# FullFormer: Generating Shapes Inside Shapes

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.11235 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11235/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Implicit Neural Representations with Periodic Activation Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09661/) (2020)
- [Estimating or Propagating Gradients Through Stochastic Neurons for Conditional Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.3432/) (2013)
- [Occupancy Networks: Learning 3D Reconstruction in Function Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03828/) (2018)
- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07636/) (2021)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [Generating Diverse High-Fidelity Images with VQ-VAE-2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00446/) (2019)
- [Learning Implicit Fields for Generative Shape Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02822/) (2018)
- [Conditional Image Generation with PixelCNN Decoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05328/) (2016)
- [Pixel Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.06759/) (2016)
- [GIRAFFE: Representing Scenes as Compositional Generative Neural Feature Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12100/) (2020)
- [Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05751/) (2018)
- [Convolutional Occupancy Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04618/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Probabilistic Models for 3D Point Cloud Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01458/) (2021)
- [PCT: Point cloud transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09688/) (2020)
- [GRAF: Generative Radiance Fields for 3D-Aware Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02442/) (2020)
- [WaveGrad: Estimating Gradients for Waveform Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.00713/) (2020)
- [LION: Latent Point Diffusion Models for 3D Shape Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06978/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Decoupling High and Low Frequencies for Faithful Image Generation with Fine Details](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05441/) (2025)
- [3D-WAG: Hierarchical Wavelet-Guided Autoregressive Generation for High-Fidelity 3D Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19037/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Implicit generative models have been widely employed to model 3D data and have recently proven to be successful in encoding and generating high-quality 3D shapes. This work builds upon these models and alleviates current limitations by presenting the first implicit generative model that facilitates the generation of complex 3D shapes with rich internal geometric details. To achieve this, our model uses unsigned distance fields to represent nested 3D surfaces allowing learning from non-watertight mesh data. We propose a transformer-based autoregressive model for 3D shape generation that leverages context-rich tokens from vector quantized shape embeddings. The generated tokens are decoded into an unsigned distance field which is rendered into a novel 3D shape exhibiting a rich internal structure. We demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art point cloud generation results on popular classes of 'Cars', 'Planes', and 'Chairs' of the ShapeNet dataset. Additionally, we curate a dataset that exclusively comprises shapes with realistic internal details from the `Cars' class of ShapeNet and demonstrate our method's efficacy in generating these shapes with internal geometry.