Ang Cao

dblp:270/4548 · DBLP profile ↗
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11ranked-venue papers
5as first author
10since 2021 · last 2026
0009-0003-9792-2780ORCID · reported

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 7 · 3 first-author · 7 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 6 · 3 first-author · 5 since 2021Computer networks · 2 · 1 first-author · 2 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 STSMC: A spatio-temporal defense mechanism against cache pollution attacks in LEO satellite edge CDNs
Xiaodan Yan, Ang Cao, Ziyou Wang
Comput. Networks5
2026 ISGKG: LLM-Driven Dual-Framework Threat Mapping for Space-Ground Cyber Reports
Ang Cao, Yongli Zhao 0001, Xiaodan Yan
IEEE Internet Things J.1
2025 Lightplane: Highly-Scalable Components for Neural 3D Fields
abstract
Contemporary 3D research, particularly in reconstruction and generation, heavily relies on 2D images for inputs or supervision. However, current designs for these 2D-3D mapping are memory-intensive, posing a significant bottleneck for existing methods and hindering new applications. In response, we propose a pair of highly scalable components for 3D neural fields: Lightplane Renderer and Splatter, which significantly reduce memory usage in 2D-3D mapping (over$\mathbf{1 0 0 0} \times)$. These innovations enable the processing of vastly more and higher resolution images with significantly small memory and computational costs. We demonstrate their utility across various applications, from optimizing with image-level losses to enabling a versatile pipeline for scaling 3D reconstruction and generation.11work done during internship
Ang Cao, Justin Johnson 0001, Andrea Vedaldi, David Novotný
3DV1
2025 Fast3R: Towards 3D Reconstruction of 1000+ Images in One Forward Pass
abstract
Multi-view 3D reconstruction remains a core challenge in computer vision, particularly in applications requiring accurate and scalable representations across diverse perspectives. Current leading methods such as DUSt3R employ a fundamentally pairwise approach, processing images in pairs and necessitating costly global alignment procedures to reconstruct from multiple views. In this work, we propose Fast 3D Reconstruction (Fast3R), a novel multi-view generalization to DUSt3R that achieves efficient and scalable 3D reconstruction by processing many views in parallel. Fast3R’s Transformer-based architecture forwards N images in a single forward pass, bypassing the need for iterative alignment. Through extensive experiments on camera pose estimation and 3D reconstruction, Fast3R demonstrates state-of-the-art performance, with significant improvements in inference speed and reduced error accumulation. These results establish Fast3R as a robust alternative for multi-view applications, offering enhanced scalability without compromising reconstruction accuracy.
Alexander Sax, Kevin J. Liang, Mikael Henaff, Ang Cao, Joyce Y. Chai, Franziska Meier, Matt Feiszli
CVPR6
2025 From Thousands to Billions: 3D Visual Language Grounding via Render-Supervised Distillation from 2D VLMs
abstract
3D vision-language grounding faces a fundamental data bottleneck: while 2D models train on billions of images, 3D models have access to only thousands of labeled scenes–a six-order-of-magnitude gap that severely limits performance. We introduce LIFT-GS, a practical distillation technique that overcomes this limitation by using differentiable rendering to bridge 3D and 2D supervision. LIFT-GS predicts 3D Gaussian representations from point clouds and uses them to render predicted language-conditioned 3D masks into 2D views, enabling supervision from 2D foundation models (SAM, CLIP, LLaMA) without requiring any 3D annotations. This render-supervised formulation enables end-to-end training of complete encoder-decoder architectures and is inherently model-agnostic. LIFT-GS achieves state-of-the-art results with 25.7% mAP on open-vocabulary instance segmentation (vs. 20.2% prior SOTA) and consistent 10-30% improvements on referential grounding tasks. Remarkably, pretraining effectively multiplies fine-tuning datasets by 2$\times$, demonstrating strong scaling properties that suggest 3D VLG currently operates in a severely data-scarce regime. Project page: https://liftgs.github.io.
Ang Cao, Sergio Arnaud, Oleksandr Maksymets, Ada Martin, Vincent-Pierre Berges, Paul McVay, Ruslan Partsey, Aravind Rajeswaran, Franziska Meier, Justin Johnson 0001, Jeong Joon Park, Alexander Sax
ICML1
2025 Probing Visual Language Priors in VLMs
abstract
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) may over-rely on visual language priors from their training data rather than true visual reasoning. To investigate this, we introduce ViLP, a benchmark featuring deliberately out-of-distribution images synthesized via image generation models and out-of-distribution Q\&A pairs. Each question in ViLP is coupled with three potential answers and three corresponding images: one that can be resolved by text priors alone and two that demand visual reasoning. Although humans achieve near-perfect accuracy, modern VLMs falter; for instance, GPT-4o achieves only 66.17\% on ViLP. To alleviate this, we propose a self-improving framework in which models generate new VQA data and then apply pixel-level and semantic corruptions to form ``good-bad" image pairs for self-training. Our proposed training objective, Image-DPO, compels VLMs to focus more on the actual visual inputs, and we demonstrate its effectiveness in LLaVA-v1.5 and Cambrian. Project Page: \href{https://vilp-team.github.io/}{ViLP}.
