# GenSDF: Two-Stage Learning of Generalizable Signed Distance Functions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.02780 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02780/

## Key facts

- Cited by 30 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 79 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [DeepSDF: Learning Continuous Signed Distance Functions for Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05103/) (2019)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [Implicit Neural Representations with Periodic Activation Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09661/) (2020)
- [Fourier Features Let Networks Learn High Frequency Functions in Low Dimensional Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10739/) (2020)
- [Occupancy Networks: Learning 3D Reconstruction in Function Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03828/) (2018)
- [NeRF in the Wild: Neural Radiance Fields for Unconstrained Photo Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02268/) (2020)
- [Nerfies: Deformable Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12948/) (2020)
- [Learning to Compare: Relation Network for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06025/) (2017)
- [Neural Sparse Voxel Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11571/) (2020)
- [Convolutional Occupancy Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04618/) (2020)
- [AtlasNet: A Papier-Mach'e Approach to Learning 3D Surface Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05384/) (2018)
- [Zero-Shot Learning -- A Comprehensive Evaluation of the Good, the Bad and the Ugly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.00600/) (2017)
- [Revisiting Point Cloud Classification: A New Benchmark Dataset and Classification Model on Real-World Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04616/) (2019)
- [Normalized Object Coordinate Space for Category-Level 6D Object Pose and Size Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02970/) (2019)
- [Neural Geometric Level of Detail: Real-time Rendering with Implicit 3D Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10994/) (2021)
- [SAL: Sign Agnostic Learning of Shapes from Raw Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10414/) (2019)
- [Local Implicit Grid Representations for 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08981/) (2020)
- [Implicit Functions in Feature Space for 3D Shape Reconstruction and Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01456/) (2020)
- [StyleSDF: High-Resolution 3D-Consistent Image and Geometry Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11427/) (2021)
- [MetaSDF: Meta-learning Signed Distance Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09662/) (2020)
- [Octree Generating Networks: Efficient Convolutional Architectures for High-resolution 3D Outputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09438/) (2017)
- [Semantic3D.net: A new Large-scale Point Cloud Classification Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03847/) (2017)
- [Neural-Pull: Learning Signed Distance Functions from Point Clouds by Learning to Pull Space onto Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13495/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [3DGen: Triplane Latent Diffusion for Textured Mesh Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05371/) (2023)
- [Diffusion-SDF: Conditional Generative Modeling of Signed Distance Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13757/) (2022)
- [SCube: Instant Large-Scale Scene Reconstruction using VoxSplats](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20030/) (2024)
- [Neural Signed Distance Function Inference through Splatting 3D Gaussians Pulled on Zero-Level Set](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14189/) (2024)
- [Towards Better Gradient Consistency for Neural Signed Distance Functions via Level Set Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11601/) (2023)
- [Learning a More Continuous Zero Level Set in Unsigned Distance Fields through Level Set Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11441/) (2023)
- [UDiFF: Generating Conditional Unsigned Distance Fields with Optimal Wavelet Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06851/) (2024)
- [ArtFormer: Controllable Generation of Diverse 3D Articulated Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07237/) (2024)
- [Marching-Primitives: Shape Abstraction from Signed Distance Function](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13190/) (2023)
- [GridPull: Towards Scalability in Learning Implicit Representations from 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13175/) (2023)
- [MultiPull: Detailing Signed Distance Functions by Pulling Multi-Level Queries at Multi-Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01208/) (2024)
- [Robust One-Class Classification with Signed Distance Function using 1-Lipschitz Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01978/) (2023)
- [Inferring Neural Signed Distance Functions by Overfitting on Single Noisy Point Clouds through Finetuning Data-Driven based Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19680/) (2024)
- [Coordinate Quantized Neural Implicit Representations for Multi-view Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11025/) (2023)
- [Deep Learning for 3D Point Cloud Enhancement: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00857/) (2024)
- [Deep Conditional Shape Models for 3D cardiac image segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10756/) (2023)
- [Optimizing 3D Geometry Reconstruction from Implicit Neural Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12725/) (2024)
- [3D-WAG: Hierarchical Wavelet-Guided Autoregressive Generation for High-Fidelity 3D Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19037/) (2024)
- [Sensing Surface Patches in Volume Rendering for Inferring Signed Distance Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16467/) (2024)
- [SDFs from Unoriented Point Clouds using Neural Variational Heat Distances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11212/) (2025)
- [PhyMix: Towards Physically Consistent Single-Image 3D Indoor Scene Generation with Implicit--Explicit Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10125/) (2026)
- [SDFReg: Learning Signed Distance Functions for Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08929/) (2023)
- [Inverse Neural Rendering for Explainable Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12359/) (2024)
- [VisTa3D: A Dataset and Benchmark for Thin Object Reconstruction from Vision, Tactile, and 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20740/) (2026)
- [Level-Set Parameters: Novel Representation for 3D Shape Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13502/) (2024)
- [Neural Shortest Path for Surface Reconstruction from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06047/) (2025)
- [NeuSEditor: From Multi-View Images to Text-Guided Neural Surface Edits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10827/) (2025)
- [Learning to Upscale 3D Segmentations in Neuroimaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21697/) (2025)
- [BladeSDF : Unconditional and Conditional Generative Modeling of Representative Blade Geometries Using Signed Distance Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13445/) (2026)
- [DSP-SLAM++: A Unified Framework for Multi-Class, High-Fidelity Object SLAM in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25953/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We investigate the generalization capabilities of neural signed distance functions (SDFs) for learning 3D object representations for unseen and unlabeled point clouds. Existing methods can fit SDFs to a handful of object classes and boast fine detail or fast inference speeds, but do not generalize well to unseen shapes. We introduce a two-stage semi-supervised meta-learning approach that transfers shape priors from labeled to unlabeled data to reconstruct unseen object categories. The first stage uses an episodic training scheme to simulate training on unlabeled data and meta-learns initial shape priors. The second stage then introduces unlabeled data with disjoint classes in a semi-supervised scheme to diversify these priors and achieve generalization. We assess our method on both synthetic data and real collected point clouds. Experimental results and analysis validate that our approach outperforms existing neural SDF methods and is capable of robust zero-shot inference on 100+ unseen classes. Code can be found at https://github.com/princeton-computational-imaging/gensdf.