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Jul 7

MPMAvatar: Learning 3D Gaussian Avatars with Accurate and Robust Physics-Based Dynamics

While there has been significant progress in the field of 3D avatar creation from visual observations, modeling physically plausible dynamics of humans with loose garments remains a challenging problem. Although a few existing works address this problem by leveraging physical simulation, they suffer from limited accuracy or robustness to novel animation inputs. In this work, we present MPMAvatar, a framework for creating 3D human avatars from multi-view videos that supports highly realistic, robust animation, as well as photorealistic rendering from free viewpoints. For accurate and robust dynamics modeling, our key idea is to use a Material Point Method-based simulator, which we carefully tailor to model garments with complex deformations and contact with the underlying body by incorporating an anisotropic constitutive model and a novel collision handling algorithm. We combine this dynamics modeling scheme with our canonical avatar that can be rendered using 3D Gaussian Splatting with quasi-shadowing, enabling high-fidelity rendering for physically realistic animations. In our experiments, we demonstrate that MPMAvatar significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art physics-based avatar in terms of (1) dynamics modeling accuracy, (2) rendering accuracy, and (3) robustness and efficiency. Additionally, we present a novel application in which our avatar generalizes to unseen interactions in a zero-shot manner-which was not achievable with previous learning-based methods due to their limited simulation generalizability. Our project page is at: https://KAISTChangmin.github.io/MPMAvatar/

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 1, 2025

Unified Micromechanics Theory of Composites

We consider the matrix composite materials (CM) of either random (statistically homogeneous or inhomogeneous), periodic, or deterministic (neither random nor periodic) structures. CMs exhibit linear or nonlinear behavior, coupled or uncoupled multi-physical phenomena, locally elastic, weakly nonlocal (strain gradient and stress gradient), or strongly nonlocal (strain-type and displacement-type, peridynamics) phase properties. A modified Computational Analytical Micromechanics (CAM) approach introduces an exact Additive General Integral Equation (AGIE) for CMs of any structure and phase properties mentioned above. The unified iteration solution of static AGIEs is adapted to the body force with compact support serving as a fundamentally new universal training parameter. The approach also establishes a critical threshold for filtering out unsuitable sub-datasets of effective parameters through a novel Representative Volume Element (RVE) concept, which extends Hill's classical framework. This RVE concept eliminates sample size, boundary layer, and edge effects, making it applicable to CMs of any structure and phase properties, regardless of local or nonlocal, linear or nonlinear. Incorporating this new RVE concept into machine learning and neural network techniques enables the construction of any unpredefined surrogate nonlocal operators. The methodology is structured as a modular, block-based framework, allowing independent development and refinement of software components. This flexible, robust AGIE-CAM framework integrates data-driven, multi-scale, and multi-physics modeling, accelerating research in CM of any microtopology and phase properties considered. The AGIE-CAM framework represents a groundbreaking paradigm shift in the micromechanics of composites, redefining the very philosophy that underpins our understanding of their behavior at the microscopic level.

  • 1 authors
·
Mar 15, 2025

Toward quantitative fractography using convolutional neural networks

The science of fractography revolves around the correlation between topographic characteristics of the fracture surface and the mechanisms and external conditions leading to their creation. While being a topic of investigation for centuries, it has remained mostly qualitative to date. A quantitative analysis of fracture surfaces is of prime interest for both the scientific community and the industrial sector, bearing the potential for improved understanding on the mechanisms controlling the fracture process and at the same time assessing the reliability of computational models currently being used for material design. With new advances in the field of image analysis, and specifically with machine learning tools becoming more accessible and reliable, it is now feasible to automate the process of extracting meaningful information from fracture surface images. Here, we propose a method of identifying and quantifying the relative appearance of intergranular and transgranular fracture events from scanning electron microscope images. The newly proposed method is based on a convolutional neural network algorithm for semantic segmentation. The proposed method is extensively tested and evaluated against two ceramic material systems (Al_2O_3,MgAl_2O_4) and shows high prediction accuracy, despite being trained on only one material system (MgAl_2O_4). While here attention is focused on brittle fracture characteristics, the method can be easily extended to account for other fracture morphologies, such as dimples, fatigue striations, etc.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 1, 2019

FLARE: A Data-Efficient Surrogate for Predicting Displacement Fields in Directed Energy Deposition

Directed energy deposition (DED) produces complex thermo-mechanical responses that can lead to distortion and reduced dimensional accuracy of a manufactured part. Thermo-mechanical finite element simulations are widely used to estimate these effects, but their computational cost and the complexity of accurately capturing DED physics limit their use in design iteration and process optimization. This paper introduces FLARE (Field Prediction via Linear Affine Reconstruction in wEight-space), a data-efficient surrogate modeling framework for predicting post-cooling displacement fields in DED from geometric and process parameters. We develop a predefined-geometry DED simulation workflow using an open-source finite element framework and generate a dataset of simulations with varying geometry, laser power, and deposition velocity. Each simulation provides full-field displacement, stress, strain, and temperature data throughout the manufacturing process. FLARE encodes each simulation as an implicit neural field and regularizes the corresponding neural-network weights so that they follow the affine structure of the input parameter space. This enables prediction of unseen parameter combinations by reconstructing network weights through affine mixing of training examples. On this DED benchmark, the method shows improved accuracy compared to baseline methods in both in-distribution and extrapolation settings. Although the present study focuses on DED displacement prediction, the proposed affine weight-space reconstruction framework offers a promising approach for data-efficient surrogate modeling of physical fields.

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 17

Dynamic and adaptive mesh-based graph neural network framework for simulating displacement and crack fields in phase field models

Fracture is one of the main causes of failure in engineering structures. Phase field methods coupled with adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) techniques have been widely used to model crack propagation due to their ease of implementation and scalability. However, phase field methods can still be computationally demanding making them unfeasible for high-throughput design applications. Machine learning (ML) models such as Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown their ability to emulate complex dynamic problems with speed-ups orders of magnitude faster compared to high-fidelity simulators. In this work, we present a dynamic mesh-based GNN framework for emulating phase field simulations of crack propagation with AMR for different crack configurations. The developed framework - ADAPTive mesh-based graph neural network (ADAPT-GNN) - exploits the benefits of both ML methods and AMR by describing the graph representation at each time-step as the refined mesh itself. Using ADAPT-GNN, we predict the evolution of displacement fields and scalar damage field (or phase field) with high accuracy compared to conventional phase field fracture model. We also compute crack stress fields with high accuracy using the predicted displacements and phase field parameter. Finally, we observe speed up of 15-36x compared to serial execution of the phase field model.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 30, 2022

New RVE concept in thermoelasticity of periodic composites subjected to compact support loading

This paper introduces an advanced Computational Analytical Micromechanics (CAM) framework for linear thermoelastic composites (CMs) with periodic microstructures. The approach is based on an exact new Additive General Integral Equation (AGIE), formulated for compactly supported loading conditions, such as body forces and localized thermal effects (for example laser heating). In addition, new general integral equations (GIEs) are established for arbitrary mechanical and thermal loading. A unified iterative scheme is developed for solving the static AGIEs, where the compact support of loading serves as a new fundamental training parameter. At the core of the methodology lies a generalized Representative Volume Element (RVE) concept that extends Hill classical definition of the RVE. Unlike conventional RVEs, this generalized RVE is not fixed geometrically but emerges naturally from the characteristic scale of localized loading, thereby reducing the analysis of an infinite periodic medium to a finite, data-driven domain. This formulation automatically filters out nonrepresentative subsets of effective parameters while eliminating boundary effects, edge artifacts, and finite-size sample dependencies. Furthermore, the AGIE-based CAM framework integrates seamlessly with machine learning (ML) and neural network (NN) architectures, supporting the development of accurate, physics-informed surrogate nonlocal operators.

  • 1 authors
·
Dec 21, 2025

Homogenization framework for rigid and non-rigid foldable origami metamaterials

Origami metamaterials typically consist of folded sheets with periodic patterns, conferring them with remarkable mechanical properties. In the context of Continuum Mechanics, the majority of existing predictive methods are mechanism analogs which favor rigid folding and panel bending. While effective in predicting primary deformation modes, existing methods fall short in capturing the full spectrum of deformation of non-rigid foldable origami, such as the emergence of curvature along straight creases, local strain at vertices and warpage in panels. To fully capture the entire deformation spectrum and enhance the accuracy of existing methods, this paper introduces a homogenization framework for origami metamaterials where the faces are modeled as plate elements. Both asymptotic and energy-based homogenization methods are formulated and implemented. As a representative crease pattern, we examine the Miura origami sheet homogenized as an equivalent Kirchhoff-Love plate. The results reveal that certain effective elastic properties are nonlinearly related to both the initial fold angle and the crease stiffness. When benchmarked with results from fully resolved simulations, our framework yields errors up to 12.9\%, while existing models, including the bar-and-hinge model and the rigid-panel model, show up to 161\% error. The differences in errors are associated with the complex modes of crease and panel deformation in non-rigid origami, unexplored by the existing models. This work demonstrates a precise and efficient continuum framework for origami metamaterials as an effective strategy for predicting their elastic properties, understanding their mechanics, and designing their functionalities.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 22, 2025

Multiview Point Cloud Registration Based on Minimum Potential Energy for Free-Form Blade Measurement

Point cloud registration is an essential step for free-form blade reconstruction in industrial measurement. Nonetheless, measuring defects of the 3D acquisition system unavoidably result in noisy and incomplete point cloud data, which renders efficient and accurate registration challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel global registration method that is based on the minimum potential energy (MPE) method to address these problems. The basic strategy is that the objective function is defined as the minimum potential energy optimization function of the physical registration system. The function distributes more weight to the majority of inlier points and less weight to the noise and outliers, which essentially reduces the influence of perturbations in the mathematical formulation. We decompose the solution into a globally optimal approximation procedure and a fine registration process with the trimmed iterative closest point algorithm to boost convergence. The approximation procedure consists of two main steps. First, according to the construction of the force traction operator, we can simply compute the position of the potential energy minimum. Second, to find the MPE point, we propose a new theory that employs two flags to observe the status of the registration procedure. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm on four types of blades. The proposed method outperforms the other global methods in terms of both accuracy and noise resistance.

