Learning 3D-Gaussian Simulators from RGB Videos

Realistic simulation is critical for applications ranging from robotics to animation.

Learned simulators have emerged as a possibility to capture real world physics directly from video data, but very often require privileged information such as depth information, particle tracks and hand-engineered features to maintain spatial and temporal consistency.

These strong inductive biases or ground truth 3D information help in domains where data is sparse but limit scalability and generalization in data rich regimes.

To overcome the key limitations, we propose 3DGSim, a learned 3D simulator that directly learns physical interactions from multi-view RGB videos.

3DGSim unifies 3D scene reconstruction, particle dynamics prediction and video synthesis into an end-to-end trained framework.

It adopts MVSplat to learn a latent particle-based representation of 3D scenes, a Point Transformer for particle dynamics, a Temporal Merging module for consistent temporal aggregation and Gaussian Splatting to produce novel view renderings.

By jointly training inverse rendering and dynamics forecasting, 3DGSim embeds the physical properties into point-wise latent features.

This enables the model to capture diverse physical behaviors, from rigid to elastic, cloth-like dynamics, and boundary conditions (e.g. fixed cloth corner), along with realistic lighting effects that also generalize to unseen multibody interactions and novel scene edits.