# Joint Geometry-Appearance Human Reconstruction in a Unified Latent Space via Bridge Diffusion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00328 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.00328/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 56 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [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)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [Zero-1-to-3: Zero-shot One Image to 3D Object](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11328/) (2023)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [4D Spatio-Temporal ConvNets: Minkowski Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08755/) (2019)
- [FLUX.1 Kontext: Flow Matching for In-Context Image Generation and Editing in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15742/) (2025)
- [DreamGaussian: Generative Gaussian Splatting for Efficient 3D Content Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16653/) (2023)
- [PIFu: Pixel-Aligned Implicit Function for High-Resolution Clothed Human Digitization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05172/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Diffusion Probabilistic Models for 3D Point Cloud Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01458/) (2021)
- [Score Jacobian Chaining: Lifting Pretrained 2D Diffusion Models for 3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00774/) (2022)
- [PIFuHD: Multi-Level Pixel-Aligned Implicit Function for High-Resolution 3D Human Digitization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00452/) (2020)
- [3DShape2VecSet: A 3D Shape Representation for Neural Fields and Generative Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11445/) (2023)
- [Point-M2AE: Multi-scale Masked Autoencoders for Hierarchical Point Cloud Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14401/) (2022)
- [PyMAF: 3D Human Pose and Shape Regression with Pyramidal Mesh Alignment Feedback Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16507/) (2021)
- [Function4D: Real-time Human Volumetric Capture from Very Sparse Consumer RGBD Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01859/) (2021)
- [BBDM: Image-to-image Translation with Brownian Bridge Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07680/) (2022)
- [XCube: Large-Scale 3D Generative Modeling using Sparse Voxel Hierarchies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03806/) (2023)
- [Denoising Diffusion Bridge Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16948/) (2023)
- [Collaborative Regression of Expressive Bodies using Moderation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05301/) (2021)
- [CraftsMan3D: High-fidelity Mesh Generation with 3D Native Generation and Interactive Geometry Refiner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14979/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Achieving consistent and high-fidelity geometry and appearance reconstruction of 3D digital humans from a single RGB image is inherently a challenging task. Existing studies typically resort to decoupled pipelines for geometry estimation and appearance synthesis, often hindering unified reconstruction and causing inconsistencies. This paper introduces JGA-LBD, a novel framework that unifies the modeling of geometry and appearance into a joint latent representation and formulates the generation process as bridge diffusion. Observing that directly integrating heterogeneous input conditions (e.g., depth maps, SMPL models) leads to substantial training difficulties, we unify all conditions into the 3D Gaussian representations, which can be further compressed into a unified latent space through a shared sparse variational autoencoder (VAE). Subsequently, the specialized form of bridge diffusion enables to start with a partial observation of the target latent code and solely focuses on inferring the missing components. Finally, a dedicated decoding module extracts the complete 3D human geometric structure and renders novel views from the inferred latent representation. Experiments demonstrate that JGA-LBD outperforms current state-of-the-art approaches in terms of both geometry fidelity and appearance quality, including challenging in-the-wild scenarios. Our code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/haiantyz/JGA-LBD.