Reconstructing articulated objects is essential for building digital twins of interactive environments. However, prior methods typically decouple geometry and motion by first reconstructing object shape in distinct states and then estimating articulation through post-hoc alignment. This separation complicates the reconstruction pipeline and restricts scalability, especially for objects with complex, multi-part articulation. We introduce a unified representation that jointly models geometry and motion using articulated 3D Gaussians. This formulation improves robustness in motion decomposition and supports articulated objects with up to 20 parts, significantly outperforming prior approaches that often struggle beyond$2-3$parts due to brittle initialization. To systematically assess scalability and generalization, we propose MPArt-90, a new benchmark consisting of 90 articulated objects across 20 categories, each with diverse part counts and motion configurations. Extensive experiments show that our method consistently achieves superior accuracy in part-level geometry reconstruction and motion estimation across a broad range of object types. We further demonstrate applicability to downstream tasks such as robotic simulation and human-scene interaction modeling, highlighting the potential of unified articulated representations in scalable physical modeling. Project Page.

Bokeh rendering simulates the shallow depth-of-field effect in photography, enhancing visual aesthetics and guiding viewer attention to regions of interest. Although recent approaches perform well, rendering controllable bokeh without additional depth inputs remains a significant challenge. Existing classical and neural controllable methods rely on accurate depth maps, while generative approaches often struggle with limited controllability and efficiency. In this paper, we propose BokehFlow, a depth-free framework for controllable bokeh rendering based on flow matching. BokehFlow directly synthesizes photorealistic bokeh effects from all-in-focus images, eliminating the need for depth inputs. It employs a cross-attention mechanism to enable semantic control over both focus regions and blur intensity via text prompts. To support training and evaluation, we collect and synthesize four datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BokehFlow achieves visually compelling bokeh effects and offers precise control, outperforming existing depth-dependent and generative methods in both rendering quality and efficiency.

Bokeh is used in photography to emphasize the selected subject by smoothly blurring the out-of-focus region with appealing highlights. While recent advances have achieved impressive results in rendering realistic blur, existing frameworks typically rely on disparity maps and bokeh-relevant inputs (e.g., focal distance and blur size), and face significant challenges in video bokeh rendering due to limited temporal consistency. In this paper, we propose BokehCrafter, the first video diffusion framework that generates temporally coherent and visually pleasing bokeh effects from all-in-focus video inputs under user-friendly input conditions. Specifically, we leverage a dual-stream attention mechanism, integrating a reference image branch and a rendering instruction branch. We propose a Bokeh Image Extraction (BIE) module and a CLIP-based text encoder to extract image and text features, respectively, whose outputs are fused via a Text-Image Fusion (TIF) module to enable fine-grained and controllable bokeh rendering. To support the novel capabilities of our model, we construct Video Bokeh Scenes (VBS), a large-scale dataset containing a wide variety of bokeh videos with corresponding rendering instructions, across various scenes and rendering settings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both bokeh rendering quality and temporal consistency.

Existing research on avatar creation is typically limited to laboratory datasets, which require high costs against scalability and exhibit insufficient representation of the real world. On the other hand, the web abounds with off-the-shelf real- world human videos, but these videos vary in quality and require accurate annotations for avatar creation. To this end, we propose an automatic annotating pipeline with filtering protocols to curate these humans from the web. Our pipeline surpasses state-of-the-art methods on the EMDB benchmark, and the filtering protocols boost verification metrics on web videos. We then curate WildAvatar, a web-scale in-the-wild human avatar creation dataset extracted from YouTube, with 10,000+ different human subjects and scenes. WildAvatar is at least 10 × richer than previous datasets for 3D human avatar creation and closer to the real world. To explore its potential, we demonstrate the quality and generalizability of avatar creation methods on WildAvatar. We will publicly release our code, data source links and annotations to push forward 3D human avatar creation and other related fields for real-world applications.

We present Free4D, a novel tuning-free framework for 4D scene generation from a single image. Existing methods either focus on object-level generation, making scene-level generation infeasible, or rely on large-scale multi-view video datasets for expensive training, with limited generalization ability due to the scarcity of 4D scene data. In contrast, our key insight is to distill pre-trained foundation models for consistent 4D scene representation, which offers promising advantages such as efficiency and generalizability. 1) To achieve this, we first animate the input image using image-to-video diffusion models followed by 4D geometric structure initialization. 2) To turn this coarse structure into spatial-temporal consistent multiview videos, we design an adaptive guidance mechanism with a point-guided denoising strategy for spatial consistency and a novel latent replacement strategy for temporal coherence. 3) To lift these generated observations into consistent 4D representation, we propose a modulation-based refinement to mitigate inconsistencies while fully leveraging the generated information. The resulting 4D representation enables real-time, controllable rendering, marking a significant advancement in single-image-based 4D scene generation.

