RigidFormer: Learning Rigid Dynamics using Transformers

Hugging Face Daily Papers Papers

Summary

RigidFormer is a new mesh-free, object-centric Transformer model that learns rigid dynamics from point clouds, outperforming mesh-based baselines in speed and scalability for multi-object contact dynamics.

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.
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Paper page - RigidFormer: Learning Rigid Dynamics using Transformers

Source: https://huggingface.co/papers/2605.09196 RigidFormer: Learning Rigid Dynamics with Transformers - our attempt to scale learning-based physical dynamics with Transformers.

RigidFormer learns rigid dynamics with Transformers. It is a mesh-free, object-centric Transformer for multi-object rigid-body contact dynamics from point clouds.

Learning physics with purely neural simulators, without relying on traditional physics engines, is an important and widely studied problem. Prior SOTA methods often use graph neural networks for accuracy and generalization, but still struggle with efficient, high-fidelity simulation at scale.

RigidFormer uses only point inputs, matches or outperforms mesh-based baselines on standard benchmarks, runs much faster, generalizes across point resolutions and 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.

RigidFormer is mesh-free: it does not require mesh connectivity, SDFs, or vertex-level message passing, making it well-suited for point-cloud observations and scalable simulation.

This architecture can also be adapted to learn soft-body dynamics by replacing the rigid-body module (differentiable Kabsch alignment).

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