# FACE: A Face-based Autoregressive Representation for High-Fidelity and Efficient Mesh Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01515 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01515/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (2022)
- [FlashAttention-2: Faster Attention with Better Parallelism and Work Partitioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08691/) (2023)
- [Objaverse: A Universe of Annotated 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08051/) (2022)
- [Learning Implicit Fields for Generative Shape Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02822/) (2018)
- [Structured 3D Latents for Scalable and Versatile 3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01506/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Probabilistic Models for 3D Point Cloud Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01458/) (2021)
- [Learning a Probabilistic Latent Space of Object Shapes via 3D Generative-Adversarial Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.07584/) (2016)
- [PointFlow: 3D Point Cloud Generation with Continuous Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.12320/) (2019)
- [3DShape2VecSet: A 3D Shape Representation for Neural Fields and Generative Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11445/) (2023)
- [CLAY: A Controllable Large-scale Generative Model for Creating High-quality 3D Assets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13897/) (2024)
- [Muon is Scalable for LLM Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16982/) (2025)
- [Hunyuan3D 2.0: Scaling Diffusion Models for High Resolution Textured 3D Assets Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12202/) (2025)
- [PolyGen: An Autoregressive Generative Model of 3D Meshes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10880/) (2020)
- [MeshGPT: Generating Triangle Meshes with Decoder-Only Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15475/) (2023)
- [TripoSG: High-Fidelity 3D Shape Synthesis using Large-Scale Rectified Flow Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06608/) (2025)
- [MeshAnything: Artist-Created Mesh Generation with Autoregressive Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10163/) (2024)
- [Using Shape to Categorize: Low-Shot Learning with an Explicit Shape Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07296/) (2021)
- [MeshAnything V2: Artist-Created Mesh Generation With Adjacent Mesh Tokenization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02555/) (2024)
- [MeshXL: Neural Coordinate Field for Generative 3D Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20853/) (2024)
- [LLaMA-Mesh: Unifying 3D Mesh Generation with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09595/) (2024)
- [Meshtron: High-Fidelity, Artist-Like 3D Mesh Generation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09548/) (2024)
- [EdgeRunner: Auto-regressive Auto-encoder for Artistic Mesh Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18114/) (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)
- [Neural Dual Contouring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01999/) (2022)
- [PolyDiff: Generating 3D Polygonal Meshes with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11417/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [AssetGen: Deployable 3D Asset Generation at Interactive Speed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.26137/) (2026)
- [QuadLink: Autoregressive Quad-Dominant Mesh Generation via Point-Relation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.16813/) (2026)
- [Hunyuan3D-Buffalo 1.0: A Unified Multimodal Model for Scalable 3D Generation, Understanding, and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.02711/) (2026)
- [TaoFlowForge: Progressive Native Mesh Generation via Cascaded Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37139/) (2026)
- [OuroReward: Sequential Reward Scheduling for Reinforcement Learning in Text-to-3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.03423/) (2026)
- [Q-MAGIC: Quad-only Mesh Autoregressive Generation via Singularity-Aware Circular Relative Offset Tokenization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.19777/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Autoregressive models for 3D mesh generation suffer from a fundamental limitation: they flatten meshes into long vertex-coordinate sequences. This results in prohibitive computational costs, hindering the efficient synthesis of high-fidelity geometry. We argue this bottleneck stems from operating at the wrong semantic level. We introduce FACE, a novel Autoregressive Autoencoder (ARAE) framework that reconceptualizes the task by generating meshes at the face level. Our one-face-one-token strategy treats each triangle face, the fundamental building block of a mesh, as a single, unified token. This simple yet powerful design reduces the sequence length by a factor of nine, leading to an unprecedented compression ratio of 0.11, halving the previous state-of-the-art. This dramatic efficiency gain does not compromise quality; by pairing our face-level decoder with a powerful VecSet encoder, FACE achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction quality on standard benchmarks. The versatility of the learned latent space is further demonstrated by training a latent diffusion model that achieves high-fidelity, single-image-to-mesh generation. FACE provides a simple, scalable, and powerful paradigm that lowers the barrier to high-quality structured 3D content creation.