Representing 3D Shapes With 64 Latent Vectors for 3D Diffusion Models

Constructing a compressed latent space through a variational autoencoder (VAE) is the key for efficient 3D diffusion models.This paper introduces COD-VAE, a VAE that encodes 3D shapes into a COmpact set of 1D latent vectors without sacrificing quality.COD-VAE introduces a two-stage autoencoder scheme to improve compression and decoding efficiency.First, our encoder block progressively compresses point clouds into compact latent vectors via intermediate point patches. Second, our triplane-based decoder reconstructs dense triplanes from latent vectors instead of directly decoding neural fields, significantly reducing computational overhead of neural fields decoding. Finally, we propose uncertainty-guided token pruning, which allocates resources adaptively by skipping computations in simpler regions and improves the decoder efficiency.Experimental results demonstrate that COD-VAE achieves 16$\times$ compression compared to the baseline while maintaining quality. This enables $20.8\times$ speedup in generation, highlighting that a large number of latent vectors is not a prerequisite for high-quality reconstruction and generation.