  • 8 authors
·
Feb 11, 2025

Probabilistic Assessment of Engineered Timber Reusability after Moisture Exposure

Engineered timber is pivotal to low-carbon construction, but moisture uptake during its service life can compromise structural reliability and impede reuse within a circular economy model. Despite growing interest, quantitative standards for classifying the reusability of moisture-exposed timber are still lacking. This study develops a probabilistic framework to determine the post-exposure reusability of engineered timber. Laminated specimens were soaked to full saturation, dried to 25% moisture content, and subjected to destructive three-point flexural testing. Structural integrity was quantified by a residual-performance metric that assigns 80% weight to the retained flexural modulus and 20% to the retained maximum load, benchmarked against unexposed controls. A hierarchical Bayesian multinomial logistic model with horseshoe priors, calibrated through Markov-Chain Monte-Carlo sampling, jointly infers the decision threshold separating three Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) reuse levels and predicts those levels from five field-measurable features: density, moisture content, specimen size, grain orientation, and surface hardness. Results indicate that a single wet-dry cycle preserves 70% of specimens above the 0.90 residual-performance threshold (Level 1), whereas repeated cycling lowers the mean residual to 0.78 and reallocates many specimens to Levels 2-3. The proposed framework yields quantified decision boundaries and a streamlined on-site testing protocol, providing a foundation for robust quality assurance standards.

  • 5 authors
·
May 29, 2025

Additive general integral equations in thermoelastic micromechanics of composites

This work presents an enhanced Computational Analytical Micromechanics (CAM) framework for the analysis of linear thermoelastic composite materials (CMs) with random microstructure. The proposed approach is grounded in an exact Additive General Integral Equation (AGIE), specifically formulated for compactly supported loading, including both body forces and localized thermal changes (such as those from laser heating). New general integral equations (GIEs) for arbitrary mechanical and thermal loading are proposed. A unified iterative solution strategy is developed for the static AGIE, applicable to CMs with both perfectly and imperfectly bonded interfaces, where the compact support of loading is introduced as a new fundamental training parameter. Central to this methodology is a generalized Representative Volume Element (RVE) concept, which extends Hill classical definition. The resulting RVE is not predefined geometrically, but rather emerges from the characteristic scale of the localized loading, effectively reducing the analysis of an infinite, randomly heterogeneous medium to a finite, data-driven domain. This generalized RVE approach enables automatic exclusion of unrepresentative subsets of effective parameters, while inherently eliminating boundary effects, edge artifacts, and finite size limitations. Moreover, the AGIE-based CAM framework is naturally compatible with machine learning (ML) and neural network (NN) architectures, facilitating the construction of accurate and physically informed surrogate nonlocal operators.

  • 1 authors
·
Dec 21, 2025

JGS2: Near Second-order Converging Jacobi/Gauss-Seidel for GPU Elastodynamics

In parallel simulation, convergence and parallelism are often seen as inherently conflicting objectives. Improved parallelism typically entails lighter local computation and weaker coupling, which unavoidably slow the global convergence. This paper presents a novel GPU algorithm that achieves convergence rates comparable to fullspace Newton's method while maintaining good parallelizability just like the Jacobi method. Our approach is built on a key insight into the phenomenon of overshoot. Overshoot occurs when a local solver aggressively minimizes its local energy without accounting for the global context, resulting in a local update that undermines global convergence. To address this, we derive a theoretically second-order optimal solution to mitigate overshoot. Furthermore, we adapt this solution into a pre-computable form. Leveraging Cubature sampling, our runtime cost is only marginally higher than the Jacobi method, yet our algorithm converges nearly quadratically as Newton's method. We also introduce a novel full-coordinate formulation for more efficient pre-computation. Our method integrates seamlessly with the incremental potential contact method and achieves second-order convergence for both stiff and soft materials. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach delivers high-quality simulations and outperforms state-of-the-art GPU methods with 50 to 100 times better convergence.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 5, 2025

An error indicator-based adaptive reduced order model for nonlinear structural mechanics -- application to high-pressure turbine blades

The industrial application motivating this work is the fatigue computation of aircraft engines' high-pressure turbine blades. The material model involves nonlinear elastoviscoplastic behavior laws, for which the parameters depend on the temperature. For this application, the temperature loading is not accurately known and can reach values relatively close to the creep temperature: important nonlinear effects occur and the solution strongly depends on the used thermal loading. We consider a nonlinear reduced order model able to compute, in the exploitation phase, the behavior of the blade for a new temperature field loading. The sensitivity of the solution to the temperature makes {the classical unenriched proper orthogonal decomposition method} fail. In this work, we propose a new error indicator, quantifying the error made by the reduced order model in computational complexity independent of the size of the high-fidelity reference model. In our framework, when the {error indicator} becomes larger than a given tolerance, the reduced order model is updated using one time step solution of the high-fidelity reference model. The approach is illustrated on a series of academic test cases and applied on a setting of industrial complexity involving 5 million degrees of freedom, where the whole procedure is computed in parallel with distributed memory.

  • 2 authors
·
Apr 19, 2019

Procedural Generation of Grain Orientations using the Wave Function Collapse Algorithm

Statistics of grain sizes and orientations in metals correlate to the material's mechanical properties. Reproducing representative volume elements for further analysis of deformation and failure in metals, like 316L stainless steel, is particularly important due to their wide use in manufacturing goods today. Two approaches, initially created for video games, were considered for the procedural generation of representative grain microstructures. The first is the Wave Function Collapse (WFC) algorithm, and the second is constraint propagation and probabilistic inference through Markov Junior, a free and open-source software. This study aimed to investigate these two algorithms' effectiveness in using reference electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) maps and recreating a statistically similar one that could be used in further research. It utilized two stainless steel EBSD maps as references to test both algorithms. First, the WFC algorithm was too constricting and, thus, incapable of producing images that resembled EBSDs. The second, MarkovJunior, was much more effective in creating a Voronoi tessellation that could be used to create an EBSD map in Python. When comparing the results between the reference and the generated EBSD, we discovered that the orientation and volume fractions were extremely similar. With the study, it was concluded that MarkovJunior is an effective machine learning tool that can reproduce representative grain microstructures.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 20, 2023

Gaussian Splatting with Localized Points Management

Point management is a critical component in optimizing 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) models, as the point initiation (e.g., via structure from motion) is distributionally inappropriate. Typically, the Adaptive Density Control (ADC) algorithm is applied, leveraging view-averaged gradient magnitude thresholding for point densification, opacity thresholding for pruning, and regular all-points opacity reset. However, we reveal that this strategy is limited in tackling intricate/special image regions (e.g., transparent) as it is unable to identify all the 3D zones that require point densification, and lacking an appropriate mechanism to handle the ill-conditioned points with negative impacts (occlusion due to false high opacity). To address these limitations, we propose a Localized Point Management (LPM) strategy, capable of identifying those error-contributing zones in the highest demand for both point addition and geometry calibration. Zone identification is achieved by leveraging the underlying multiview geometry constraints, with the guidance of image rendering errors. We apply point densification in the identified zone, whilst resetting the opacity of those points residing in front of these regions so that a new opportunity is created to correct ill-conditioned points. Serving as a versatile plugin, LPM can be seamlessly integrated into existing 3D Gaussian Splatting models. Experimental evaluation across both static 3D and dynamic 4D scenes validate the efficacy of our LPM strategy in boosting a variety of existing 3DGS models both quantitatively and qualitatively. Notably, LPM improves both vanilla 3DGS and SpaceTimeGS to achieve state-of-the-art rendering quality while retaining real-time speeds, outperforming on challenging datasets such as Tanks & Temples and the Neural 3D Video Dataset.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 6, 2024

A Data-Driven Framework for Designing Microstructure of Multifunctional Composites with Deep-Learned Diffusion-Based Generative Models

This paper puts forward an integrated microstructure design methodology that replaces the common existing design approaches: 1) reconstruction of microstructures, 2) analyzing and quantifying material properties, and 3) inverse design of materials using deep-learned generative and surrogate models. The long-standing issue of microstructure reconstruction is well addressed in this study using a new class of state-of-the-art generative model, the diffusion-based generative model (DGM). Moreover, the conditional formulation of DGM for guidance to the embedded desired material properties with a transformer-based attention mechanism enables the inverse design of multifunctional composites. A convolutional neural network (CNN)-based surrogate model is utilized to analyze the nonlinear material behavior to facilitate the prediction of material properties for building microstructure-property linkages. Combined, these generative and surrogate models enable large data processing and database construction that is often not affordable with resource-intensive finite element method (FEM)-based direct numerical simulation (DNS) and iterative reconstruction methods. An example case is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, which is designing mechanoluminescence (ML) particulate composites made of europium and dysprosium ions. The results show that the inversely-designed multiple ML microstructure candidates with the proposed generative and surrogate models meet the multiple design requirements (e.g., volume fraction, elastic constant, and light sensitivity). The evaluation of the generated samples' quality and the surrogate models' performance using appropriate metrics are also included. This assessment demonstrates that the proposed integrated methodology offers an end-to-end solution for practical material design applications.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 14, 2023

GaussianProperty: Integrating Physical Properties to 3D Gaussians with LMMs

Estimating physical properties for visual data is a crucial task in computer vision, graphics, and robotics, underpinning applications such as augmented reality, physical simulation, and robotic grasping. However, this area remains under-explored due to the inherent ambiguities in physical property estimation. To address these challenges, we introduce GaussianProperty, a training-free framework that assigns physical properties of materials to 3D Gaussians. Specifically, we integrate the segmentation capability of SAM with the recognition capability of GPT-4V(ision) to formulate a global-local physical property reasoning module for 2D images. Then we project the physical properties from multi-view 2D images to 3D Gaussians using a voting strategy. We demonstrate that 3D Gaussians with physical property annotations enable applications in physics-based dynamic simulation and robotic grasping. For physics-based dynamic simulation, we leverage the Material Point Method (MPM) for realistic dynamic simulation. For robot grasping, we develop a grasping force prediction strategy that estimates a safe force range required for object grasping based on the estimated physical properties. Extensive experiments on material segmentation, physics-based dynamic simulation, and robotic grasping validate the effectiveness of our proposed method, highlighting its crucial role in understanding physical properties from visual data. Online demo, code, more cases and annotated datasets are available on https://Gaussian-Property.github.io{this https URL}.

