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3D assets reflect light but emit none, and a new benchmark scores generating the light itself

AspireAI community · arXiv (Dongchen Yang et al.)
Current 3D generation produces assets with detailed geometry and rich textures that are still non-emissive: they reflect light and emit none. LightGenBench treats emission generation as a new task, predicting spatially varying RGB emission over a 3D asset's surface from its geometry, non-emissive materials and a rendered view. It curates 37k artist-authored emissive assets in UV, voxel and multi-view form, establishes baselines across four method families (UV-domain, sparse-voxel, multi-view and segmentation-based), and designs an evaluation protocol measuring where an asset emits and how, backed by user-study comparisons on renderings at varying emission strength. The sparse-voxel baseline TRELLIS.2-Emission performs best, because generating emission natively in 3D avoids the fracturing artefacts of UV space and the occluded emitters multi-view generation cannot see. But TRELLIS.2-Emission reaches only an IoU of 0.271, so the authors are explicit that the task is far from solved.
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One distance function matched sparse-autoencoder features across layers and compressed feature circuits into supernodes
Two sparse-autoencoder analyses have resisted scaling: matching semantically similar features across layers, and compressing large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes. This paper argues both are the same underlying problem, estimating semantic distances between SAE features that sit on different activation manifolds. Its representation treats each feature not as a single decoder vector but as an activation-weighted distribution over the hidden states expressing it, projects those distributions into a shared reference space, and compares them with Wasserstein distance. The representation is proved invariant to activation rescaling and stable under perturbation, and recovers true matches under finite-sample margin conditions. Empirically it outperformed decoder-vector and LLM-based baselines and captured subtle functional distinctions between related features, and it compressed large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes automatically. The limitation is that this is interpretability tooling: the paper demonstrates better feature matching and circuit compression, not that downstream interpretability claims become more accurate.
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