Repurposing 2D Diffusion Models with Gaussian Atlas for 3D Generation

Tiange Xiang, Kai Li, Chengjiang Long, Christian Häne, Peihong Guo, Scott Delp, Ehsan Adeli, Li Fei-Fei; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2025, pp. 16492-16502

Text-to-image diffusion models have seen significant development recently due to increasing availability of paired 2D data. Although a similar trend is emerging in 3D generation, the limited availability of high-quality 3D data has resulted in less competitive 3D diffusion models compared to their 2D counterparts. In this work, we show how 2D diffusion models, originally trained for text-to-image generation, can be repurposed for 3D object generation. We introduce Gaussian Atlas, a representation of 3D Gaussians with dense 2D grids, which enables the fine-tuning of 2D diffusion models for generating 3D Gaussians. Our approach shows a successful transfer learning from a pretrained 2D diffusion model to 2D manifold flattend from 3D structures. To facilitate model training, a large-scale dataset, Gaussian Atlas, is compiled to comprise 205K high-quality 3D Gaussian fittings of a diverse array of 3D objects. Our experiment results indicate that text-to-image diffusion models can also serve as 3D content generators.