# RadarGen: Automotive Radar Point Cloud Generation from Cameras

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17897 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17897/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in 3D, point cloud and scene generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 55 of its 94 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Dec 2025.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [3D, point cloud and scene generation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/3d-point-cloud-and-scene-generation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [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)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [An Introduction to Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02691/) (2019)
- [Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03575/) (2025)
- [Diffusion Probabilistic Models for 3D Point Cloud Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01458/) (2021)
- [Point-E: A System for Generating 3D Point Clouds from Complex Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08751/) (2022)
- [LION: Latent Point Diffusion Models for 3D Shape Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06978/) (2022)
- [3D Shape Generation and Completion through Point-Voxel Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03670/) (2021)
- [PointFlow: 3D Point Cloud Generation with Continuous Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.12320/) (2019)
- [SANA: Efficient High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Linear Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10629/) (2024)
- [Learning Gradient Fields for Shape Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.06520/) (2020)
- [VoxelNeXt: Fully Sparse VoxelNet for 3D Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11301/) (2023)
- [GAIA-2: A Controllable Multi-View Generative World Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20523/) (2025)
- [UniDepthV2: Universal Monocular Metric Depth Estimation Made Simpler](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20110/) (2025)
- [Learning to Generate Realistic LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03954/) (2022)
- [PC2: Projection-Conditioned Point Cloud Diffusion for Single-Image 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10668/) (2023)
- [Cosmos-Drive-Dreams: Scalable Synthetic Driving Data Generation with World Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09042/) (2025)
- [UltraLiDAR: Learning Compact Representations for LiDAR Completion and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01448/) (2023)
- [Deep Generative Modeling of LiDAR Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01180/) (2018)
- [Towards Realistic Scene Generation with LiDAR Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00815/) (2024)
- [LiDAR Data Synthesis with Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09256/) (2023)
- [RangeLDM: Fast Realistic LiDAR Point Cloud Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10094/) (2024)
- [MAN TruckScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous trucking in diverse conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07462/) (2024)

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

- [HyperDet: 3D Object Detection with Hyper 4D Radar Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11554/) (2026)
- [DyRAD: Radar Novel View Synthesis for Dynamic Driving Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39841/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present RadarGen, a diffusion model for synthesizing realistic automotive radar point clouds from multi-view camera imagery. RadarGen adapts efficient image-latent diffusion to the radar domain by representing radar measurements in bird's-eye-view form that encodes spatial structure together with radar cross section (RCS) and Doppler attributes. A lightweight recovery step reconstructs point clouds from the generated maps. To better align generation with the visual scene, RadarGen incorporates BEV-aligned depth, semantic, and motion cues extracted from pretrained foundation models, which guide the stochastic generation process toward physically plausible radar patterns. Conditioning on images makes the approach broadly compatible, in principle, with existing visual datasets and simulation frameworks, offering a scalable direction for multimodal generative simulation. Evaluations on large-scale driving data show that RadarGen captures characteristic radar measurement distributions and reduces the gap to perception models trained on real data, marking a step toward unified generative simulation across sensing modalities.