We introduce Patchwork, a new general-purpose shape representation capable of modeling 2D and 3D geometry with a small number of parameters. Patchwork is grounded in a rigorous mathematical framework, providing provable complexity bounds and the ability to approximate arbitrary shapes with arbitrary precision in any dimension. We propose an efficient gradient-based optimization scheme to fit Patchwork representations to 2D and 3D data, along with a novel regularization loss that progressively prunes redundant elements, yielding high compactness after convergence. Our approach offers fast fitting performance, a fraction of the required parameters compared to existing alternatives, and native support for inside-outside classification, making it a versatile and compact representation for geometric learning and reconstruction tasks, with future potential for 3D generation. Our implementation is available at: https://github.com/Ankbzpx/patchwork-experiment.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Our method represents 3D shapes in a very compact and memory-efficient way.
Figure 2: A patchwork (the boundary between the dark and light areas) for increasing values of β (left and middle) and the limiting case β→+∞ (right). The design lines (blue), the equality lines (dashed), the candidate intervals (brown/orange), and the active intervals (orange). Just two design lines represent a concave angle.
Figure 3: Nonconvex (left), disconnected (middle), and non-simply-connected (right) shapes and their approximations by patchworks computed by optimization (right per pair). Each patchwork is the boundary between a dark and a light region. These compact representations have just n=12,37,55 design lines (left to right). The candidate intervals (brown/orange) decompose the plane into polygons. The “interior” of the patchwork is roughly the union of the polygons corresponding to the indices i with si<0 , and the patchwork is roughly the union of active intervals (orange).
Figure 4: Patchworks (orange) approximating a given curve (red). The construction can employ a square grid (left), a honeycomb lattice (middle), or an affine transformation of the latter (right). The squares/hexagons inside the curve are light, the other ones are dark, and the patchwork separates the colors.
Figure 5: Patchworks approximating a sphere (a and c) and a torus (e), and their limiting cases β→+∞ (b, d, f). The patchworks (a, c, e) visually coincide with the shapes, although their width is just n=13 , 31 , 30 (left to right). For (a and b), the 12 design planes contain the faces of the dodecahedron (b), and the 13 th linear function is constant. For (e and f), just 30 design planes represent an intricate nonconvex shape.
Method
CH ↓
HD ↓
FS ↑
# Params
MC
6.79
8.68
49.93
8000
RFTA
3.62
5.88
36.83
8000
SPSR
5.55
7.20
19.66
8806
VoroMesh
17.27
16.81
7.95
8000
PoNQ
8.01
13.44
53.61
8800
SIREN
22.57
77.28
51.52
8641
Table 1: Quantitative results on the roof modeling dataset. The bold text indicates the best score. To approximate the SPSR parameter count, we voxelize input clouds over sparse octrees of the same depth, then average the number of nodes. Ours is the average parameter size after the progressive pruning. CH = Chamfer; HD = Hausdorff; FS = F-score.
Figure 6: Qualitative results on the roof modeling dataset. Our method has clear advantages both in visual quality and compactness.
Method
CH ↓
HD ↓
FS ↑
# Params
MC
4.61 / 3.56
6.00 / 6.78
48.10 / 43.82
125000
RFTA
3.82 / 12.92
5.60 / 7.15
53.09 / 53.51
125000
SPSR
2.49 / 2.02
3.77 / 4.32
58.01 / 63.21
150975
VoroMesh
5.95 / 3.62
6.94 / 6.65
36.99 / 42.17
125000
PoNQ
3.30 / 2.87
5.82 / 6.20
58.59 / 51.79
132000
SIREN
2.79 / 3.18
25.32 / 26.24
57.25 / 61.28
132865
Table 2: Quantitative results on ABC / Thingi10K. The bold text indicates the best score; the underlined text indicates the second-best. To approximate the SPSR parameter count, we voxelize input clouds over sparse octrees of the same depth, then average the number of nodes. Ours is the average parameter size after the progressive pruning. CH = Chamfer; HD = Hausdorff; FS = F-score.
Figure 7: Qualitative results on the ABC and Thingi10k datasets. Our method can compactly represent CAD and general shapes.
Chamfer ↓
Hausdorff ↓
F-score ↑
w.o.
14.33 / 61.73 / 59.00
18.20 / 40.24 / 41.46
29.87 / 8.16 / 3.98
w.
1.42 / 2.48 / 2.39
1.45 / 4.93 / 5.88
76.88 / 60.83 / 61.59
Table 3: Ablation study of our explicit geometric initialization on roof modeling / ABC / Thingi10k datasets.
Lsur
Lnormal
Lreg
Chamfer ↓
Hausdorff ↓
F-score ↑
✓
✗
✗
132.68
115.16
3.36
✓
✓
✗
57.49
83.27
39.92
✓
✗
✓
1.56
2.06
76.79
✗
✗
✓
496.99
114.51
0.05
✗
✓
✓
503.22
132.20
0.09
✓
✓
✓
1.42
1.45
76.88
Table 4: Ablation study of Lsur , Lnormal , and Lreg on the roof modeling dataset.