  • 11 authors
·
Dec 15, 2024 2

Sycophancy as Material Failure under Pushback Loading: A Multi-Axis Characterization Across Three Loading Cases and up to Seventeen Material Charges

Sycophancy in LLMs is documented across 70+ papers, but expert agreement on construct boundaries remains low (ICC=.184; Ye et al., 2026). The construct fragments because behavioral classification depends on which surface form is privileged. We adopt a materials-science framing: conversation as test specimen under load, LLM-model as material charge, pushback as progressive load, stance-flip as material failure. We characterize this failure across three loading cases (debate n=1000; false-presuppositions n=3400; ethical-setting n=3400; 10-17 material charges per case; 7800 specimens total) using 14 turn-level axis-measurements spanning velocity, damage accumulation, frame-drift, brittleness, and direction stability, plus three speaker-resolved axes from an independent pipeline. The measurements are Hooke-coupled (σ= E cdot varepsilon analog) and reproduce across loading cases with effects up to |r_{rb}| = 0.35 on debate; the sign structure adds a second pattern: the ethical-setting case inverts the velocity and accumulation blocks. Variance composition partitions into two profiles: debate is charge-dominated (brittle-fracture-like: the material grade decides), false-presuppositions and ethical-setting are topic-dominated (creep-like: the load decides); the ratios (2.03 vs 0.13/0.17) are estimator-dependent, for debate even in direction. Cross-judge reliability (GPT-4o vs Haiku 4.5) shows debate scoring is judge-robust (Cohen's κ= 0.88) while false-presupposition scoring is judge-sensitive (κ= 0.36) -- a caveat single-judge benchmarks must report. This is the methodological move Ye et al.'s diagnosis calls for: a multi-axis characterization that does not depend on which surface form of the construct one privileges.

  • 1 authors
·
Jun 14

MatSpray: Fusing 2D Material World Knowledge on 3D Geometry

Manual modeling of material parameters and 3D geometry is a time consuming yet essential task in the gaming and film industries. While recent advances in 3D reconstruction have enabled accurate approximations of scene geometry and appearance, these methods often fall short in relighting scenarios due to the lack of precise, spatially varying material parameters. At the same time, diffusion models operating on 2D images have shown strong performance in predicting physically based rendering (PBR) properties such as albedo, roughness, and metallicity. However, transferring these 2D material maps onto reconstructed 3D geometry remains a significant challenge. We propose a framework for fusing 2D material data into 3D geometry using a combination of novel learning-based and projection-based approaches. We begin by reconstructing scene geometry via Gaussian Splatting. From the input images, a diffusion model generates 2D maps for albedo, roughness, and metallic parameters. Any existing diffusion model that can convert images or videos to PBR materials can be applied. The predictions are further integrated into the 3D representation either by optimizing an image-based loss or by directly projecting the material parameters onto the Gaussians using Gaussian ray tracing. To enhance fine-scale accuracy and multi-view consistency, we further introduce a light-weight neural refinement step (Neural Merger), which takes ray-traced material features as input and produces detailed adjustments. Our results demonstrate that the proposed methods outperform existing techniques in both quantitative metrics and perceived visual realism. This enables more accurate, relightable, and photorealistic renderings from reconstructed scenes, significantly improving the realism and efficiency of asset creation workflows in content production pipelines.

CGTuebingen CG Tübingen
·
Dec 20, 2025 2

DyFraNet: Forecasting and Backcasting Dynamic Fracture Mechanics in Space and Time Using a 2D-to-3D Deep Neural Network

The dynamics of materials failure is one of the most critical phenomena in a range of scientific and engineering fields, from healthcare to structural materials to transportation. In this paper we propose a specially designed deep neural network, DyFraNet, which can predict dynamic fracture behaviors by identifying a complete history of fracture propagation - from cracking onset, as a crack grows through the material, modeled as a series of frames evolving over time and dependent on each other. Furthermore, this model can not only forecast future fracture processes but also backcast to elucidate the past fracture history. In this scenario, once provided with the outcome of a fracture event, the model will elucidate past events that led to this state and will predict the future evolution of the failure process. By comparing the predicted results with atomistic-level simulations and theory, we show that DyFraNet can capture dynamic fracture mechanics by accurately predicting how cracks develop over time, including measures such as the crack speed, as well as when cracks become unstable. We use GradCAM to interpret how DyFraNet perceives the relationship between geometric conditions and fracture dynamics and we find DyFraNet pays special attention to the areas around crack tips, which have a critical influence in the early stage of fracture propagation. In later stages, the model pays increased attention to the existing or newly formed damage distribution in the material. The proposed approach offers significant potential to accelerate the exploration of the dynamics in material design against fracture failures and can be beneficially adapted for all kinds of dynamical engineering problems.

  • 2 authors
·
Nov 15, 2022

Efficient Estimation of Material Property Curves and Surfaces via Active Learning

The relationship between material properties and independent variables such as temperature, external field or time, is usually represented by a curve or surface in a multi-dimensional space. Determining such a curve or surface requires a series of experiments or calculations which are often time and cost consuming. A general strategy uses an appropriate utility function to sample the space to recommend the next optimal experiment or calculation within an active learning loop. However, knowing what the optimal sampling strategy to use to minimize the number of experiments is an outstanding problem. We compare a number of strategies based on directed exploration on several materials problems of varying complexity using a Kriging based model. These include one dimensional curves such as the fatigue life curve for 304L stainless steel and the Liquidus line of the Fe-C phase diagram, surfaces such as the Hartmann 3 function in 3D space and the fitted intermolecular potential for Ar-SH, and a four dimensional data set of experimental measurements for BaTiO3 based ceramics. We also consider the effects of experimental noise on the Hartmann 3 function. We find that directed exploration guided by maximum variance provides better performance overall, converging faster across several data sets. However, for certain problems, the trade-off methods incorporating exploitation can perform at least as well, if not better than maximum variance. Thus, we discuss how the choice of the utility function depends on the distribution of the data, the model performance and uncertainties, additive noise as well as the budget.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 14, 2020

Matrix structure and convergence behavior of the matched eigenfunction method for computing heave wave forces on generalized concentric bodies

Structural survival of offshore structures is crucial for the growing marine economy. Calculating the added mass, radiation damping, and excitation coefficients to quantify wave loads with the traditional boundary element method (BEM) presents a computational bottleneck. The matched eigenfunction expansion method (MEEM), a long-known but rarely-used alternative, offers computational benefits due to its semi-analytical nature. However, previous work fails to directly compare its accuracy and computational performance with BEM, leaving the extent of its utility unknown. Furthermore, the geometry-dependent convergence for cylindrical and slanted geometries has not yet been documented, making the method's practicality for general geometries unclear. This paper presents a unifying MEEM framework for modeling an arbitrary number of fixed or heaving surface-piercing annular cylinders with continuous and radially-monotonic body profiles, and explores the method's block matrix structure, convergence behavior, ability to accurately approximate slanted geometries, and computational advantages over the BEM solver Capytaine. The numerical experiments show that MEEM can compute hydrodynamic coefficients of slanted geometries within 5% of Capytaine, even for angles as steep as 15 degrees from vertical. Finally, MEEM can achieve 2% convergence of its hydrodynamic coefficients an order of magnitude faster than Capytaine with a matrix size two orders of magnitude smaller, making it a computationally effective alternative to traditional BEM solvers. These contributions enable hydrodynamic analysis of a broad range of shapes with increased speed and confidence, paving the way for future optimization studies to yield improved designs.

  • 6 authors
·
May 18

Learning Nonlinear Responses in PET Bottle Buckling with a Hybrid DeepONet-Transolver Framework

Neural surrogates and operator networks for solving partial differential equation (PDE) problems have attracted significant research interest in recent years. However, most existing approaches are limited in their ability to generalize solutions across varying non-parametric geometric domains. In this work, we address this challenge in the context of Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) bottle buckling analysis, a representative packaging design problem conventionally solved using computationally expensive finite element analysis (FEA). We introduce a hybrid DeepONet-Transolver framework that simultaneously predicts nodal displacement fields and the time evolution of reaction forces during top load compression. Our methodology is evaluated on two families of bottle geometries parameterized by two and four design variables. Training data is generated using nonlinear FEA simulations in Abaqus for 254 unique designs per family. The proposed framework achieves mean relative L^{2} errors of 2.5-13% for displacement fields and approximately 2.4% for time-dependent reaction forces for the four-parameter bottle family. Point-wise error analyses further show absolute displacement errors on the order of 10^{-4}-10^{-3}, with the largest discrepancies confined to localized geometric regions. Importantly, the model accurately captures key physical phenomena, such as buckling behavior, across diverse bottle geometries. These results highlight the potential of our framework as a scalable and computationally efficient surrogate, particularly for multi-task predictions in computational mechanics and applications requiring rapid design evaluation.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 16, 2025

Bridging 3D Gaussian and Mesh for Freeview Video Rendering

This is only a preview version of GauMesh. Recently, primitive-based rendering has been proven to achieve convincing results in solving the problem of modeling and rendering the 3D dynamic scene from 2D images. Despite this, in the context of novel view synthesis, each type of primitive has its inherent defects in terms of representation ability. It is difficult to exploit the mesh to depict the fuzzy geometry. Meanwhile, the point-based splatting (e.g. the 3D Gaussian Splatting) method usually produces artifacts or blurry pixels in the area with smooth geometry and sharp textures. As a result, it is difficult, even not impossible, to represent the complex and dynamic scene with a single type of primitive. To this end, we propose a novel approach, GauMesh, to bridge the 3D Gaussian and Mesh for modeling and rendering the dynamic scenes. Given a sequence of tracked mesh as initialization, our goal is to simultaneously optimize the mesh geometry, color texture, opacity maps, a set of 3D Gaussians, and the deformation field. At a specific time, we perform alpha-blending on the RGB and opacity values based on the merged and re-ordered z-buffers from mesh and 3D Gaussian rasterizations. This produces the final rendering, which is supervised by the ground-truth image. Experiments demonstrate that our approach adapts the appropriate type of primitives to represent the different parts of the dynamic scene and outperforms all the baseline methods in both quantitative and qualitative comparisons without losing render speed.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 18, 2024

UMat: Uncertainty-Aware Single Image High Resolution Material Capture

We propose a learning-based method to recover normals, specularity, and roughness from a single diffuse image of a material, using microgeometry appearance as our primary cue. Previous methods that work on single images tend to produce over-smooth outputs with artifacts, operate at limited resolution, or train one model per class with little room for generalization. Previous methods that work on single images tend to produce over-smooth outputs with artifacts, operate at limited resolution, or train one model per class with little room for generalization. In contrast, in this work, we propose a novel capture approach that leverages a generative network with attention and a U-Net discriminator, which shows outstanding performance integrating global information at reduced computational complexity. We showcase the performance of our method with a real dataset of digitized textile materials and show that a commodity flatbed scanner can produce the type of diffuse illumination required as input to our method. Additionally, because the problem might be illposed -more than a single diffuse image might be needed to disambiguate the specular reflection- or because the training dataset is not representative enough of the real distribution, we propose a novel framework to quantify the model's confidence about its prediction at test time. Our method is the first one to deal with the problem of modeling uncertainty in material digitization, increasing the trustworthiness of the process and enabling more intelligent strategies for dataset creation, as we demonstrate with an active learning experiment.

