# Shap-E: Generating Conditional 3D Implicit Functions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.02463 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02463/

## Key facts

- Cited by 385 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 60 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 60)

- [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)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00364/) (2022)
- [DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14988/) (2022)
- [DeepSDF: Learning Continuous Signed Distance Functions for Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05103/) (2019)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (2022)
- [Variational Inference with Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05770/) (2015)
- [Imagen Video: High Definition Video Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02303/) (2022)
- [Make-A-Video: Text-to-Video Generation without Text-Video Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14792/) (2022)
- [Generating Diverse High-Fidelity Images with VQ-VAE-2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00446/) (2019)
- [Scaling Autoregressive Models for Content-Rich Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10789/) (2022)
- [Magic3D: High-Resolution Text-to-3D Content Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10440/) (2022)
- [Mixed Precision Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03740/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 385)

- [MVDream: Multi-view Diffusion for 3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16512/) (2023)
- [LRM: Large Reconstruction Model for Single Image to 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04400/) (2023)
- [DreamGaussian: Generative Gaussian Splatting for Efficient 3D Content Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16653/) (2023)
- [Objaverse-XL: A Universe of 10M+ 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05663/) (2023)
- [Structured 3D Latents for Scalable and Versatile 3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01506/) (2024)
- [LGM: Large Multi-View Gaussian Model for High-Resolution 3D Content Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05054/) (2024)
- [SyncDreamer: Generating Multiview-consistent Images from a Single-view Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03453/) (2023)
- [One-2-3-45: Any Single Image to 3D Mesh in 45 Seconds without Per-Shape Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16928/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Text-to-Visual Generation with Image-to-Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01291/) (2024)
- [CLAY: A Controllable Large-scale Generative Model for Creating High-quality 3D Assets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13897/) (2024)
- [InstantMesh: Efficient 3D Mesh Generation from a Single Image with Sparse-view Large Reconstruction Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07191/) (2024)
- [Magic123: One Image to High-Quality 3D Object Generation Using Both 2D and 3D Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17843/) (2023)
- [Instant3D: Fast Text-to-3D with Sparse-View Generation and Large Reconstruction Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06214/) (2023)
- [PointLLM: Empowering Large Language Models to Understand Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16911/) (2023)
- [GRM: Large Gaussian Reconstruction Model for Efficient 3D Reconstruction and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14621/) (2024)
- [Text-to-3D using Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16585/) (2023)
- [One-2-3-45++: Fast Single Image to 3D Objects with Consistent Multi-View Generation and 3D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07885/) (2023)
- [Triplane Meets Gaussian Splatting: Fast and Generalizable Single-View 3D Reconstruction with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09147/) (2023)
- [ImageDream: Image-Prompt Multi-view Diffusion for 3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02201/) (2023)
- [GPT4Tools: Teaching Large Language Model to Use Tools via Self-instruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18752/) (2023)
- [Michelangelo: Conditional 3D Shape Generation based on Shape-Image-Text Aligned Latent Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17115/) (2023)
- [DMV3D: Denoising Multi-View Diffusion using 3D Large Reconstruction Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09217/) (2023)
- [Scalable 3D Captioning with Pretrained Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07279/) (2023)
- [Native and Compact Structured Latents for 3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14692/) (2025)
- [RichDreamer: A Generalizable Normal-Depth Diffusion Model for Detail Richness in Text-to-3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16918/) (2023)
- [DreamCraft3D: Hierarchical 3D Generation with Bootstrapped Diffusion Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16818/) (2023)
- [GPT-4V(ision) is a Human-Aligned Evaluator for Text-to-3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04092/) (2024)
- [State of the Art on Diffusion Models for Visual Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07204/) (2023)
- [GenSim: Generating Robotic Simulation Tasks via Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01361/) (2023)
- [MIDI: Multi-Instance Diffusion for Single Image to 3D Scene Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03558/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present Shap-E, a conditional generative model for 3D assets. Unlike recent work on 3D generative models which produce a single output representation, Shap-E directly generates the parameters of implicit functions that can be rendered as both textured meshes and neural radiance fields. We train Shap-E in two stages: first, we train an encoder that deterministically maps 3D assets into the parameters of an implicit function; second, we train a conditional diffusion model on outputs of the encoder. When trained on a large dataset of paired 3D and text data, our resulting models are capable of generating complex and diverse 3D assets in a matter of seconds. When compared to Point-E, an explicit generative model over point clouds, Shap-E converges faster and reaches comparable or better sample quality despite modeling a higher-dimensional, multi-representation output space. We release model weights, inference code, and samples at https://github.com/openai/shap-e.