Tiange Luo, Ang Cao, Justin Johnson 0001, Honglak Lee
ICML2
2025 LOCATE 3D: Real-World Object Localization via Self-Supervised Learning in 3D
abstract
We present LOCATE 3D, a model for localizing objects in 3D scenes from referring expressions like "the small coffee table between the sofa and the lamp." LOCATE 3D sets a new state-of-the-art on standard referential grounding benchmarks and showcases robust generalization capabilities. Notably, LOCATE 3D operates directly on sensor observation streams (posed RGB-D frames), enabling real-world deployment on robots and AR devices. Key to our approach is 3D-JEPA, a novel self-supervised learning (SSL) algorithm applicable to sensor point clouds. It takes as input a 3D pointcloud featurized using 2D foundation models (CLIP, DINO). Subsequently, masked prediction in latent space is employed as a pretext task to aid the self-supervised learning of contextualized pointcloud features. Once trained, the 3D-JEPA encoder is finetuned alongside a language-conditioned decoder to jointly predict 3D masks and bounding boxes. Additionally, we introduce LOCATE 3D DATASET, a new dataset for 3D referential grounding, spanning multiple capture setups with over 130K annotations. This enables a systematic study of generalization capabilities as well as a stronger model. Code, models and dataset can be found at the project website: locate3d.atmeta.com
Paul McVay, Sergio Arnaud, Ada Martin, Arjun Majumdar, Krishna Murthy Jatavallabhula, Phillip Thomas, Ruslan Partsey, Daniel Dugas, Abha Gejji, Alexander Sax, Vincent-Pierre Berges, Mikael Henaff, Ang Cao, Ishita Prasad, Mrinal Kalakrishnan, Michael G. Rabbat, Nicolas Ballas, Mido Assran, Oleksandr Maksymets, Aravind Rajeswaran
ICML14
2023 HexPlane: A Fast Representation for Dynamic Scenes
abstract
Modeling and re-rendering dynamic 3D scenes is a challenging task in 3D vision. Prior approaches build on NeRF and rely on implicit representations. This is slow since it requires many MLP evaluations, constraining real-world applications. We show that dynamic 3D scenes can be explicitly represented by six planes of learned features, leading to an elegant solution we call HexPlane. A HexPlane computes features for points in spacetime by fusing vectors extracted from each plane, which is highly efficient. Pairing a HexPlane with a tiny MLP to regress output colors and training via volume rendering gives impressive results for novel view synthesis on dynamic scenes, matching the image quality of prior work but reducing training time by more than 100×. Extensive ablations confirm our HexPlane design and show that it is robust to different feature fusion mechanisms, coordinate systems, and decoding mechanisms. HexPlane is a simple and effective solution for representing 4D volumes, and we hope they can broadly contribute to modeling spacetime for dynamic 3D scenes.11Project page: https://caoang327.github.io/HexPlane.
Ang Cao, Justin Johnson 0001
CVPR1
2023 Text2Room: Extracting Textured 3D Meshes from 2D Text-to-Image Models
abstract
We present Text2Room1, a method for generating room-scale textured 3D meshes from a given text prompt as input. To this end, we leverage pre-trained 2D text-to-image models to synthesize a sequence of images from different poses. In order to lift these outputs into a consistent 3D scene representation, we combine monocular depth estimation with a text-conditioned inpainting model. The core idea of our approach is a tailored viewpoint selection such that the content of each image can be fused into a seamless, textured 3D mesh. More specifically, we propose a continuous alignment strategy that iteratively fuses scene frames with the existing geometry to create a seamless mesh. Unlike existing works that focus on generating single objects [56], [41] or zoom-out trajectories [18] from text, our method generates complete 3D scenes with multiple objects and explicit 3D geometry. We evaluate our approach using qualitative and quantitative metrics, demonstrating it as the first method to generate room-scale 3D geometry with compelling textures from only text as input.
Lukas Höllein, Ang Cao, Andrew Owens, Justin Johnson 0001, Matthias Nießner
ICCV2
2022 FWD: Real-time Novel View Synthesis with Forward Warping and Depth
abstract
Novel view synthesis (NVS) is a challenging task requiring systems to generate photorealistic images of scenes from new viewpoints, where both quality and speed are important for applications. Previous image-based rendering (IBR) methods are fast, but have poor quality when input views are sparse. Recent Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and generalizable variants give impressive results but are not real-time. In our paper, we propose a generalizable NVS method with sparse inputs, called FWD, which gives high-quality synthesis in real-time. With explicit depth and differentiable rendering, it achieves competitive results to the SOTA methods with 130-1000× speedup and better perceptual quality. If available, we can seamlessly integrate sensor depth during either training or inference to improve image quality while retaining real-time speed. With the growing prevalence of depths sensors, we hope that methods making use of depth will become increasingly useful.
Ang Cao, Chris Rockwell 0001, Justin Johnson 0001
CVPR1
2020 Unified Signal Compression Using Generative Adversarial Networks
abstract
We propose a unified compression framework that uses generative adversarial networks (GAN) to compress image and speech signals. The compressed signal is represented by a latent vector fed into a generator network which is trained to produce high quality signals that minimize a target objective function. To efficiently quantize the compressed signal, non-uniformly quantized optimal latent vectors are identified by iterative back-propagation with ADMM optimization performed for each iteration. Our experiments show that the proposed algorithm outperforms prior signal compression methods for both image and speech compression quantified in various metrics including bit rate, PSNR, and neural network based signal classification accuracy.
Bowen Liu 0001, Ang Cao, Hun-Seok Kim
ICASSP2