# Locally Attentional SDF Diffusion for Controllable 3D Shape Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.04461 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04461/

## Key facts

- Cited by 130 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 75 of its 93 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 75)

- [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)
- [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)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (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)
- [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)
- [DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14988/) (2022)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [Variational Inference with Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05770/) (2015)
- [Occupancy Networks: Learning 3D Reconstruction in Function Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03828/) (2018)
- [Magic3D: High-Resolution Text-to-3D Content Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10440/) (2022)
- [Efficient Geometry-aware 3D Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07945/) (2021)
- [Variational Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00630/) (2021)
- [Learning Implicit Fields for Generative Shape Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02822/) (2018)
- [A Point Set Generation Network for 3D Object Reconstruction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00603/) (2016)
- [PIFu: Pixel-Aligned Implicit Function for High-Resolution Clothed Human Digitization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05172/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Diffusion Probabilistic Models for 3D Point Cloud Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01458/) (2021)
- [pi-GAN: Periodic Implicit Generative Adversarial Networks for 3D-Aware Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00926/) (2020)
- [Point-E: A System for Generating 3D Point Clouds from Complex Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08751/) (2022)
- [GRAF: Generative Radiance Fields for 3D-Aware Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02442/) (2020)
- [Pixel2Mesh: Generating 3D Mesh Models from Single RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01654/) (2018)
- [Learning a Probabilistic Latent Space of Object Shapes via 3D Generative-Adversarial Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.07584/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 130)

- [DreamGaussian: Generative Gaussian Splatting for Efficient 3D Content Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16653/) (2023)
- [Structured 3D Latents for Scalable and Versatile 3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01506/) (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)
- [Hunyuan3D 2.0: Scaling Diffusion Models for High Resolution Textured 3D Assets Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12202/) (2025)
- [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)
- [LucidDreamer: Domain-free Generation of 3D Gaussian Splatting Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13384/) (2023)
- [CRM: Single Image to 3D Textured Mesh with Convolutional Reconstruction Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05034/) (2024)
- [XCube: Large-Scale 3D Generative Modeling using Sparse Voxel Hierarchies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03806/) (2023)
- [Native and Compact Structured Latents for 3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14692/) (2025)
- [State of the Art on Diffusion Models for Visual Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07204/) (2023)
- [3DTopia-XL: Scaling High-quality 3D Asset Generation via Primitive Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12957/) (2024)
- [EdgeRunner: Auto-regressive Auto-encoder for Artistic Mesh Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18114/) (2024)
- [BlockFusion: Expandable 3D Scene Generation using Latent Tri-plane Extrapolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17053/) (2024)
- [SparseFlex: High-Resolution and Arbitrary-Topology 3D Shape Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21732/) (2025)
- [Scaling Mesh Generation via Compressive Tokenization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07025/) (2024)
- [LooseControl: Lifting ControlNet for Generalized Depth Conditioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03079/) (2023)
- [InstructEdit: Improving Automatic Masks for Diffusion-based Image Editing With User Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18047/) (2023)
- [Advances in 3D Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17807/) (2024)
- [SCube: Instant Large-Scale Scene Reconstruction using VoxSplats](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20030/) (2024)
- [Part123: Part-aware 3D Reconstruction from a Single-view Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16888/) (2024)
- [MeshFormer: High-Quality Mesh Generation with 3D-Guided Reconstruction Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10198/) (2024)
- [PivotMesh: Generic 3D Mesh Generation via Pivot Vertices Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16890/) (2024)
- [Efficient Part-level 3D Object Generation via Dual Volume Packing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09980/) (2025)
- [UniDream: Unifying Diffusion Priors for Relightable Text-to-3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08754/) (2023)
- [VideoMV: Consistent Multi-View Generation Based on Large Video Generative Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12010/) (2024)
- [LATTICE: Democratize High-Fidelity 3D Generation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03052/) (2025)
- [OctFusion: Octree-based Diffusion Models for 3D Shape Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14732/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Although the recent rapid evolution of 3D generative neural networks greatly improves 3D shape generation, it is still not convenient for ordinary users to create 3D shapes and control the local geometry of generated shapes. To address these challenges, we propose a diffusion-based 3D generation framework -- locally attentional SDF diffusion, to model plausible 3D shapes, via 2D sketch image input. Our method is built on a two-stage diffusion model. The first stage, named occupancy-diffusion, aims to generate a low-resolution occupancy field to approximate the shape shell. The second stage, named SDF-diffusion, synthesizes a high-resolution signed distance field within the occupied voxels determined by the first stage to extract fine geometry. Our model is empowered by a novel view-aware local attention mechanism for image-conditioned shape generation, which takes advantage of 2D image patch features to guide 3D voxel feature learning, greatly improving local controllability and model generalizability. Through extensive experiments in sketch-conditioned and category-conditioned 3D shape generation tasks, we validate and demonstrate the ability of our method to provide plausible and diverse 3D shapes, as well as its superior controllability and generalizability over existing work. Our code and trained models are available at https://zhengxinyang.github.io/projects/LAS-Diffusion.html