  • 4 authors
·
May 25, 2023

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.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 4, 2024

Enhancing Sampling Protocol for Point Cloud Classification Against Corruptions

Established sampling protocols for 3D point cloud learning, such as Farthest Point Sampling (FPS) and Fixed Sample Size (FSS), have long been relied upon. However, real-world data often suffer from corruptions, such as sensor noise, which violates the benign data assumption in current protocols. As a result, these protocols are highly vulnerable to noise, posing significant safety risks in critical applications like autonomous driving. To address these issues, we propose an enhanced point cloud sampling protocol, PointSP, designed to improve robustness against point cloud corruptions. PointSP incorporates key point reweighting to mitigate outlier sensitivity and ensure the selection of representative points. It also introduces a local-global balanced downsampling strategy, which allows for scalable and adaptive sampling while maintaining geometric consistency. Additionally, a lightweight tangent plane interpolation method is used to preserve local geometry while enhancing the density of the point cloud. Unlike learning-based approaches that require additional model training, PointSP is architecture-agnostic, requiring no extra learning or modification to the network. This enables seamless integration into existing pipelines. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world corrupted datasets show that PointSP significantly improves the robustness and accuracy of point cloud classification, outperforming state-of-the-art methods across multiple benchmarks.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 21, 2024

Determining large-strain metal plasticity parameters using in-situ measurements of plastic flow past a wedge

We present a novel approach to determine the constitutive properties of metals under large plastic strains and strain rates that otherwise are difficult to access using conventional materials testing methods. The approach exploits large-strain plastic flow past a sharp wedge, coupled with high-speed photography and image velocimetry to capture the underlying plastic flow dynamics. The inverse problem of estimating material parameters from the flow field is solved using an iterative optimization procedure that minimizes the gap between internal and external plastic work. A major advantage of the method is that it neither makes any assumptions about the flow nor requires computational simulations. To counter the problem of non-unique parameter estimates, we propose a parameterization scheme that takes advantage of the functional form of the constitutive model and reformulates the problem into a more tractable form to identify plasticity parameters uniquely. We present studies to illustrate the principle of the method with two materials with widely different plastic flow characteristics: copper (strain hardening) and a lead-free solder alloy (rate sensitive and deformation history dependent). The results demonstrate the efficacy of the method in reliably determining the material parameters under high strain/strain rate conditions of relevance to a range of practical engineering problems.

  • 4 authors
·
May 28, 2022

NeRF-based Point Cloud Reconstruction using a Stationary Camera for Agricultural Applications

This paper presents a NeRF-based framework for point cloud (PCD) reconstruction, specifically designed for indoor high-throughput plant phenotyping facilities. Traditional NeRF-based reconstruction methods require cameras to move around stationary objects, but this approach is impractical for high-throughput environments where objects are rapidly imaged while moving on conveyors or rotating pedestals. To address this limitation, we develop a variant of NeRF-based PCD reconstruction that uses a single stationary camera to capture images as the object rotates on a pedestal. Our workflow comprises COLMAP-based pose estimation, a straightforward pose transformation to simulate camera movement, and subsequent standard NeRF training. A defined Region of Interest (ROI) excludes irrelevant scene data, enabling the generation of high-resolution point clouds (10M points). Experimental results demonstrate excellent reconstruction fidelity, with precision-recall analyses yielding an F-score close to 100.00 across all evaluated plant objects. Although pose estimation remains computationally intensive with a stationary camera setup, overall training and reconstruction times are competitive, validating the method's feasibility for practical high-throughput indoor phenotyping applications. Our findings indicate that high-quality NeRF-based 3D reconstructions are achievable using a stationary camera, eliminating the need for complex camera motion or costly imaging equipment. This approach is especially beneficial when employing expensive and delicate instruments, such as hyperspectral cameras, for 3D plant phenotyping. Future work will focus on optimizing pose estimation techniques and further streamlining the methodology to facilitate seamless integration into automated, high-throughput 3D phenotyping pipelines.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 27, 2025

DoMINO: A Decomposable Multi-scale Iterative Neural Operator for Modeling Large Scale Engineering Simulations

Numerical simulations play a critical role in design and development of engineering products and processes. Traditional computational methods, such as CFD, can provide accurate predictions but are computationally expensive, particularly for complex geometries. Several machine learning (ML) models have been proposed in the literature to significantly reduce computation time while maintaining acceptable accuracy. However, ML models often face limitations in terms of accuracy and scalability and depend on significant mesh downsampling, which can negatively affect prediction accuracy and generalization. In this work, we propose a novel ML model architecture, DoMINO (Decomposable Multi-scale Iterative Neural Operator) developed in NVIDIA Modulus to address the various challenges of machine learning based surrogate modeling of engineering simulations. DoMINO is a point cloudbased ML model that uses local geometric information to predict flow fields on discrete points. The DoMINO model is validated for the automotive aerodynamics use case using the DrivAerML dataset. Through our experiments we demonstrate the scalability, performance, accuracy and generalization of our model to both in-distribution and out-of-distribution testing samples. Moreover, the results are analyzed using a range of engineering specific metrics important for validating numerical simulations.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 22, 2025

Relightable 3D Gaussian: Real-time Point Cloud Relighting with BRDF Decomposition and Ray Tracing

We present a novel differentiable point-based rendering framework for material and lighting decomposition from multi-view images, enabling editing, ray-tracing, and real-time relighting of the 3D point cloud. Specifically, a 3D scene is represented as a set of relightable 3D Gaussian points, where each point is additionally associated with a normal direction, BRDF parameters, and incident lights from different directions. To achieve robust lighting estimation, we further divide incident lights of each point into global and local components, as well as view-dependent visibilities. The 3D scene is optimized through the 3D Gaussian Splatting technique while BRDF and lighting are decomposed by physically-based differentiable rendering. Moreover, we introduce an innovative point-based ray-tracing approach based on the bounding volume hierarchy for efficient visibility baking, enabling real-time rendering and relighting of 3D Gaussian points with accurate shadow effects. Extensive experiments demonstrate improved BRDF estimation and novel view rendering results compared to state-of-the-art material estimation approaches. Our framework showcases the potential to revolutionize the mesh-based graphics pipeline with a relightable, traceable, and editable rendering pipeline solely based on point cloud. Project page:https://nju-3dv.github.io/projects/Relightable3DGaussian/.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 27, 2023

OmniPhysGS: 3D Constitutive Gaussians for General Physics-Based Dynamics Generation

Recently, significant advancements have been made in the reconstruction and generation of 3D assets, including static cases and those with physical interactions. To recover the physical properties of 3D assets, existing methods typically assume that all materials belong to a specific predefined category (e.g., elasticity). However, such assumptions ignore the complex composition of multiple heterogeneous objects in real scenarios and tend to render less physically plausible animation given a wider range of objects. We propose OmniPhysGS for synthesizing a physics-based 3D dynamic scene composed of more general objects. A key design of OmniPhysGS is treating each 3D asset as a collection of constitutive 3D Gaussians. For each Gaussian, its physical material is represented by an ensemble of 12 physical domain-expert sub-models (rubber, metal, honey, water, etc.), which greatly enhances the flexibility of the proposed model. In the implementation, we define a scene by user-specified prompts and supervise the estimation of material weighting factors via a pretrained video diffusion model. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that OmniPhysGS achieves more general and realistic physical dynamics across a broader spectrum of materials, including elastic, viscoelastic, plastic, and fluid substances, as well as interactions between different materials. Our method surpasses existing methods by approximately 3% to 16% in metrics of visual quality and text alignment.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 31, 2025

TexGaussian: Generating High-quality PBR Material via Octree-based 3D Gaussian Splatting

Physically Based Rendering (PBR) materials play a crucial role in modern graphics, enabling photorealistic rendering across diverse environment maps. Developing an effective and efficient algorithm that is capable of automatically generating high-quality PBR materials rather than RGB texture for 3D meshes can significantly streamline the 3D content creation. Most existing methods leverage pre-trained 2D diffusion models for multi-view image synthesis, which often leads to severe inconsistency between the generated textures and input 3D meshes. This paper presents TexGaussian, a novel method that uses octant-aligned 3D Gaussian Splatting for rapid PBR material generation. Specifically, we place each 3D Gaussian on the finest leaf node of the octree built from the input 3D mesh to render the multi-view images not only for the albedo map but also for roughness and metallic. Moreover, our model is trained in a regression manner instead of diffusion denoising, capable of generating the PBR material for a 3D mesh in a single feed-forward process. Extensive experiments on publicly available benchmarks demonstrate that our method synthesizes more visually pleasing PBR materials and runs faster than previous methods in both unconditional and text-conditional scenarios, exhibiting better consistency with the given geometry. Our code and trained models are available at https://3d-aigc.github.io/TexGaussian.

