Researcher profile

David Novotny

David Novotny contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

4 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

VGGT-$Ω$

Recent feed-forward reconstruction models, such as VGGT, have proven competitive with traditional optimization-based reconstructors while also providing geometry-aware features useful for other tasks. Here, we show that the quality of these models scales predictably with model and data size. We do so by introducing VGGT-$Ω$, which substantially improves reconstruction accuracy, efficiency, and capabilities for both static and dynamic scenes. To enable training this model at an unprecedented scale, we introduce architectural changes that improve training efficiency, a high-quality data annotation pipeline that supports dynamic scenes, and a self-supervised learning protocol. We simplify VGGT's architecture by using a single dense prediction head with multi-task supervision and removing the expensive high-resolution convolutional layers. We also use registers to aggregate scene information into a compact representation and introduce register attention, which restricts inter-frame information exchange to these registers, in part replacing global attention. In this way, during training, VGGT-$Ω$ uses only about 30% of the GPU memory of its predecessor, allowing us to train with 15x more supervised data than prior work and to leverage vast amounts of unlabeled video data. VGGT-$Ω$ achieves strong results for reconstruction of static and dynamic scenes across multiple benchmarks, for example, improving over the previous best camera estimation accuracy on Sintel by 77%. We also show that the learned registers can improve vision-language-action models and support alignment with language, suggesting that reconstruction can be a powerful and scalable proxy task for spatial understanding. Project Page: http://vggt-omega.github.io/

preprint2022arXiv

iSDF: Real-Time Neural Signed Distance Fields for Robot Perception

We present iSDF, a continual learning system for real-time signed distance field (SDF) reconstruction. Given a stream of posed depth images from a moving camera, it trains a randomly initialised neural network to map input 3D coordinate to approximate signed distance. The model is self-supervised by minimising a loss that bounds the predicted signed distance using the distance to the closest sampled point in a batch of query points that are actively sampled. In contrast to prior work based on voxel grids, our neural method is able to provide adaptive levels of detail with plausible filling in of partially observed regions and denoising of observations, all while having a more compact representation. In evaluations against alternative methods on real and synthetic datasets of indoor environments, we find that iSDF produces more accurate reconstructions, and better approximations of collision costs and gradients useful for downstream planners in domains from navigation to manipulation. Code and video results can be found at our project page: https://joeaortiz.github.io/iSDF/ .

preprint2022arXiv

Nerfels: Renderable Neural Codes for Improved Camera Pose Estimation

This paper presents a framework that combines traditional keypoint-based camera pose optimization with an invertible neural rendering mechanism. Our proposed 3D scene representation, Nerfels, is locally dense yet globally sparse. As opposed to existing invertible neural rendering systems which overfit a model to the entire scene, we adopt a feature-driven approach for representing scene-agnostic, local 3D patches with renderable codes. By modelling a scene only where local features are detected, our framework effectively generalizes to unseen local regions in the scene via an optimizable code conditioning mechanism in the neural renderer, all while maintaining the low memory footprint of a sparse 3D map representation. Our model can be incorporated to existing state-of-the-art hand-crafted and learned local feature pose estimators, yielding improved performance when evaluating on ScanNet for wide camera baseline scenarios.

preprint2020arXiv

Accelerating 3D Deep Learning with PyTorch3D

Deep learning has significantly improved 2D image recognition. Extending into 3D may advance many new applications including autonomous vehicles, virtual and augmented reality, authoring 3D content, and even improving 2D recognition. However despite growing interest, 3D deep learning remains relatively underexplored. We believe that some of this disparity is due to the engineering challenges involved in 3D deep learning, such as efficiently processing heterogeneous data and reframing graphics operations to be differentiable. We address these challenges by introducing PyTorch3D, a library of modular, efficient, and differentiable operators for 3D deep learning. It includes a fast, modular differentiable renderer for meshes and point clouds, enabling analysis-by-synthesis approaches. Compared with other differentiable renderers, PyTorch3D is more modular and efficient, allowing users to more easily extend it while also gracefully scaling to large meshes and images. We compare the PyTorch3D operators and renderer with other implementations and demonstrate significant speed and memory improvements. We also use PyTorch3D to improve the state-of-the-art for unsupervised 3D mesh and point cloud prediction from 2D images on ShapeNet. PyTorch3D is open-source and we hope it will help accelerate research in 3D deep learning.