RigidFormer: Learning Rigid Dynamics using Transformers

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Dou, Zhiyang, Guo, Minghao, Wu, Haixu, Roble, Doug, Stuyck, Tuur, Matusik, Wojciech
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Dou, Zhiyang
Guo, Minghao
Wu, Haixu
Roble, Doug
Stuyck, Tuur
Matusik, Wojciech
author_facet Dou, Zhiyang
Guo, Minghao
Wu, Haixu
Roble, Doug
Stuyck, Tuur
Matusik, Wojciech
contents Learning-based simulation of multi-object rigid-body dynamics remains difficult because contact is discontinuous and errors compound over long horizons. Most existing methods remain tied to mesh connectivity and vertex-level message passing, which limits their applicability to mesh-free inputs such as point clouds and leads to high computational cost. Efficiently modeling high-fidelity rigid-body dynamics from mesh-free representations, therefore, remains challenging. We introduce RigidFormer, an object-centric Transformer-based model that learns mesh-free rigid-body dynamics with controllable integration step sizes. RigidFormer reasons at the object level and advances each object through compact anchors; Anchor-Vertex Pooling enriches these anchors with local vertex features, retaining contact-relevant geometry without dense vertex-level interaction. We propose Anchor-based RoPE to inject anchor geometry into attention while respecting the unordered nature of objects and anchors: object-token processing is permutation-equivariant, and the mean-pooled anchor descriptor is invariant to anchor reindexing while preserving shape extent. RigidFormer further enforces rigidity by projecting updates onto the rigid-body manifold using differentiable Kabsch alignment. On standard benchmarks, RigidFormer outperforms or matches mesh-based baselines using point inputs, runs faster, generalizes to unseen point resolutions and across datasets, and scales to 200+ objects; we also show a preliminary extension to command-conditioned articulated bodies by treating body parts as interacting object-level components.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_09196
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RigidFormer: Learning Rigid Dynamics using Transformers
Dou, Zhiyang
Guo, Minghao
Wu, Haixu
Roble, Doug
Stuyck, Tuur
Matusik, Wojciech
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Graphics
Machine Learning
Robotics
Learning-based simulation of multi-object rigid-body dynamics remains difficult because contact is discontinuous and errors compound over long horizons. Most existing methods remain tied to mesh connectivity and vertex-level message passing, which limits their applicability to mesh-free inputs such as point clouds and leads to high computational cost. Efficiently modeling high-fidelity rigid-body dynamics from mesh-free representations, therefore, remains challenging. We introduce RigidFormer, an object-centric Transformer-based model that learns mesh-free rigid-body dynamics with controllable integration step sizes. RigidFormer reasons at the object level and advances each object through compact anchors; Anchor-Vertex Pooling enriches these anchors with local vertex features, retaining contact-relevant geometry without dense vertex-level interaction. We propose Anchor-based RoPE to inject anchor geometry into attention while respecting the unordered nature of objects and anchors: object-token processing is permutation-equivariant, and the mean-pooled anchor descriptor is invariant to anchor reindexing while preserving shape extent. RigidFormer further enforces rigidity by projecting updates onto the rigid-body manifold using differentiable Kabsch alignment. On standard benchmarks, RigidFormer outperforms or matches mesh-based baselines using point inputs, runs faster, generalizes to unseen point resolutions and across datasets, and scales to 200+ objects; we also show a preliminary extension to command-conditioned articulated bodies by treating body parts as interacting object-level components.
title RigidFormer: Learning Rigid Dynamics using Transformers
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Graphics
Machine Learning
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.09196