N
Chamfer ↓
Hausdorff ↓
F-score ↑
w.o.
1.69
1.90
76.71
w.
1.42
1.45
76.88
Table 5: Ablation study of progressive pruning on the roof modeling dataset.
Appendix figures & tables8 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Curve complexity measure
Notation
Bound
Underlying theorem
x -projection degree
D
M≥D
Bézout’s theorem
number of components
C
M≥2C
Harnack’s curve theorem
Appendix
Table 6: A few lower bounds on the precision complexity M of a patchwork representing a given bounded curve. The x -projection degree D is the maximal number of intersections of the curve with an y -parallel line. See Section 0.C for details.
Surface complexity measure
Bound
Underlying theorem
xy -projection degree
D
M≥D
Bézout’s theorem
number of components
C
M≥32C
Generalized Harnack Inequality
number of handles
G
M≥32(C+G)
[ 12 ] and Proposition 1
Appendix
Table 7: A few lower bounds on the precision complexity M of a patchwork representing a given closed surface. The xy -projection degree D is the maximal number of intersections of the surface with a z -parallel line. The number of handles G is the total genus of all the surface components. See Section 0.C for details.
Figure 8: Explicit extraction. The top row illustrates the patchwork extraction procedure, from left to right: 1) equality lines; 2) halfspace intersections with connectivity; 3) resulting interior candidate polygons; 4) resulting active segments. The bottom row shows extractions, interior candidate polyhedra, and tessellations for 3D cases. We use Qhull [ 2 ] for convex hull computation and Polycope [ 28 ] for visualization.
Figure 9: More qualitative results on the roof modeling dataset.
Figure 10: More qualitative results on the ABC dataset.
Figure 11: More qualitative results on the Thingi10K dataset.
Figure 12: Two failure cases of our method. Per row, from left to right, the pairs correspond to Ours Init, Ours, and GT.
Figure 13: Some 2D examples. Numbers indicate the number of parameters (i.e., 3× the number of design lines) needed to represent them as a patchwork.
Industrial CAD workflows require robust, generalizable 3D geometric representations supporting accuracy and explainability. We introduce Shape, a self-supervised foundation model converting surface meshes into dense per-token embeddings. Shape combines a structured 3D latent grid, a multi-scale geometry-aware tokenizer (MAGNO) with cross-attention, and a transformer processor using grouped-query attention and RMSNorm. A learned reconstruction prior enables per-region attribution for explainable predictions. Pretraining uses masked-token reconstruction of normalized geometry statistics and multi-resolution contrastive consistency. The 10.9M-parameter backbone is pretrained on 61,052 CAD meshes from Thingi10K, MFCAD, and Fusion360. On a held-out split of 2,983 meshes, Shape achieves reconstruction R2 = 0.729 and 98.1% top-1 retrieval under the Wang-Isola protocol, with near-zero reconstruction train/val gap (contrastive scores use a larger evaluation pool). A 2x2 ablation on loss type and target-space normalization shows per-dimension normalization is critical: without it, performance collapses (R2 < 0.14, top-1 < 88%); with it, both losses succeed (R2 > 0.70, top-1 > 96%). Smooth-L1 offers secondary stability. Code, embeddings, and an interactive demo are released at https://github.com/simd-ai/shape.
We consider the problem of regenerating 3D objects from 2D images and initial 3D shapes. Most 3D generators operate in a one-shot fashion, converting text or images to a 3D object with limited controllability. We introduce instead MeshReGen, a 3D regenerator that is conditioned on an initial 3D shape. This conceptually simple formulation allows us to support numerous useful tasks, including 3D enhancement, reconstruction, and editing. MeshReGen uses a new conditioning mechanism based on VecSet, which allows the regenerator to update or improve the input geometry with consistent fine-grained details. MeshReGen learns a widely applicable regeneration prior from off-the-shelf 3D datasets via self-supervised pretext tasks and augmentations, without additional annotations. We evaluate both the geometric consistency and fine-grained quality of MeshReGen, achieving state-of-the-art performance in controllable 3D generation across several tasks.
Geon Yeong Park, Roman Shapovalov, Rakesh Ranjan +3
KAIST · ⋆Work done during an internship at Meta Reality Labs. · Meta Reality Labs
Traditional explicit 3D representations, such as point clouds and meshes, demand significant storage to capture fine geometric details and require complex indexing systems for surface lookups, making functional representations an efficient, compact, and continuous alternative. In this work, we propose a novel, object-specific functional shape representation that models surface geometry with Gaussian Process (GP) mixture models. Rather than relying on computationally heavy neural architectures, our method is lightweight, leveraging GPs to learn continuous directional distance fields from sparsely sampled point clouds. We capture complex topologies by anchoring local GP priors at strategic reference points, which can be flexibly extracted using any structural decomposition method (e.g. skeletonization, distance-based clustering). Extensive evaluations on the ShapeNetCore and IndustryShapes datasets demonstrate that our method can efficiently and accurately represent complex geometries.
Panagiotis Sapoutzoglou, George Terzakis, Georgios Floros +1
Laboratory of Photogrammetry, School of Rural, Surveying and Geoinformatics Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Greece