper, we present OReX, a method for 3D shape reconstruction from slices alone, featuring a Neural Field as the interpolation prior. A modest neural network is trained on the input planes to return an inside/outside estimate for a given 3D coordinate, yielding a powerful prior that induces smoothness and self-similarities. The main challenge for this approach is high-frequency details, as the neural prior is overly smoothing. To alleviate this, we offer an iterative estimation architecture and a hierarchical input sampling scheme that encourage coarse-to-fine training, allowing the training process to focus on high frequencies at later stages. In addition, we identify and analyze a ripple-like effect stemming from the mesh extraction step. We mitigate it by regularizing the spatial gradients of the indicator function around input in/out boundaries during network training, tackling the problem at the root. Through extensive qualitative and quantitative experimentation, we demonstrate our method is robust, accurate, and scales well with the size of the input. We report state-of-the-art results compared to previous approaches and recent potential solutions, and demonstrate the benefit of our individual contributions through analysis and ablation studies.