  • 9 authors
·
Nov 29, 2024

S3IM: Stochastic Structural SIMilarity and Its Unreasonable Effectiveness for Neural Fields

Recently, Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) has shown great success in rendering novel-view images of a given scene by learning an implicit representation with only posed RGB images. NeRF and relevant neural field methods (e.g., neural surface representation) typically optimize a point-wise loss and make point-wise predictions, where one data point corresponds to one pixel. Unfortunately, this line of research failed to use the collective supervision of distant pixels, although it is known that pixels in an image or scene can provide rich structural information. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to design a nonlocal multiplex training paradigm for NeRF and relevant neural field methods via a novel Stochastic Structural SIMilarity (S3IM) loss that processes multiple data points as a whole set instead of process multiple inputs independently. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the unreasonable effectiveness of S3IM in improving NeRF and neural surface representation for nearly free. The improvements of quality metrics can be particularly significant for those relatively difficult tasks: e.g., the test MSE loss unexpectedly drops by more than 90% for TensoRF and DVGO over eight novel view synthesis tasks; a 198% F-score gain and a 64% Chamfer L_{1} distance reduction for NeuS over eight surface reconstruction tasks. Moreover, S3IM is consistently robust even with sparse inputs, corrupted images, and dynamic scenes.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 14, 2023

POINT^{2}: A Polymer Informatics Training and Testing Database

The advancement of polymer informatics has been significantly propelled by the integration of machine learning (ML) techniques, enabling the rapid prediction of polymer properties and expediting the discovery of high-performance polymeric materials. However, the field lacks a standardized workflow that encompasses prediction accuracy, uncertainty quantification, ML interpretability, and polymer synthesizability. In this study, we introduce POINT^{2} (POlymer INformatics Training and Testing), a comprehensive benchmark database and protocol designed to address these critical challenges. Leveraging the existing labeled datasets and the unlabeled PI1M dataset, a collection of approximately one million virtual polymers generated via a recurrent neural network trained on the realistic polymers, we develop an ensemble of ML models, including Quantile Random Forests, Multilayer Perceptrons with dropout, Graph Neural Networks, and pretrained large language models. These models are coupled with diverse polymer representations such as Morgan, MACCS, RDKit, Topological, Atom Pair fingerprints, and graph-based descriptors to achieve property predictions, uncertainty estimations, model interpretability, and template-based polymerization synthesizability across a spectrum of properties, including gas permeability, thermal conductivity, glass transition temperature, melting temperature, fractional free volume, and density. The POINT^{2} database can serve as a valuable resource for the polymer informatics community for polymer discovery and optimization.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 30, 2025

Learning Multiple-Scattering Solutions for Sphere-Tracing of Volumetric Subsurface Effects

Accurate subsurface scattering solutions require the integration of optical material properties along many complicated light paths. We present a method that learns a simple geometric approximation of random paths in a homogeneous volume of translucent material. The generated representation allows determining the absorption along the path as well as a direct lighting contribution, which is representative of all scattering events along the path. A sequence of conditional variational auto-encoders (CVAEs) is trained to model the statistical distribution of the photon paths inside a spherical region in presence of multiple scattering events. A first CVAE learns to sample the number of scattering events, occurring on a ray path inside the sphere, which effectively determines the probability of the ray being absorbed. Conditioned on this, a second model predicts the exit position and direction of the light particle. Finally, a third model generates a representative sample of photon position and direction along the path, which is used to approximate the contribution of direct illumination due to in-scattering. To accelerate the tracing of the light path through the volumetric medium toward the solid boundary, we employ a sphere-tracing strategy that considers the light absorption and is able to perform statistically accurate next-event estimation. We demonstrate efficient learning using shallow networks of only three layers and no more than 16 nodes. In combination with a GPU shader that evaluates the CVAEs' predictions, performance gains can be demonstrated for a variety of different scenarios. A quality evaluation analyzes the approximation error that is introduced by the data-driven scattering simulation and sheds light on the major sources of error in the accelerated path tracing process.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 5, 2020

A Nonintrusive Distributed Reduced Order Modeling Framework for nonlinear structural mechanics -- application to elastoviscoplastic computations

In this work, we propose a framework that constructs reduced order models for nonlinear structural mechanics in a nonintrusive fashion, and can handle large scale simulations. We identify three steps that are carried out separately in time, and possibly on different devices: (i) the production of high-fidelity solutions by a commercial software, (ii) the offline stage of the model reduction and (iii) the online stage where the reduced order model is exploited. The nonintrusivity assumes that only the displacement field solution is known, and relies on operations on simulation data during the offline phase by using an in-house code. The compatibility with a new commercial code only needs the implementation of a routine converting the mesh and result format into our in-house data format. The nonintrusive capabilities of the framework are demonstrated on numerical experiments using commercial versions of the finite element softwares Zset and Ansys Mechanical. The nonlinear constitutive equations are evaluated by using the same external plugins as for Zset or Ansys Mechanical. The large scale simulations are handled using domain decomposition and parallel computing with distributed memory. The features and performances of the framework are evaluated on two numerical applications involving elastoviscoplastic materials: the second one involves a model of high-pressure blade, where the framework is used to extrapolate cyclic loadings in 6.5 hours, whereas the reference high-fidelity computation would take 9.5 days.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 18, 2018

MeLM, a generative pretrained language modeling framework that solves forward and inverse mechanics problems

We report a flexible multi-modal mechanics language model, MeLM, applied to solve various nonlinear forward and inverse problems, that can deal with a set of instructions, numbers and microstructure data. The framework is applied to various examples including bio-inspired hierarchical honeycomb design, carbon nanotube mechanics, and protein unfolding. In spite of the flexible nature of the model-which allows us to easily incorporate diverse materials, scales, and mechanical features-it performs well across disparate forward and inverse tasks. Based on an autoregressive attention-model, MeLM effectively represents a large multi-particle system consisting of hundreds of millions of neurons, where the interaction potentials are discovered through graph-forming self-attention mechanisms that are then used to identify relationships from emergent structures, while taking advantage of synergies discovered in the training data. We show that the model can solve complex degenerate mechanics design problems and determine novel material architectures across a range of hierarchical levels, providing an avenue for materials discovery and analysis. Looking beyond the demonstrations reported in this paper, we discuss other opportunities in applied mechanics and general considerations about the use of large language models in modeling, design, and analysis that can span a broad spectrum of material properties from mechanical, thermal, optical, to electronic.

  • 1 authors
·
Jun 30, 2023

EquiNO: A Physics-Informed Neural Operator for Multiscale Simulations

Multiscale problems are ubiquitous in physics. Numerical simulations of such problems by solving partial differential equations (PDEs) at high resolution are computationally too expensive for many-query scenarios, e.g., uncertainty quantification, remeshing applications, topology optimization, and so forth. This limitation has motivated the application of data-driven surrogate models, where the microscale computations are substituted with a surrogate, usually acting as a black-box mapping between macroscale quantities. These models offer significant speedups but struggle with incorporating microscale physical constraints, such as the balance of linear momentum and constitutive models. In this contribution, we propose Equilibrium Neural Operator (EquiNO) as a complementary physics-informed PDE surrogate for predicting microscale physics and compare it with variational physics-informed neural and operator networks. Our framework, applicable to the so-called multiscale FE^{,2}, computations, introduces the FE-OL approach by integrating the finite element (FE) method with operator learning (OL). We apply the proposed FE-OL approach to quasi-static problems of solid mechanics. The results demonstrate that FE-OL can yield accurate solutions even when confronted with a restricted dataset during model development. Our results show that EquiNO achieves speedup factors exceeding 8000-fold compared to traditional methods and offers an optimal balance between data-driven and physics-based strategies.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 27, 2025

Uncertainty Visualization of Critical Points of 2D Scalar Fields for Parametric and Nonparametric Probabilistic Models

This paper presents a novel end-to-end framework for closed-form computation and visualization of critical point uncertainty in 2D uncertain scalar fields. Critical points are fundamental topological descriptors used in the visualization and analysis of scalar fields. The uncertainty inherent in data (e.g., observational and experimental data, approximations in simulations, and compression), however, creates uncertainty regarding critical point positions. Uncertainty in critical point positions, therefore, cannot be ignored, given their impact on downstream data analysis tasks. In this work, we study uncertainty in critical points as a function of uncertainty in data modeled with probability distributions. Although Monte Carlo (MC) sampling techniques have been used in prior studies to quantify critical point uncertainty, they are often expensive and are infrequently used in production-quality visualization software. We, therefore, propose a new end-to-end framework to address these challenges that comprises a threefold contribution. First, we derive the critical point uncertainty in closed form, which is more accurate and efficient than the conventional MC sampling methods. Specifically, we provide the closed-form and semianalytical (a mix of closed-form and MC methods) solutions for parametric (e.g., uniform, Epanechnikov) and nonparametric models (e.g., histograms) with finite support. Second, we accelerate critical point probability computations using a parallel implementation with the VTK-m library, which is platform portable. Finally, we demonstrate the integration of our implementation with the ParaView software system to demonstrate near-real-time results for real datasets.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 25, 2024

PDE-Agents: An LLM-Orchestrated Multi-Agent Framework for Automated Finite Element Simulations with Knowledge Graph-Augmented Reasoning

We present PDE-Agents, a multi-agent ecosystem that automates the full lifecycle of partial differential equation (PDE) / finite element method (FEM) simulations through natural-language interaction. Three specialist large language model (LLM) agents (Simulation, Analytics, Database) are orchestrated via a LangGraph supervisor, with a local open-source LLM stack (Qwen3-Coder-Next, Llama 4 Scout) on dual NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 GPUs. The architecture is model-agnostic, validated across two LLM generations. A GraphRAG knowledge base (Neo4j, 768-d vector embeddings) encodes curated material properties, known failure patterns, and prior run lineage. We report seven contributions: (i) a verification and validation (V&V) study confirming second-order spatial convergence (O(h^2)) on the heat-equation solver; (ii) a three-way ablation over 50 tasks with a frozen KG (KG On, KG Off, KG Smart), where KG Smart reaches 100% success and the highest output quality (physics 0.933 vs. 0.853 for KG Off; MPF 0.926 vs. 0.796); (iii) a novel-material experiment with three fictional materials known only to the KG, where KG Smart attains near-perfect material property fidelity (MPF = 1.00) versus 0.34 for the KG-free baseline; (iv) a failure analysis tracing KG On's three failures to budget exhaustion and timeout, establishing warm-start injection as the dominant reliability factor; (v) an adaptive framework selecting the optimal retrieval mode per task; (vi) production metrics from 1,369 runs (97.8% success, 57.6% first-try); and (vii) a 100-task KG growth experiment showing a difficulty-dependent gain, with hard-task MPF improving 8.8% while easy/novel tasks stay at ceiling. All code, models, and evaluation artifacts are released openly. Our findings show that integration pattern, not knowledge content, determines whether GraphRAG augmentation helps or hinders LLM agents.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 4

FEM-Bench: A Structured Scientific Reasoning Benchmark for Evaluating Code-Generating LLMs