Video depth estimation aims to infer temporally consistent depth. One approach is to finetune a single-image model on each video with geometry constraints, which proves inefficient and lacks robustness. An alternative is learning to enforce consistency from data, which requires well-designed models and sufficient video depth data. To address both challenges, we introduce NVDS that stabilizes inconsistent depth estimated by various single-image models in a plug-and-play manner. We also elaborate a large-scale Video Depth in the Wild (VDW) dataset, which contains 14,203 videos with over two million frames, making it the largest natural-scene video depth dataset. Additionally, a bidirectional inference strategy is designed to improve consistency by adaptively fusing forward and backward predictions. We instantiate a model family ranging from small to large scales for different applications. The method is evaluated on VDW dataset and three public benchmarks. To further prove the versatility, we extend NVDS to video semantic segmentation and several downstream applications like bokeh rendering, novel view synthesis, and 3D reconstruction. Experimental results show that our method achieves significant improvements in consistency, accuracy, and efficiency. Our work serves as a solid baseline and data foundation for learning-based video depth estimation.

Generalizable NeRF aims to synthesize novel views for unseen scenes. Common practices involve constructing variance-based cost volumes for geometry reconstruction and encoding 3D descriptors for decoding novel views. However, existing methods show limited generalization ability in challenging conditions due to inaccurate geometry, sub-optimal descriptors, and decoding strategies. We address these issues point by point. First, we find the variance-based cost volume exhibits failure patterns as the features of pixels corresponding to the same point can be inconsistent across different views due to occlusions or reflections. We introduce an Adaptive Cost Aggregation (ACA) approach to amplify the contribution of consistent pixel pairs and suppress inconsistent ones. Un-like previous methods that solely fuse 2D features into descriptors, our approach introduces a Spatial-View Ag-gregator (SVA) to incorporate 3D context into descriptors through spatial and inter-view interaction. When decoding the descriptors, we observe the two existing decoding strategies excel in different areas, which are complementary. A Consistency-Aware Fusion (CAF) strategy is proposed to leverage the advantages of both. We incorporate the above ACA, SVA, and CAF into a coarse-to-fine framework, termed Geometry-aware Reconstruction and Fusion-refined Rendering (GeFu). GeFu attains state-of-the-art performance across multiple datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/TQTQliu/GeFu.

Depth refinement aims to infer high-resolution depth with fine-grained edges and details, refining low-resolution results of depth estimation models. The prevailing methods adopt tile-based manners by merging numerous patches, which lacks efficiency and produces inconsistency. Besides, prior arts suffer from fuzzy depth boundaries and limited generalizability. Analyzing the fundamental reasons for these limitations, we model depth refinement as a noisy Poisson fusion problem with local inconsistency and edge deformation noises. We propose the Self-distilled Depth Refinement (SDDR) framework to enforce robustness against the noises, which mainly consists of depth edge representation and edge-based guidance. With noisy depth predictions as input, SDDR generates low-noise depth edge representations as pseudo-labels by coarse-to-fine self-distillation. Edge-based guidance with edge-guided gradient loss and edge-based fusion loss serves as the optimization objective equivalent to Poisson fusion. When depth maps are better refined, the labels also become more noise-free. Our model can acquire strong robustness to the noises, achieving significant improvements in accuracy, edge quality, efficiency, and generalizability on five different benchmarks. Moreover, directly training another model with edge labels produced by SDDR brings improvements, suggesting that our method could help with training robust refinement models in future works.

