While recent work on text-conditional 3D object generation has shown promising results, the state-of-the-art methods typically require multiple GPU-hours to produce a single sample. This is in stark contrast to state-of-the-art generative image models, which produce samples in a number of seconds or minutes. In this paper, we explore an alternative method for 3D object generation which produces 3D models in only 1-2 minutes on a single GPU. Our method first generates a single synthetic view using a text-to-image diffusion model, and then produces a 3D point cloud using a second diffusion model which conditions on the generated image. While our method still falls short of the state-of-the-art in terms of sample quality, it is one to two orders of magnitude faster to sample from, offering a practical trade-off for some use cases. We release our pre-trained point cloud diffusion models, as well as evaluation code and models, at https://github.com/openai/point-e.
Much of the success of deep learning is drawn from building architectures that properly respect underlying symmetry and structure in the data on which they operate - a set of considerations that have been united under the banner of geometric deep learning. Often problems in the physical sciences deal with relatively small sets of points in two- or three-dimensional space wherein translation, rotation, and permutation equivariance are important or even vital for models to be useful in practice. In this work, we present rotation- and permutation-equivariant architectures for deep learning on these small point clouds, composed of a set of products of terms from the geometric algebra and reductions over those products using an attention mechanism. The geometric algebra provides valuable mathematical structure by which to combine vector, scalar, and other types of geometric inputs in a systematic way to account for rotation invariance or covariance, while attention yields a powerful way to impose permutation equivariance. We demonstrate the usefulness of these architectures by training models to solve sample problems relevant to physics, chemistry, and biology.
In this work, we propose a novel method for generating 3D point clouds that leverage properties of hyper networks. Contrary to the existing methods that learn only the representation of a 3D object, our approach simultaneously finds a representation of the object and its 3D surface. The main idea of our HyperCloud method is to build a hyper network that returns weights of a particular neural network (target network) trained to map points from a uniform unit ball distribution into a 3D shape. As a consequence, a particular 3D shape can be generated using point-by-point sampling from the assumed prior distribution and transforming sampled points with the target network. Since the hyper network is based on an auto-encoder architecture trained to reconstruct realistic 3D shapes, the target network weights can be considered a parametrization of the surface of a 3D shape, and not a standard representation of point cloud usually returned by competitive approaches. The proposed architecture allows finding mesh-based representation of 3D objects in a generative manner while providing point clouds en pair in quality with the state-of-the-art methods.
Constructing high-quality generative models for 3D shapes is a fundamental task in computer vision with diverse applications in geometry processing, engineering, and design. Despite the recent progress in deep generative modelling, synthesis of finely detailed 3D surfaces, such as high-resolution point clouds, from scratch has not been achieved with existing approaches. In this work, we propose to employ the latent-space Laplacian pyramid representation within a hierarchical generative model for 3D point clouds. We combine the recently proposed latent-space GAN and Laplacian GAN architectures to form a multi-scale model capable of generating 3D point clouds at increasing levels of detail. Our evaluation demonstrates that our model outperforms the existing generative models for 3D point clouds.
Generating 3D point clouds is challenging yet highly desired. This work presents a novel autoregressive model, PointGrow, which can generate diverse and realistic point cloud samples from scratch or conditioned on semantic contexts. This model operates recurrently, with each point sampled according to a conditional distribution given its previously-generated points, allowing inter-point correlations to be well-exploited and 3D shape generative processes to be better interpreted. Since point cloud object shapes are typically encoded by long-range dependencies, we augment our model with dedicated self-attention modules to capture such relations. Extensive evaluations show that PointGrow achieves satisfying performance on both unconditional and conditional point cloud generation tasks, with respect to realism and diversity. Several important applications, such as unsupervised feature learning and shape arithmetic operations, are also demonstrated.