As LLMs advance their reasoning capabilities about the physical world, the absence of rigorous benchmarks for evaluating their ability to generate scientifically valid physical models has become a critical gap. Computational mechanics, which develops and applies mathematical models and numerical methods to predict the behavior of physical systems under forces, deformation, and constraints, provides an ideal foundation for structured scientific reasoning evaluation. Problems follow clear mathematical structure, enforce strict physical and numerical constraints, and support objective verification. The discipline requires constructing explicit models of physical systems and reasoning about geometry, spatial relationships, and material behavior, connecting directly to emerging AI goals in physical reasoning and world modeling. We introduce FEM-Bench, a computational mechanics benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of LLMs to generate correct finite element method (FEM) and related code. FEM-Bench 2025 contains a suite of introductory but nontrivial tasks aligned with material from a first graduate course on computational mechanics. These tasks capture essential numerical and physical modeling challenges while representing only a small fraction of the complexity present in the discipline. Despite their simplicity, state-of-the-art LLMs do not reliably solve all of them. In a five attempt run, the best performing model at function writing, Gemini 3 Pro, completed 30/33 tasks at least once and 26/33 tasks all five times. The best performing model at unit test writing, GPT-5, had an Average Joint Success Rate of 73.8%. Other popular models showed broad performance variation. FEM-Bench establishes a structured foundation for evaluating AI-generated scientific code, and future iterations will incorporate increasingly sophisticated tasks to track progress as models evolve.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 23, 2025

Gaussian-Flow: 4D Reconstruction with Dynamic 3D Gaussian Particle

We introduce Gaussian-Flow, a novel point-based approach for fast dynamic scene reconstruction and real-time rendering from both multi-view and monocular videos. In contrast to the prevalent NeRF-based approaches hampered by slow training and rendering speeds, our approach harnesses recent advancements in point-based 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Specifically, a novel Dual-Domain Deformation Model (DDDM) is proposed to explicitly model attribute deformations of each Gaussian point, where the time-dependent residual of each attribute is captured by a polynomial fitting in the time domain, and a Fourier series fitting in the frequency domain. The proposed DDDM is capable of modeling complex scene deformations across long video footage, eliminating the need for training separate 3DGS for each frame or introducing an additional implicit neural field to model 3D dynamics. Moreover, the explicit deformation modeling for discretized Gaussian points ensures ultra-fast training and rendering of a 4D scene, which is comparable to the original 3DGS designed for static 3D reconstruction. Our proposed approach showcases a substantial efficiency improvement, achieving a 5times faster training speed compared to the per-frame 3DGS modeling. In addition, quantitative results demonstrate that the proposed Gaussian-Flow significantly outperforms previous leading methods in novel view rendering quality. Project page: https://nju-3dv.github.io/projects/Gaussian-Flow

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 6, 2023

Microscale stress-geometry interactions in an additively manufactured NiTi cardiovascular stent: A synchrotron dual imaging tomography and diffraction study

This study explores cardiovascular stents fabricated using laser powder bed fusion (LPBF); an emerging method to offer patient-specific customisable parts. Here, the shape memory alloy NiTi, in a near equiatomic composition, was investigated to deconvolve the material response from macroscopic component effects. Specifically, stress-geometry interactions were revealed, in-situ, for a minaturised cardiovascular stent subjected to an externally applied cylindrical stress whilst acquiring synchrotron X-ray imaging and diffraction data. The approach enabled the collection of spatially resolved micromechanical deformation data; the formation of stress-induced martensite and R-phase was evident, occurring in locations near junctions between stent ligaments where stress concentrations exist. In the as-fabricated condition, hardness maps were obtained through nanoindentation, demonstrating that the localised deformation and deformation patterning is further controlled by porosity and microstructural heterogeneity. Electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) supported these observations, showing a finer grain structure near stent junctions with higher associated lattice curvature. These features, combined with stress concentrations when loaded will initiate localised phase transformations. If the stent was subjected to repeated loading, representing in-vivo conditions, these regions would be susceptible to cyclic damage through transformation memory loss, leading to premature component failure. This study highlights the challenges that must be addressed for the post-processing treatment of LABF-processed stents for healthcare-related applications.

  • 11 authors
·
Dec 12, 2023

TRIPS: Trilinear Point Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering

Point-based radiance field rendering has demonstrated impressive results for novel view synthesis, offering a compelling blend of rendering quality and computational efficiency. However, also latest approaches in this domain are not without their shortcomings. 3D Gaussian Splatting [Kerbl and Kopanas et al. 2023] struggles when tasked with rendering highly detailed scenes, due to blurring and cloudy artifacts. On the other hand, ADOP [R\"uckert et al. 2022] can accommodate crisper images, but the neural reconstruction network decreases performance, it grapples with temporal instability and it is unable to effectively address large gaps in the point cloud. In this paper, we present TRIPS (Trilinear Point Splatting), an approach that combines ideas from both Gaussian Splatting and ADOP. The fundamental concept behind our novel technique involves rasterizing points into a screen-space image pyramid, with the selection of the pyramid layer determined by the projected point size. This approach allows rendering arbitrarily large points using a single trilinear write. A lightweight neural network is then used to reconstruct a hole-free image including detail beyond splat resolution. Importantly, our render pipeline is entirely differentiable, allowing for automatic optimization of both point sizes and positions. Our evaluation demonstrate that TRIPS surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of rendering quality while maintaining a real-time frame rate of 60 frames per second on readily available hardware. This performance extends to challenging scenarios, such as scenes featuring intricate geometry, expansive landscapes, and auto-exposed footage.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 11, 2024

MatDecompSDF: High-Fidelity 3D Shape and PBR Material Decomposition from Multi-View Images

We present MatDecompSDF, a novel framework for recovering high-fidelity 3D shapes and decomposing their physically-based material properties from multi-view images. The core challenge of inverse rendering lies in the ill-posed disentanglement of geometry, materials, and illumination from 2D observations. Our method addresses this by jointly optimizing three neural components: a neural Signed Distance Function (SDF) to represent complex geometry, a spatially-varying neural field for predicting PBR material parameters (albedo, roughness, metallic), and an MLP-based model for capturing unknown environmental lighting. The key to our approach is a physically-based differentiable rendering layer that connects these 3D properties to the input images, allowing for end-to-end optimization. We introduce a set of carefully designed physical priors and geometric regularizations, including a material smoothness loss and an Eikonal loss, to effectively constrain the problem and achieve robust decomposition. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets (e.g., DTU) demonstrate that MatDecompSDF surpasses state-of-the-art methods in geometric accuracy, material fidelity, and novel view synthesis. Crucially, our method produces editable and relightable assets that can be seamlessly integrated into standard graphics pipelines, validating its practical utility for digital content creation.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 7, 2025

PhysRig: Differentiable Physics-Based Skinning and Rigging Framework for Realistic Articulated Object Modeling

Skinning and rigging are fundamental components in animation, articulated object reconstruction, motion transfer, and 4D generation. Existing approaches predominantly rely on Linear Blend Skinning (LBS), due to its simplicity and differentiability. However, LBS introduces artifacts such as volume loss and unnatural deformations, and it fails to model elastic materials like soft tissues, fur, and flexible appendages (e.g., elephant trunks, ears, and fatty tissues). In this work, we propose PhysRig: a differentiable physics-based skinning and rigging framework that overcomes these limitations by embedding the rigid skeleton into a volumetric representation (e.g., a tetrahedral mesh), which is simulated as a deformable soft-body structure driven by the animated skeleton. Our method leverages continuum mechanics and discretizes the object as particles embedded in an Eulerian background grid to ensure differentiability with respect to both material properties and skeletal motion. Additionally, we introduce material prototypes, significantly reducing the learning space while maintaining high expressiveness. To evaluate our framework, we construct a comprehensive synthetic dataset using meshes from Objaverse, The Amazing Animals Zoo, and MixaMo, covering diverse object categories and motion patterns. Our method consistently outperforms traditional LBS-based approaches, generating more realistic and physically plausible results. Furthermore, we demonstrate the applicability of our framework in the pose transfer task highlighting its versatility for articulated object modeling.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 25, 2025 3

EarthquakeNPP: A Benchmark for Earthquake Forecasting with Neural Point Processes

For decades, classical point process models, such as the epidemic-type aftershock sequence (ETAS) model, have been widely used for forecasting the event times and locations of earthquakes. Recent advances have led to Neural Point Processes (NPPs), which promise greater flexibility and improvements over such classical models. However, the currently-used benchmark for NPPs does not represent an up-to-date challenge in the seismological community, since it contains data leakage and omits the largest earthquake sequence from the region. Additionally, initial earthquake forecasting benchmarks fail to compare NPPs with state-of-the-art forecasting models commonly used in seismology. To address these gaps, we introduce EarthquakeNPP: a benchmarking platform that curates and standardizes existing public resources: globally available earthquake catalogs, the ETAS model, and evaluation protocols from the seismology community. The datasets cover a range of small to large target regions within California, dating from 1971 to 2021, and include different methodologies for dataset generation. Benchmarking experiments, using both log-likelihood and generative evaluation metrics widely recognised in seismology, show that none of the five NPPs tested outperform ETAS. These findings suggest that current NPP implementations are not yet suitable for practical earthquake forecasting. Nonetheless, EarthquakeNPP provides a platform to foster future collaboration between the seismology and machine learning communities.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 27, 2024

Creation of single vacancies in hBN with electron irradiation

Understanding electron irradiation effects is vital not only for reliable transmission electron microscopy characterization, but increasingly also for the controlled manipulation of two-dimensional materials. The displacement cross sections of monolayer hBN are measured using aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy in near ultra-high vacuum at primary beam energies between 50 and 90 keV. Damage rates below 80 keV are up to three orders of magnitude lower than previously measured at edges under poorer residual vacuum conditions where chemical etching appears to have been dominant. Notably, is possible to create single vacancies in hBN using electron irradiation, with boron almost twice as likely as nitrogen to be ejected below 80 keV. Moreover, any damage at such low energies cannot be explained by elastic knock-on, even when accounting for vibrations of the atoms. A theoretical description is developed to account for lowering of the displacement threshold due to valence ionization resulting from inelastic scattering of probe electrons, modelled using charge-constrained density functional theory molecular dynamics. Although significant reductions are found depending on the constrained charge, quantitative predictions for realistic ionization states are currently not possible. Nonetheless, there is potential for defect-engineering of hBN at the level of single vacancies using electron irradiation.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 1, 2023

Physics3D: Learning Physical Properties of 3D Gaussians via Video Diffusion

In recent years, there has been rapid development in 3D generation models, opening up new possibilities for applications such as simulating the dynamic movements of 3D objects and customizing their behaviors. However, current 3D generative models tend to focus only on surface features such as color and shape, neglecting the inherent physical properties that govern the behavior of objects in the real world. To accurately simulate physics-aligned dynamics, it is essential to predict the physical properties of materials and incorporate them into the behavior prediction process. Nonetheless, predicting the diverse materials of real-world objects is still challenging due to the complex nature of their physical attributes. In this paper, we propose Physics3D, a novel method for learning various physical properties of 3D objects through a video diffusion model. Our approach involves designing a highly generalizable physical simulation system based on a viscoelastic material model, which enables us to simulate a wide range of materials with high-fidelity capabilities. Moreover, we distill the physical priors from a video diffusion model that contains more understanding of realistic object materials. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method with both elastic and plastic materials. Physics3D shows great potential for bridging the gap between the physical world and virtual neural space, providing a better integration and application of realistic physical principles in virtual environments. Project page: https://liuff19.github.io/Physics3D.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 6, 2024 4