Category-agnostic pose estimation (CAPE) aims to predict keypoints for arbitrary categories given support images with keypoint annotations. Existing approaches match the keypoints across the image for localization. However, such a one-stage matching paradigm shows inferior accuracy: the prediction heavily relies on the matching results, which can be noisy due to the open set nature in CAPE. For example, two mirror-symmetric keypoints (e.g., left and right eyes) in the query image can both trigger high similarity on certain support keypoints (eyes), which leads to duplicated or opposite predictions. To calibrate the inaccurate matching results, we introduce a two-stage framework, where matched keypoints from the first stage are viewed as similarity-aware position proposals. Then, the model learns to fetch relevant features to correct the initial proposals in the second stage. We instantiate the framework with a transformer model tailored for CAPE. The transformer encoder incorporates specific designs to improve the representation and similarity modeling in the first matching stage. In the second stage, similarity-aware proposals are packed as queries in the decoder for refinement via cross-attention. Our method surpasses the previous best approach by large margins on CAPE benchmark MP-100 on both accuracy and efficiency. Code available at github.com/flyinglynx/CapeFormer

Video depth estimation aims to infer temporally consistent depth. Some methods achieve temporal consistency by finetuning a single-image depth model during test time using geometry and re-projection constraints, which is inefficient and not robust. An alternative approach is to learn how to enforce temporal consistency from data, but this requires well-designed models and sufficient video depth data. To address these challenges, we propose a plug-and-play framework called Neural Video Depth Stabilizer (NVDS) that stabilizes inconsistent depth estimations and can be applied to different single-image depth models without extra effort. We also introduce a large-scale dataset, Video Depth in the Wild (VDW), which consists of 14,203 videos with over two million frames, making it the largest natural-scene video depth dataset to our knowledge. We evaluate our method on the VDW dataset as well as two public benchmarks and demonstrate significant improvements in consistency, accuracy, and efficiency compared to previous approaches. Our work serves as a solid baseline and provides a data foundation for learning-based video depth models. We will release our dataset and code for future research.

Learning-based multi-view stereo (MVS) methods deal with predicting accurate depth maps to achieve an accurate and complete 3D representation. Despite the excellent performance, existing methods ignore the fact that a suitable depth geometry is also critical in MVS. In this paper, we demonstrate that different depth geometries have significant performance gaps, even using the same depth prediction error. Therefore, we introduce an ideal depth geometry composed of Saddle-Shaped Cells, whose predicted depth map oscillates upward and downward around the ground-truth surface, rather than maintaining a continuous and smooth depth plane. To achieve it, we develop a coarse-to-fine framework called Dual-MVSNet (DMVSNet), which can produce an oscillating depth plane. Technically, we predict two depth values for each pixel (Dual-Depth), and propose a novel loss function and a checkerboard-shaped selecting strategy to constrain the predicted depth geometry. Compared to existing methods, DMVSNet achieves a high rank on the DTU benchmark and obtains the top performance on challenging scenes of Tanks and Temples, demonstrating its strong performance and generalization ability. Our method also points to a new research direction for considering depth geometry in MVS.

Human Mesh Reconstruction (HMR) aims to recover 3D human poses and shapes from a single image. Existing parameterized HMR approaches follow the "representation-to-reasoning'' paradigm to predict human body and pose parameters. This paradigm typically involves intermediate representation and complex pipeline, where potential side effects may occur that could hinder performance. In contrast, query-based non-parameterized methods directly output 3D joints and mesh vertices, but they rely on excessive queries for prediction, leading to low efficiency and robustness. In this work, we propose a simple query-based framework, dubbed SimHMR, for parameterized human mesh reconstruction. This framework streamlines the prediction process by using a few parameterized queries, which effectively removes the need for hand-crafted intermediate representation and reasoning pipeline. Different from query-based non-parameterized HMR that uses excessive coordinate queries, SimHMR only requires a few semantic queries, which physically correspond to pose, shape, and camera. The use of semantic queries significantly improves the efficiency and robustness in extreme scenarios, e.g., occlusions. Without bells and whistles, øurs achieves state-of-the-art performance on 3DPW and Human3.6M benchmarks, and surpasses existing methods on challenging 3DPW-OCC. Code available at https://github.com/inso-13/SimHMR github.com/inso-13/SimHMR

Depth estimation aims to predict dense depth maps. In autonomous driving scenes, sparsity of annotations makes the task challenging. Supervised models produce concave objects due to insufficient structural information. They overfit to valid pixels and fail to restore spatial structures. Self-supervised methods are proposed for the problem. Their robustness is limited by pose estimation, leading to erroneous results in natural scenes. In this paper, we propose a supervised framework termed Diffusion-Augmented Depth Prediction (DADP). We leverage the structural characteristics of diffusion model to enforce depth structures of depth models in a plug-and-play manner. An object-guided integrality loss is also proposed to further enhance regional structure integrality by fetching objective information. We evaluate DADP on three driving benchmarks and achieve significant improvements in depth structures and robustness. Our work provides a new perspective on depth estimation with sparse annotations in autonomous driving scenes.