Organizations: Division of Information Science, Graduate School of Science and Technology, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, 8916-5 Takayama, Ikoma, Nara, 630-0192, Japan
Non-destructive extraction of the target internal part, such as batteries and motors, by cutting surrounding structures is crucial at recycling and disposal sites. However, the diversity of products and the lack of information on disassembly procedures make it challenging to decide where to cut. This study explores a method for non-destructive extraction of a target internal part that iteratively estimates the internal structure from observed cutting surfaces and formulates cutting plans based on the estimation results. A key requirement is to estimate the probability of the target part's presence from partial observations. However, learning conditional generative models for this task is challenging: The high dimensionality of 3D shape representations makes learning difficult, and conventional models (e.g., conditional variational autoencoders) often fail to capture multi-modal predictive uncertainty due to mode collapse, resulting in overconfident predictions. To address these issues, we propose VoxelDiffusionCut, which iteratively estimates the internal structure represented as voxels using a diffusion model and plans cuts for non-destructive extraction of the target internal part based on the estimation results. Voxel representation allows the model to predict only attributes at fixed grid positions, i.e., types of constituent parts, making learning more tractable. The diffusion model completes the voxel representation conditioned on observed cutting surfaces, capturing uncertainty in unobserved regions to avoid erroneous cuts. Experimental results in simulation suggest that the proposed method can estimate internal structures from observed cutting surfaces and enable non-destructive extraction of the target internal part by leveraging the estimated uncertainty.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1 : Overview of the process for non-destructive extraction of the target internal part. The process iteratively estimates the internal structure from the observed cutting surfaces and plans cutting positions to extract the target part without damage.
Fig. 2 : Framework of VoxelDiffusionCut. The internal structure prediction model is trained using a diffusion model based on data with various location patterns of internal parts. During deployment, the model estimates the internal structure through conditional generation based on the observed cutting surfaces and subsequently plans the cutting positions.
Fig. 3 : 3D shape representation by voxelization. (a) Voxel representation with a discrete 3D grid K . (b) Examples of cutting surfaces (slices) extracted along the Y -axis (indexed by j ), with each surface denoted as x(i,j) .
Fig. 4 : Cutting action planning along the Y -axis based on predicted internal structure. Values on each cutting surface indicate the presence score of the target internal part. Positions 2 and 3 are feasible owing to their low presence scores, and 3 is selected because it maximizes the removable volume.
Fig. 5 : Object configurations used for evaluation. The battery is defined as the target internal part for extraction. In the simple-shaped model, Part B corresponds to the battery.
Fig. 6 : Examples of cutting process transitions by the proposed VoxelDiffusionCut with the simple-shaped model (Object A). VoxelDiffusionCut plans cutting positions based on the estimated internal structure to maximize the removable volume while non-destructively extracting the target internal part.
Table 7
Fig. 7 : Rendered objects after processing by each method for the simple-shaped models
Fig. 8 : Examples of cutting process transitions by the proposed VoxelDiffusionCut with the complex-shaped model (Object D)
Table 10
Fig. 9 : Rendered objects after processing by each method for complex-shaped models. The areas enlarged in red frames show where the baseline method erroneously cut the target internal part.
Fig. 10 : Comparison of presence score maps for target internal part locations in complex-shaped models at task step t =8
Accurately modeling and tracking the deformation of soft tissue is critical for a wide range of interventional and surgical procedures. However, current methods struggle in scenarios involving topological changes, such as cutting and dissection, due to the inherent non-linearity and discontinuity introduced by explicit changes in connectivity. In this work, we present a novel, fully differentiable framework that enables robust estimation and modeling of topological changes during deformable tracking. Our method introduces a continuous, sigmoid-based formulation to smooth the otherwise discrete event of tissue cutting, making it amenable to gradient-based optimization within a differentiable Position-Based Dynamics (PBD) simulation. To account for uncertainty and improve robustness in the presence of noisy visual data, we incorporate Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) for particle-based probabilistic inference, generating multiple hypotheses for topological state estimation. Building on this foundation, we develop an autonomous dissection algorithm for thin-shell tissues that leverages topological updates to guide closed-loop cutting trajectory control. We evaluate our approach in both simulated and real-world electrosurgical environments, demonstrating significant improvements in topological estimation accuracy and dissection precision over existing methods. Our results highlight the potential of this framework to advance automation in soft-tissue surgical procedures by enabling reliable perception and control in the presence of complex structural changes.
We introduce Discrete Voxel Diffusion (DVD), a discrete diffusion framework to generate, assess, and edit sparse voxels for SLat (Structured LATent) based 3D generative pipelines. Although discrete diffusion has not generally displaced continuous diffusion in image-like generation, we show that it can be an effective first-stage prior for sparse voxel scaffolds. By treating voxel occupancy as a native discrete variable, DVD avoids continuous-to-discrete thresholding and provides a simple framework for voxel generation, uncertainty estimation, and editing. Beyond quality gains, DVD provides more interpretable generation dynamics through explicit categorical modeling. Furthermore, we leverage the predictive entropy as a robust uncertainty metric to identify ambiguous voxel regions and complicated samples, facilitating tasks such as data filtering and quality assessment. Finally, we propose a lightweight fine-tuning strategy using block-structured perturbation patterns. This approach empowers the model to inpaint and edit voxels within a single sampling round, requiring negligible auxiliary computation and no additional model evaluations. Code is available at https://github.com/TeCai/DVD.
Zhengrui Xiang, Jiaqi Wu, Fupeng Sun +2
Imperial College London · Math Magic, Hitem3D · Math Magic
Part-aware 3D generation aims to create digital assets that are coherent as complete objects while exposing structural parts for editing, material assignment, animation, and reuse. Existing methods impose this structure outside the native generation loop: segmentation-based methods partition an already generated shape, while additive methods synthesize parts from predefined layouts, boxes, or tokens and then reconcile them into a whole. The former preserves the generated geometry but fixes the object before part boundaries are determined; the latter exposes part cardinality but often leaves shared boundaries vulnerable to gaps, interpenetrations, and material discontinuities. In this paper, we propose SCULPT, a framework that addresses these challenges through subtractive composition. Given a complete object represented in a structured 3D latent space, SCULPT iteratively applies a joint split predictor to generate one extracted part together with the remaining object. The predictor performs a coupled denoising process conditioned on both the image and the current 3D state, so the extracted part and updated remainder are generated together rather than reconciled after generation. The joint split predictor processes both outputs on the union of their native sparse 3D supports, allowing neighboring supports to overlap rather than imposing a disjoint voxel partition. The rollout ends when the remainder support becomes empty or reaches a fixed safety cap, allowing the number of generated parts to adapt to each object within that bound. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art geometry on PartObjaverse while preserving strong complete-object reconstruction after part assembly. Results on four dataset images, one text-to-image-generated input, and one real-world photograph further show fine-grained textured part decomposition beyond the benchmark.
Sikuang Li, Chen Yang, Jiemin Fang +5
Shanghai Jiao Tong University · This work was done during an internship at Huawei. · Huawei