# EXIM: A Hybrid Explicit-Implicit Representation for Text-Guided 3D Shape Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.01714 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01714/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [Occupancy Networks: Learning 3D Reconstruction in Function Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03828/) (2018)
- [RePaint: Inpainting using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09865/) (2022)
- [Magic3D: High-Resolution Text-to-3D Content Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10440/) (2022)
- [Learning Implicit Fields for Generative Shape Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02822/) (2018)
- [Diffusion Probabilistic Models for 3D Point Cloud Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01458/) (2021)
- [Differentiable Volumetric Rendering: Learning Implicit 3D Representations without 3D Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07372/) (2019)
- [Point-E: A System for Generating 3D Point Clouds from Complex Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08751/) (2022)
- [Fantasia3D: Disentangling Geometry and Appearance for High-quality Text-to-3D Content Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13873/) (2023)
- [Learning a Probabilistic Latent Space of Object Shapes via 3D Generative-Adversarial Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.07584/) (2016)
- [LION: Latent Point Diffusion Models for 3D Shape Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06978/) (2022)
- [3DShape2VecSet: A 3D Shape Representation for Neural Fields and Generative Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11445/) (2023)
- [GET3D: A Generative Model of High Quality 3D Textured Shapes Learned from Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11163/) (2022)
- [Shap-E: Generating Conditional 3D Implicit Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02463/) (2023)
- [Implicit Functions in Feature Space for 3D Shape Reconstruction and Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01456/) (2020)
- [3D-FUTURE: 3D Furniture shape with TextURE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09633/) (2020)
- [SDFusion: Multimodal 3D Shape Completion, Reconstruction, and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04493/) (2022)
- [CLIP-Mesh: Generating textured meshes from text using pretrained image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13333/) (2022)
- [3D Neural Field Generation using Triplane Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16677/) (2022)
- [CLIP-Forge: Towards Zero-Shot Text-to-Shape Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02624/) (2021)
- [AutoSDF: Shape Priors for 3D Completion, Reconstruction and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09516/) (2022)
- [ATISS: Autoregressive Transformers for Indoor Scene Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03675/) (2021)
- [Text2Shape: Generating Shapes from Natural Language by Learning Joint Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08495/) (2018)
- [Neural Wavelet-domain Diffusion for 3D Shape Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08725/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Make-A-Shape: a Ten-Million-scale 3D Shape Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11067/) (2024)
- [Wavelet Latent Diffusion (Wala): Billion-Parameter 3D Generative Model with Compact Wavelet Encodings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.08017/) (2024)
- [LaS-Comp: Zero-shot 3D Completion with Latent-Spatial Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18735/) (2026)
- [Surf-D: Generating High-Quality Surfaces of Arbitrary Topologies Using Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17050/) (2023)
- [CNS-Edit: 3D Shape Editing via Coupled Neural Shape Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02313/) (2024)
- [Spice-E : Structural Priors in 3D Diffusion using Cross-Entity Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17834/) (2023)
- [CanFields: Consolidating Diffeomorphic Flows for Non-Rigid 4D Interpolation from Arbitrary-Length Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18582/) (2024)
- [coDrawAgents: A Multi-Agent Dialogue Framework for Compositional Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12829/) (2026)
- [Part-aware Shape Generation with Latent 3D Diffusion of Neural Voxel Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00998/) (2024)
- [Imagine a City: CityGenAgent for Procedural 3D City Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05362/) (2026)
- [PEGAsus: 3D Personalization of Geometry and Appearance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08198/) (2026)
- [Occupancy-Based Dual Contouring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13418/) (2024)
- [EPS3D: End-to-End Feed-Forward 3D Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08980/) (2026)
- [HOTS3D: Hyper-Spherical Optimal Transport for Semantic Alignment of Text-to-3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14419/) (2024)
- [WonderVerse: Extendable 3D Scene Generation with Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09160/) (2025)
- [CNS-Edit++: Category-Agnostic 3D Editing with Coupled Neural Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.16577/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents a new text-guided technique for generating 3D shapes. The technique leverages a hybrid 3D shape representation, namely EXIM, combining the strengths of explicit and implicit representations. Specifically, the explicit stage controls the topology of the generated 3D shapes and enables local modifications, whereas the implicit stage refines the shape and paints it with plausible colors. Also, the hybrid approach separates the shape and color and generates color conditioned on shape to ensure shape-color consistency. Unlike the existing state-of-the-art methods, we achieve high-fidelity shape generation from natural-language descriptions without the need for time-consuming per-shape optimization or reliance on human-annotated texts during training or test-time optimization. Further, we demonstrate the applicability of our approach to generate indoor scenes with consistent styles using text-induced 3D shapes. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the compelling quality of our results and the high coherency of our generated shapes with the input texts, surpassing the performance of existing methods by a significant margin. Codes and models are released at https://github.com/liuzhengzhe/EXIM.