Overview

3D scene representation studies how to encode the shape, appearance, meaning, and motion of environments so they can be reconstructed, rendered, edited, or used by robots and other AI systems. Common approaches include explicit representations such as meshes, voxels, point clouds, Gaussian splats, and scene graphs, alongside implicit neural fields and compact learned tokens; these are used in tasks from novel-view synthesis to dynamic mapping and scene generation. Current work increasingly combines geometric structure with language or semantic features, and tests representations on reconstruction benchmarks as well as navigation, spatial reasoning, and manipulation tasks. A central tension is balancing visual fidelity and geometric reliability against memory, computation, and scalability, especially for large, changing scenes and incomplete observations.

Latest papers

242 papers35 papers in the last four weeks, up 35% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

Apr 29, 2025

GaussTrap: Stealthy Backdoor Attacks on 3D Gaussian Splatting for Targeted Scene Misperception

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for real-time scene representation and novel view synthesis, gaining traction in safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving and AR/VR systems. However, the security vulnerabilities of 3DGS remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study of backdoor threats in 3DGS pipelines. We uncover an inherent security vulnerability in the adaptive density control mechanism of 3DGS, originally designed for detailed reconstruction, which enables attackers to induce localized gaussian proliferation, effectively embedding malicious backdoors into the scene geometry while remaining invisible from other viewpoints. To expose this threat, we propose GaussTrap, a novel stealthy poisoning framework tailored for 3DGS. GaussTrap operates in three stages (adversarial injection, geometric stabilization, and global fidelity restoration) to embed imperceptible yet adversarial Gaussian components into the reconstruction. It ensures consistent poisoning effects at specific viewpoints while preserving photorealism in benign views, thereby achieving high attack efficacy with low detectability. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that GaussTrap reliably induces targeted visual corruption under trigger conditions while maintaining high rendering fidelity elsewhere, highlighting a critical security blind spot in modern 3D rendering systems. The code is available at https://github.com/acang425/GaussTrap.
Nov 26, 2024

NumGrad-Pull: Numerical Gradient Guided Tri-plane Representation for Surface Reconstruction from Point Clouds

Reconstructing continuous surfaces from unoriented and unordered 3D points is a fundamental challenge in computer vision and graphics. Recent advancements address this problem by training neural signed distance functions to pull 3D location queries to their closest points on a surface, following the predicted signed distances and the analytical gradients computed by the network. In this paper, we introduce NumGrad-Pull, leveraging the representation capability of tri-plane structures to accelerate the learning of signed distance functions and enhance the fidelity of local details in surface reconstruction. To further improve the training stability of grid-based tri-planes, we propose to exploit numerical gradients, replacing conventional analytical computations. Additionally, we present a progressive plane expansion strategy to facilitate faster signed distance function convergence and design a data sampling strategy to mitigate reconstruction artifacts. These components are synergistically integrated into a unified tri-plane-based pulling framework, in which numerical gradients, progressive expansion, and complementary sampling jointly address the locality and sparsity challenges of learning SDFs from unoriented point clouds. Our extensive experiments across a variety of benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach. Codes are available at: https://github.com/cuiruikai/numgrad-pull.