# Pushing Auto-regressive Models for 3D Shape Generation at Capacity and Scalability

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.12225 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12225/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 77 of its 91 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 77)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [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)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [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)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [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)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07682/) (2022)
- [Occupancy Networks: Learning 3D Reconstruction in Function Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03828/) (2018)
- [Objaverse: A Universe of Annotated 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08051/) (2022)
- [Zero-1-to-3: Zero-shot One Image to 3D Object](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11328/) (2023)
- [Generating Diverse High-Fidelity Images with VQ-VAE-2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00446/) (2019)
- [LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08239/) (2022)
- [Efficient Geometry-aware 3D Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07945/) (2021)
- [PaLM 2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10403/) (2023)
- [MaskGIT: Masked Generative Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04200/) (2022)
- [Learning Implicit Fields for Generative Shape Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02822/) (2018)
- [Scaling Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04560/) (2021)
- [A Point Set Generation Network for 3D Object Reconstruction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00603/) (2016)
- [Conditional Image Generation with PixelCNN Decoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05328/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [RigAnything: Template-Free Autoregressive Rigging for Diverse 3D Assets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09615/) (2025)
- [Autoregressive Models in Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05902/) (2024)
- [LiftImage3D: Lifting Any Single Image to 3D Gaussians with Video Generation Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09597/) (2024)
- [HY3D-Bench: Generation of 3D Assets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03907/) (2026)
- [MeshPad: Interactive Sketch-Conditioned Artist-Reminiscent Mesh Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01425/) (2025)
- [MinD-3D++: Advancing fMRI-Based 3D Reconstruction with High-Quality Textured Mesh Generation and a Comprehensive Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11315/) (2024)
- [CG-MLLM: Captioning and Generating 3D content via Multi-modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21798/) (2026)
- [Octrees as an Explicit 3D Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02388/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Auto-regressive models have achieved impressive results in 2D image generation by modeling joint distributions in grid space. In this paper, we extend auto-regressive models to 3D domains, and seek a stronger ability of 3D shape generation by improving auto-regressive models at capacity and scalability simultaneously. Firstly, we leverage an ensemble of publicly available 3D datasets to facilitate the training of large-scale models. It consists of a comprehensive collection of approximately 900,000 objects, with multiple properties of meshes, points, voxels, rendered images, and text captions. This diverse labeled dataset, termed Objaverse-Mix, empowers our model to learn from a wide range of object variations. However, directly applying 3D auto-regression encounters critical challenges of high computational demands on volumetric grids and ambiguous auto-regressive order along grid dimensions, resulting in inferior quality of 3D shapes. To this end, we then present a novel framework Argus3D in terms of capacity. Concretely, our approach introduces discrete representation learning based on a latent vector instead of volumetric grids, which not only reduces computational costs but also preserves essential geometric details by learning the joint distributions in a more tractable order. The capacity of conditional generation can thus be realized by simply concatenating various conditioning inputs to the latent vector, such as point clouds, categories, images, and texts. In addition, thanks to the simplicity of our model architecture, we naturally scale up our approach to a larger model with an impressive 3.6 billion parameters, further enhancing the quality of versatile 3D generation. Extensive experiments on four generation tasks demonstrate that Argus3D can synthesize diverse and faithful shapes across multiple categories, achieving remarkable performance.