Skip to main navigation Skip to search Skip to main content

SAND: Spatially Adaptive Network Depth for Fast Sampling of Neural Implicit Surfaces

  • Chuanxiang Yang
  • , Junhui Hou
  • , Yuan Liu
  • , Siyu Ren
  • , Guangshun Wei
  • , Taku Komura
  • , Yuanfeng Zhou*
  • , Wenping Wang*
  • *Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Journal Publications and ReviewsRGC 21 - Publication in refereed journalpeer-review

1 Downloads (CityUHK Scholars)

Abstract

Implicit neural representations are powerful for geometric modeling, but their practical use is often limited by the high computational cost of network evaluations. We observe that implicit representations require progressively lower accuracy as query points move farther from the target surface, and that even within the same iso-surface, representation difficulty varies spatially with local geometric complexity. However, conventional neural implicit models evaluate all query points with the same network depth and computational cost, ignoring this spatial variation and thereby incurring substantial computational waste. Motivated by this observation, we propose an efficient neural implicit geometry representation framework with spatially adaptive network depth (SAND). SAND leverages a volumetric network-depth map together with a tailed multi-layer perceptron (T-MLP) to model implicit representation. The volumetric depth map records, for each spatial region, the network depth required to achieve sufficient accuracy, while the T-MLP is a modified MLP designed to learn implicit functions such as signed distance functions, where an output branch, referred to as a tail, is attached to each hidden layer. This design allows network evaluation to terminate adaptively without traversing the full network and directs computational resources to geometrically important and complex regions, improving efficiency while preserving high-fidelity representations. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach can significantly improve the inference-time query speed of implicit neural representations.

© 2026 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
Original languageEnglish
Article number54
Number of pages14
JournalACM Transactions on Graphics
Volume45
Issue number4
Online published3 Jul 2026
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jul 2026

Funding

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 62572284 and 62422118, the Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province (Major Basic Research) under Grant ZR2024ZD12, and the Hong Kong Research Grants Council under Grants 11219324 and N_CityU1114/25.

Research Keywords

  • Computing methodologies
  • Modeling methodologies
  • Implicit neural representation
  • Adaptive computation
  • Level of detail
  • Octree
  • Efficient inference

Publisher's Copyright Statement

  • This full text is made available under CC-BY 4.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

RGC Funding Information

  • RGC-funded

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'SAND: Spatially Adaptive Network Depth for Fast Sampling of Neural Implicit Surfaces'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this