# Neural Shape Deformation Priors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.05616 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05616/

## Key facts

- Cited by 27 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 53 of its 82 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [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)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [DeepSDF: Learning Continuous Signed Distance Functions for Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05103/) (2019)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [Occupancy Networks: Learning 3D Reconstruction in Function Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03828/) (2018)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [Rethinking Semantic Segmentation from a Sequence-to-Sequence Perspective with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15840/) (2020)
- [Learning Implicit Fields for Generative Shape Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02822/) (2018)
- [Convolutional Occupancy Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04618/) (2020)
- [Implicit Geometric Regularization for Learning Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10099/) (2020)
- [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)
- [DISN: Deep Implicit Surface Network for High-quality Single-view 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10711/) (2019)
- [Deep Local Shapes: Learning Local SDF Priors for Detailed 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10983/) (2020)
- [Exploring Self-attention for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13621/) (2020)
- [SNARF: Differentiable Forward Skinning for Animating Non-Rigid Neural Implicit Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03953/) (2021)
- [STAR: Sparse Trained Articulated Human Body Regressor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08535/) (2020)
- [SCANimate: Weakly Supervised Learning of Skinned Clothed Avatar Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03313/) (2021)
- [CoFiNet: Reliable Coarse-to-fine Correspondences for Robust Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14076/) (2021)
- [4DComplete: Non-Rigid Motion Estimation Beyond the Observable Surface](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01905/) (2021)
- [Deformed Implicit Field: Modeling 3D Shapes with Learned Dense Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13650/) (2020)
- [LEAP: Learning Articulated Occupancy of People](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06849/) (2021)
- [TransformerFusion: Monocular RGB Scene Reconstruction using Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02191/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [3DShape2VecSet: A 3D Shape Representation for Neural Fields and Generative Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11445/) (2023)
- [DiffuScene: Denoising Diffusion Models for Generative Indoor Scene Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14207/) (2023)
- [Rotation-Invariant Transformer for Point Cloud Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08231/) (2023)
- [RGBD2: Generative Scene Synthesis via Incremental View Inpainting using RGBD Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05993/) (2022)
- [GAF: Gaussian Avatar Reconstruction from Monocular Videos via Multi-view Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10209/) (2024)
- [Motion2VecSets: 4D Latent Vector Set Diffusion for Non-rigid Shape Reconstruction and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06614/) (2024)
- [Recent Trends in 3D Reconstruction of General Non-Rigid Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15064/) (2024)
- [Puppet-Master: Scaling Interactive Video Generation as a Motion Prior for Part-Level Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04631/) (2024)
- [As-Plausible-As-Possible: Plausibility-Aware Mesh Deformation Using 2D Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16739/) (2023)
- [InstructP2P: Learning to Edit 3D Point Clouds with Text Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07154/) (2023)
- [Functional Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15435/) (2023)
- [CAMM: Building Category-Agnostic and Animatable 3D Models from Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06937/) (2023)
- [DPHMs: Diffusion Parametric Head Models for Depth-based Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01068/) (2023)
- [Correspondence-Free Non-Rigid Point Set Registration Using Unsupervised Clustering Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18817/) (2024)
- [DreamMesh: Jointly Manipulating and Texturing Triangle Meshes for Text-to-3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07454/) (2024)
- [DNF: Unconditional 4D Generation with Dictionary-based Neural Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05161/) (2024)
- [Spice-E : Structural Priors in 3D Diffusion using Cross-Entity Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17834/) (2023)
- [MeshPad: Interactive Sketch-Conditioned Artist-Reminiscent Mesh Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01425/) (2025)
- [Neural Pose Representation Learning for Generating and Transferring Non-Rigid Object Poses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09728/) (2024)
- [PHRIT: Parametric Hand Representation with Implicit Template](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14916/) (2023)
- [Implicit-ARAP: Efficient Handle-Guided Neural Field Deformation via Local Patch Meshing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12895/) (2024)
- [Nonrigid Object Contact Estimation With Regional Unwrapping Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14074/) (2023)
- [CeRF: Convolutional Neural Radiance Fields for New View Synthesis with Derivatives of Ray Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07125/) (2023)
- [Deformation-based In-Context Learning for Point Cloud Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02845/) (2026)
- [CNS-Edit++: Category-Agnostic 3D Editing with Coupled Neural Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.16577/) (2026)
- [As-Rigid-As-Possible Regularization for Implicit Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15933/) (2026)
- [Cepheid: Decoupling Scale from Structure for Cross-Family Motion Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.18871/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present Neural Shape Deformation Priors, a novel method for shape manipulation that predicts mesh deformations of non-rigid objects from user-provided handle movements. State-of-the-art methods cast this problem as an optimization task, where the input source mesh is iteratively deformed to minimize an objective function according to hand-crafted regularizers such as ARAP. In this work, we learn the deformation behavior based on the underlying geometric properties of a shape, while leveraging a large-scale dataset containing a diverse set of non-rigid deformations. Specifically, given a source mesh and desired target locations of handles that describe the partial surface deformation, we predict a continuous deformation field that is defined in 3D space to describe the space deformation. To this end, we introduce transformer-based deformation networks that represent a shape deformation as a composition of local surface deformations. It learns a set of local latent codes anchored in 3D space, from which we can learn a set of continuous deformation functions for local surfaces. Our method can be applied to challenging deformations and generalizes well to unseen deformations. We validate our approach in experiments using the DeformingThing4D dataset, and compare to both classic optimization-based and recent neural network-based methods.