MultiLevel Variational MultiScale (ML-VMS) framework for large-scale simulation

In this paper, we propose the MultiLevel Variational MultiScale (ML-VMS) method, a novel approach that seamlessly integrates a multilevel mesh strategy into the Variational Multiscale (VMS) framework. A key feature of the ML-VMS method is the use of the Convolutional Hierarchical Deep Neural Network (C-HiDeNN) as the approximation basis. The framework employs a coarse mesh throughout the domain, with localized fine meshes placed only in subdomains of high interest, such as those surrounding a source. Solutions at different resolutions are robustly coupled through the variational weak form and interface conditions. Compared to existing multilevel methods, ML-VMS (1) can couple an arbitrary number of mesh levels across different scales using variational multiscale framework; (2) allows approximating functions with arbitrary orders with linear finite element mesh due to the C-HiDeNN basis; (3) is supported by a rigorous theoretical error analysis; (4) features several tunable hyperparameters (e.g., order p, patch size s) with a systematic guide for their selection. We first show the theoretical error estimates of ML-VMS. Then through numerical examples, we demonstrate that ML-VMS with the C-HiDeNN takes less computational time than the FEM basis given comparable accuracy. Furthermore, we incorporate a space-time reduced-order model (ROM) based on C-HiDeNN-Tensor Decomposition (TD) into the ML-VMS framework. For a large-scale single-track laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) transient heat transfer problem that is equivalent to a full-order finite element model with 10^{10} spatial degrees of freedom (DoFs), our 3-level ML-VMS C-HiDeNN-TD achieves an approximately 5,000x speedup on a single CPU over a single-level linear FEM-TD ROM.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 27, 2025

RPBG: Towards Robust Neural Point-based Graphics in the Wild

Point-based representations have recently gained popularity in novel view synthesis, for their unique advantages, e.g., intuitive geometric representation, simple manipulation, and faster convergence. However, based on our observation, these point-based neural re-rendering methods are only expected to perform well under ideal conditions and suffer from noisy, patchy points and unbounded scenes, which are challenging to handle but defacto common in real applications. To this end, we revisit one such influential method, known as Neural Point-based Graphics (NPBG), as our baseline, and propose Robust Point-based Graphics (RPBG). We in-depth analyze the factors that prevent NPBG from achieving satisfactory renderings on generic datasets, and accordingly reform the pipeline to make it more robust to varying datasets in-the-wild. Inspired by the practices in image restoration, we greatly enhance the neural renderer to enable the attention-based correction of point visibility and the inpainting of incomplete rasterization, with only acceptable overheads. We also seek for a simple and lightweight alternative for environment modeling and an iterative method to alleviate the problem of poor geometry. By thorough evaluation on a wide range of datasets with different shooting conditions and camera trajectories, RPBG stably outperforms the baseline by a large margin, and exhibits its great robustness over state-of-the-art NeRF-based variants. Code available at https://github.com/QT-Zhu/RPBG.

  • 8 authors
·
May 9, 2024

Multi-Spectroscopic Method to Quantify Rapid Decomposition of an Organophosphate Simulant Using Reactive Materials as a Function of Metal Powder Chemistry and Temperature

The development of advanced diagnostic systems to measure and optimize emerging energetic material performance is critical for the defeat of Chemical Warfare Agents (CWA). This study presents an integrated multi-spectroscopic approach to monitor the interaction between a CWA simulant, Diisopropyl Methyl Phosphonate (DIMP), and combusting composite metal particles. A custom benchtop Polygonal Rotating Mirror Infrared Spectrometer (PRiMIRS), equipped with a customizable experimental chamber, is employed to observe DIMP decomposition. Tunable Diode Laser Absorption Spectroscopy (TDLAS) is used to measure path-averaged gas temperature profiles during combustion. In the experiment, the chamber is preheated to evaporate liquid DIMP. Various composite metal powders (Al-8Mg):3Zr, (Al-8Mg):Zr, 2(Al-8Mg):Zr, and 4(Al-8Mg):Zr are placed on a stainless steel mount and ignited using 3Al-2Ni sputter-deposited nanolayered foils. The combusting metal particles mix with the DIMP vapor, initiating chemical and thermal interactions. PRiMIRS captures DIMP spectral evolution, while TDLAS simultaneously monitors gas temperature. A spectral defeat parameter was developed to enable quantitative real-time assessment of the DIMP destruction. It uses infrared light absorption by both from DIMP and its immediate decomposition products Isopropyl Methyl Phosphonate (IMP) and Isopropyl Alcohol (IPA). Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) serves as a secondary verification tool quantifying the decomposition products over extended timeframes, and Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) confirms the expected metal oxide dispersion within the reaction space. This study reports variability in DIMP defeat as a function of metal powder stoichiometry, metal powder loading, and path-averaged gas temperature profiles, offering critical insights into optimizing reactive materials for effective CWA neutralization.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 4, 2025

ScatterPrism: convergence for generative simulation and inverse problems in particle and nuclear physics

High-fidelity simulations and complex inverse problems, such as detector modeling and unfolding, are computationally intensive bottlenecks across subatomic physics, yet essential for accurate physical interpretation. While Conditional Flow Matching (CFM) offers a robust acceleration approach, we demonstrate its standard training loss is fundamentally misleading. Specifically, utilizing a Jefferson Lab Nuclear Physics (NP) kinematic dataset (γp to ρ^0 p to π^+π^- p), we expose that CFM loss plateaus prematurely, obscuring ongoing physical refinement. To verify this disconnect is a dataset-agnostic pathology, we introduce ScatterPrism, an efficient generative surrogate evaluated against both the NP data and synthetic stress tests modeling challenging 1D distribution topologies. Coupling these benchmarks, we establish that physics-informed metrics continue improving long after standard loss converges. Consequently, we propose a multi-metric diagnostic protocol to ensure true kinematic fidelity without data memorization. Driven by NP challenges relevant to the forthcoming Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), this unified machinery has strong potential to extend to High-Energy Physics (HEP) applications, such as jet modeling. Furthermore, the framework holds promise for broader domains requiring rigorous generative reliability, including medical imaging, astrophysics, and quantitative finance.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 4

How Far Can You Grow? Characterizing the Extrapolation Frontier of Graph Generative Models for Materials Science

Every generative model for crystalline materials harbors a critical structure size beyond which its outputs quietly become unreliable -- we call this the extrapolation frontier. Despite its direct consequences for nanomaterial design, this frontier has never been systematically measured. We introduce RADII, a radius-resolved benchmark of {sim}75,000 nanoparticle structures (55-11,298 atoms) that treats radius as a continuous scaling knob to trace generation quality from in-distribution to out-of-distribution regimes under leakage-free splits. RADII provides frontier-specific diagnostics: per-radius error profiles pinpoint each architecture's scaling ceiling, surface-interior decomposition tests whether failures originate at boundaries or in bulk, and cross-metric failure sequencing reveals which aspect of structural fidelity breaks first. Benchmarking five state-of-the-art architectures, we find that: (i) all models degrade by {sim}13% in global positional error beyond training radii, yet local bond fidelity diverges wildly across architectures -- from near-zero to over 2times collapse; (ii) no two architectures share the same failure sequence, revealing the frontier as a multi-dimensional surface shaped by model family; and (iii) well-behaved models obey a power-law scaling exponent αapprox 1/3 whose in-distribution fit accurately predicts out-of-distribution error, making their frontiers quantitatively forecastable. These findings establish output scale as a first-class evaluation axis for geometric generative models. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/KurbanIntelligenceLab/RADII.

  • 4 authors
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Feb 9

Matbench Discovery -- An evaluation framework for machine learning crystal stability prediction

Matbench Discovery simulates the deployment of machine learning (ML) energy models in a high-throughput search for stable inorganic crystals. We address the disconnect between (i) thermodynamic stability and formation energy and (ii) in-domain vs out-of-distribution performance. Alongside this paper, we publish a Python package to aid with future model submissions and a growing online leaderboard with further insights into trade-offs between various performance metrics. To answer the question which ML methodology performs best at materials discovery, our initial release explores a variety of models including random forests, graph neural networks (GNN), one-shot predictors, iterative Bayesian optimizers and universal interatomic potentials (UIP). Ranked best-to-worst by their test set F1 score on thermodynamic stability prediction, we find CHGNet > M3GNet > MACE > ALIGNN > MEGNet > CGCNN > CGCNN+P > Wrenformer > BOWSR > Voronoi tessellation fingerprints with random forest. The top 3 models are UIPs, the winning methodology for ML-guided materials discovery, achieving F1 scores of ~0.6 for crystal stability classification and discovery acceleration factors (DAF) of up to 5x on the first 10k most stable predictions compared to dummy selection from our test set. We also highlight a sharp disconnect between commonly used global regression metrics and more task-relevant classification metrics. Accurate regressors are susceptible to unexpectedly high false-positive rates if those accurate predictions lie close to the decision boundary at 0 eV/atom above the convex hull where most materials are. Our results highlight the need to focus on classification metrics that actually correlate with improved stability hit rate.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 28, 2023

Optimization of Precipitate Segmentation Through Linear Genetic Programming of Image Processing

Current analysis of additive manufactured niobium-based copper alloys relies on hand annotation due to varying contrast, noise, and image artifacts present in micrographs, slowing iteration speed in alloy development. We present a filtering and segmentation algorithm for detecting precipitates in FIB cross-section micrographs, optimized using linear genetic programming (LGP), which accounts for the various artifacts. To this end, the optimization environment uses a domain-specific language for image processing to iterate on solutions. Programs in this language are a list of image-filtering blocks with tunable parameters that sequentially process an input image, allowing for reliable generation and mutation by a genetic algorithm. Our environment produces optimized human-interpretable MATLAB code representing an image filtering pipeline. Under ideal conditions--a population size of 60 and a maximum program length of 5 blocks--our system was able to find a near-human accuracy solution with an average evaluation error of 1.8% when comparing segmentations pixel-by-pixel to a human baseline using an XOR error evaluation. Our automation work enabled faster iteration cycles and furthered exploration of the material composition and processing space: our optimized pipeline algorithm processes a 3.6 megapixel image in about 2 seconds on average. This ultimately enables convergence on strong, low-activation, precipitation hardened copper alloys for additive manufactured fusion reactor parts.

