arXiv:2605.25861v2 Announce Type: cross Abstract: 3D human mesh recovery and 3D clothed human reconstruction are inherently related, yet they have long been studied in isolation, thereby overlooking the potential gains of joint optimization. To overcome this limitation, we propose to address these two tasks within a unified framework, which allows their mutual dependencies to be effectively exploited. Building on this idea, we propose MuNet, a mutualistic network for joint 3D human mesh recovery and 3D clothed human reconstruction from single images. First, we adopt 2-manifold graphs as a unified representation for all 3D models, enabling consistent modeling across 3D human mesh recovery and clothed human reconstruction. Second, we design an end-to-end graph convolutional network that progressively deforms an initial graph into a 3D human mesh and refines it into a detailed 3D clothed human model. Third, we introduce a mutualistic mechanism that allows reciprocal interaction between the two tasks {during training}, where 3D human mesh recovery provides guidance for 3D clothed human reconstruction, and reconstruction feedback refines the 3D human mesh recovery. We extensively evaluate MuNet on six benchmark datasets for 3D human mesh recovery and 3D clothed human reconstruction, including Human3.6M, 3DPW, MPI-INF-3DHP, THuman2.0, CAPE, and RenderPeople. Experimental results demonstrate that MuNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on both tasks across all datasets. The code of MuNet is released for research purposes at https://github.com/starVisionTeam/MuNet.

Nature, Published online: 15 April 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01102-w

Grand anti-desertification schemes often fail when trees die and funding dries up — yet one project has broken the mould.

arXiv:2603.29634v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Continuous image tokenizers enable efficient visual generation, and those based on variational frameworks can learn smooth, structured latent representations through KL regularization. Yet this often leads to posterior collapse when using fewer tokens, where the encoder fails to encode informative features into the compressed latent space. To address this, we introduce \textbf{MacTok}, a \textbf{M}asked \textbf{A}ugmenting 1D \textbf{C}ontinuous \textbf{Tok}enizer that leverages image masking and representation alignment to prevent collapse while learning compact and robust representations. MacTok applies both random masking to regularize latent learning and DINO-guided semantic masking to emphasize informative regions in images, forcing the model to encode robust semantics from incomplete visual evidence. Combined with global and local representation alignment, MacTok preserves rich discriminative information in a highly compressed 1D latent space, requiring only 64 or 128 tokens. On ImageNet, MacTok achieves a competitive gFID of 1.44 at 256$\times$256 and a state-of-the-art 1.52 at 512$\times$512 with SiT-XL, while reducing token usage by up to 64$\times$. These results confirm that masking and semantic guidance together prevent posterior collapse and achieve efficient, high-fidelity tokenization.