Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Chen, Hongrui, Ha, Dat Quoc, Carstensen, Josephine V., Ahmed, Faez
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.26926
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866910079732678656
author Chen, Hongrui
Ha, Dat Quoc
Carstensen, Josephine V.
Ahmed, Faez
author_facet Chen, Hongrui
Ha, Dat Quoc
Carstensen, Josephine V.
Ahmed, Faez
contents Topology optimization can generate high-performance structures, but designers often need to revise the resulting topology in ways that reflect fabrication preferences, structural intuition, or downstream design constraints. In particular, they may wish to explicitly control interpretable structural characteristics such as member thickness, characteristic member length, the number of joints, or the number of members connected to a joint. These quantities are often discrete, non-smooth, or only available through a forward evaluation procedure, making them difficult to impose within conventional optimization pipelines. We present TopoCtrl, a post-optimization control framework that repurposes the latent space of a pre-trained topology foundation model for explicit characteristic-guided editing. Given an optimized topology, TopoCtrl encodes it into the latent space of a latent diffusion model, applies partial noising to preserve instance similarity while creating room for modification, and then performs regression-guided denoising toward a prescribed target characteristic. The concept is to train a lightweight regression model on latent representations annotated with evaluated structural characteristics, and to use its gradient as a differentiable guidance signal during reverse diffusion. This avoids the need for characteristic-specific reformulations, hand-derived sensitivities, or iterative optimization. Because the method operates through partial noising of an existing topology latent, it preserves overall structural similarity while still enabling characteristic controls. Across representative control tasks involving both continuous and discrete structural characteristics, TopoCtrl produces target-aligned topology modifications while better preserving structural coherence and design intent than indirect parameter tuning or naive geometric post-processing.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_26926
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TopoCtrl: Post-Optimization Topology Editing Toward Target Structural Characteristics
Chen, Hongrui
Ha, Dat Quoc
Carstensen, Josephine V.
Ahmed, Faez
Graphics
Topology optimization can generate high-performance structures, but designers often need to revise the resulting topology in ways that reflect fabrication preferences, structural intuition, or downstream design constraints. In particular, they may wish to explicitly control interpretable structural characteristics such as member thickness, characteristic member length, the number of joints, or the number of members connected to a joint. These quantities are often discrete, non-smooth, or only available through a forward evaluation procedure, making them difficult to impose within conventional optimization pipelines. We present TopoCtrl, a post-optimization control framework that repurposes the latent space of a pre-trained topology foundation model for explicit characteristic-guided editing. Given an optimized topology, TopoCtrl encodes it into the latent space of a latent diffusion model, applies partial noising to preserve instance similarity while creating room for modification, and then performs regression-guided denoising toward a prescribed target characteristic. The concept is to train a lightweight regression model on latent representations annotated with evaluated structural characteristics, and to use its gradient as a differentiable guidance signal during reverse diffusion. This avoids the need for characteristic-specific reformulations, hand-derived sensitivities, or iterative optimization. Because the method operates through partial noising of an existing topology latent, it preserves overall structural similarity while still enabling characteristic controls. Across representative control tasks involving both continuous and discrete structural characteristics, TopoCtrl produces target-aligned topology modifications while better preserving structural coherence and design intent than indirect parameter tuning or naive geometric post-processing.
title TopoCtrl: Post-Optimization Topology Editing Toward Target Structural Characteristics
topic Graphics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.26926