  • 2 authors
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Feb 6

Challenges and Research Directions from the Operational Use of a Machine Learning Damage Assessment System via Small Uncrewed Aerial Systems at Hurricanes Debby and Helene

This paper details four principal challenges encountered with machine learning (ML) damage assessment using small uncrewed aerial systems (sUAS) at Hurricanes Debby and Helene that prevented, degraded, or delayed the delivery of data products during operations and suggests three research directions for future real-world deployments. The presence of these challenges is not surprising given that a review of the literature considering both datasets and proposed ML models suggests this is the first sUAS-based ML system for disaster damage assessment actually deployed as a part of real-world operations. The sUAS-based ML system was applied by the State of Florida to Hurricanes Helene (2 orthomosaics, 3.0 gigapixels collected over 2 sorties by a Wintra WingtraOne sUAS) and Debby (1 orthomosaic, 0.59 gigapixels collected via 1 sortie by a Wintra WingtraOne sUAS) in Florida. The same model was applied to crewed aerial imagery of inland flood damage resulting from post-tropical remnants of Hurricane Debby in Pennsylvania (436 orthophotos, 136.5 gigapixels), providing further insights into the advantages and limitations of sUAS for disaster response. The four challenges (variationin spatial resolution of input imagery, spatial misalignment between imagery and geospatial data, wireless connectivity, and data product format) lead to three recommendations that specify research needed to improve ML model capabilities to accommodate the wide variation of potential spatial resolutions used in practice, handle spatial misalignment, and minimize the dependency on wireless connectivity. These recommendations are expected to improve the effective operational use of sUAS and sUAS-based ML damage assessment systems for disaster response.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 18, 2025

CarCrashNet: A Large-Scale Dataset and Hierarchical Neural Solver for Data-Driven Structural Crash Simulation

Crash simulation is a cornerstone of modern vehicle development because it reduces the need for costly physical prototypes, accelerates safety-driven design iteration, and increasingly supports virtual testing workflows. At the same time, modeling structural crash mechanics remains exceptionally challenging: the response is governed by nonlinear contact, large deformation, material plasticity, failure, and complex multi-body interactions evolving over space and time on high-resolution finite-element meshes. In this work, we introduce CarCrashNet, a public high-fidelity open-source benchmark for data-driven structural crash simulation. CarCrashNet combines component-scale and full-vehicle simulations in a multi-modal format, including more than 14{,}000 bumper-beam pole-impact simulations with varying geometry, materials, and boundary conditions, together with 825 full-vehicle crash simulations built from three industry-standard vehicle models of increasing structural complexity: Dodge Neon, Toyota Yaris, and Chevrolet Silverado. To establish the reliability of the benchmark, we validate our open-source finite-element workflow based on OpenRadioss against both experimental crash data and the commercial solver Ansys LS-DYNA. We also introduce CrashSolver, a machine-learning model designed for full-vehicle crash prediction from high-resolution finite-element crash data. We further perform extensive benchmarking across the released datasets and evaluate CrashSolver against state-of-the-art geometric deep learning and transformer-based neural solvers. Our results position CarCrashNet as a foundation for reproducible research in structural simulation, crashworthiness modeling, and AI-driven virtual crash testing. The dataset is available at https://github.com/Mohamedelrefaie/CarCrashNet.

  • 4 authors
·
May 7

Automating modeling in mechanics: LLMs as designers of physics-constrained neural networks for constitutive modeling of materials

Large language model (LLM)-based agentic frameworks increasingly adopt the paradigm of dynamically generating task-specific agents. We suggest that not only agents but also specialized software modules for scientific and engineering tasks can be generated on demand. We demonstrate this concept in the field of solid mechanics. There, so-called constitutive models are required to describe the relationship between mechanical stress and body deformation. Constitutive models are essential for both the scientific understanding and industrial application of materials. However, even recent data-driven methods of constitutive modeling, such as constitutive artificial neural networks (CANNs), still require substantial expert knowledge and human labor. We present a framework in which an LLM generates a CANN on demand, tailored to a given material class and dataset provided by the user. The framework covers LLM-based architecture selection, integration of physical constraints, and complete code generation. Evaluation on three benchmark problems demonstrates that LLM-generated CANNs achieve accuracy comparable to or greater than manually engineered counterparts, while also exhibiting reliable generalization to unseen loading scenarios and extrapolation to large deformations. These findings indicate that LLM-based generation of physics-constrained neural networks can substantially reduce the expertise required for constitutive modeling and represent a step toward practical end-to-end automation.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 1, 2025

MeshGS: Adaptive Mesh-Aligned Gaussian Splatting for High-Quality Rendering

Recently, 3D Gaussian splatting has gained attention for its capability to generate high-fidelity rendering results. At the same time, most applications such as games, animation, and AR/VR use mesh-based representations to represent and render 3D scenes. We propose a novel approach that integrates mesh representation with 3D Gaussian splats to perform high-quality rendering of reconstructed real-world scenes. In particular, we introduce a distance-based Gaussian splatting technique to align the Gaussian splats with the mesh surface and remove redundant Gaussian splats that do not contribute to the rendering. We consider the distance between each Gaussian splat and the mesh surface to distinguish between tightly-bound and loosely-bound Gaussian splats. The tightly-bound splats are flattened and aligned well with the mesh geometry. The loosely-bound Gaussian splats are used to account for the artifacts in reconstructed 3D meshes in terms of rendering. We present a training strategy of binding Gaussian splats to the mesh geometry, and take into account both types of splats. In this context, we introduce several regularization techniques aimed at precisely aligning tightly-bound Gaussian splats with the mesh surface during the training process. We validate the effectiveness of our method on large and unbounded scene from mip-NeRF 360 and Deep Blending datasets. Our method surpasses recent mesh-based neural rendering techniques by achieving a 2dB higher PSNR, and outperforms mesh-based Gaussian splatting methods by 1.3 dB PSNR, particularly on the outdoor mip-NeRF 360 dataset, demonstrating better rendering quality. We provide analyses for each type of Gaussian splat and achieve a reduction in the number of Gaussian splats by 30% compared to the original 3D Gaussian splatting.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 11, 2024

Beyond Text and Tables: Vision-Language Model Integration in ComProScanner for Extracting Materials Data from Scientific Figures with High Accuracy

Automated extraction of materials composition-property data from scientific literature has advanced considerably with the development of large language model-based pipelines; however, existing frameworks remain limited to textual and tabular content, overlooking the substantial proportion of quantitative property data reported exclusively in scientific figures. Here, we extend ComProScanner, a fully end-to-end multi-agent framework for automated composition-property database construction, with a native vision-language model (VLM) based figure extraction capability. The extension introduces a FigureExtractor utility for caption-keyword-based figure filtering across all supported publishers, and a GraphExtractorTool agent that passes extracted figures to a configurable VLM to recover composition-property pairs from scientific charts and plots. Four VLMs are selected for evaluation on the basis of the LMArena Diagram leaderboard with an input cost criterion of less than \1.50 per million tokens. Benchmarking on 50 piezoelectric ceramic articles from the established d_{33}$ test corpus demonstrates that Gemini-3-Flash-Preview achieves the highest performance with a composition accuracy of 0.97 and a normalised F1 score of 0.97, whilst remaining the most cost-effective model among the four evaluated. We additionally introduce a range-based value error threshold parameter into the evaluation framework, providing a more physically meaningful assessment of numeric property values extracted from figures than exact value matching. These contributions establish VLM-integrated ComProScanner as the first materials-specific, fully automated, multimodal literature mining platform capable of extracting structured composition-property data from text, tables, and figures within a single unified pipeline.

  • 4 authors
·
May 18

Implicit Neural Spatial Representations for Time-dependent PDEs

Implicit Neural Spatial Representation (INSR) has emerged as an effective representation of spatially-dependent vector fields. This work explores solving time-dependent PDEs with INSR. Classical PDE solvers introduce both temporal and spatial discretizations. Common spatial discretizations include meshes and meshless point clouds, where each degree-of-freedom corresponds to a location in space. While these explicit spatial correspondences are intuitive to model and understand, these representations are not necessarily optimal for accuracy, memory usage, or adaptivity. Keeping the classical temporal discretization unchanged (e.g., explicit/implicit Euler), we explore INSR as an alternative spatial discretization, where spatial information is implicitly stored in the neural network weights. The network weights then evolve over time via time integration. Our approach does not require any training data generated by existing solvers because our approach is the solver itself. We validate our approach on various PDEs with examples involving large elastic deformations, turbulent fluids, and multi-scale phenomena. While slower to compute than traditional representations, our approach exhibits higher accuracy and lower memory consumption. Whereas classical solvers can dynamically adapt their spatial representation only by resorting to complex remeshing algorithms, our INSR approach is intrinsically adaptive. By tapping into the rich literature of classic time integrators, e.g., operator-splitting schemes, our method enables challenging simulations in contact mechanics and turbulent flows where previous neural-physics approaches struggle. Videos and codes are available on the project page: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/cg/INSR-PDE/

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 30, 2022

Generative Inverse Design of Metamaterials with Functional Responses by Interpretable Learning

Metamaterials with functional responses can exhibit varying properties under different conditions (e.g., wave-based responses or deformation-induced property variation). This work addresses the rapid inverse design of such metamaterials to meet target qualitative functional behaviors, a challenge due to its intractability and non-unique solutions. Unlike data-intensive and non-interpretable deep-learning-based methods, we propose the Random-forest-based Interpretable Generative Inverse Design (RIGID), a single-shot inverse design method for fast generation of metamaterial designs with on-demand functional behaviors. RIGID leverages the interpretability of a random forest-based "designrightarrowresponse" forward model, eliminating the need for a more complex "responserightarrowdesign" inverse model. Based on the likelihood of target satisfaction derived from the trained random forest, one can sample a desired number of design solutions using Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. We validate RIGID on acoustic and optical metamaterial design problems, each with fewer than 250 training samples. Compared to the genetic algorithm-based design generation approach, RIGID generates satisfactory solutions that cover a broader range of the design space, allowing for better consideration of additional figures of merit beyond target satisfaction. This work offers a new perspective on solving on-demand inverse design problems, showcasing the potential for incorporating interpretable machine learning into generative design under small data constraints.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 7, 2023