Allen Tu

Portrait of Allen Tu

atu1@umd.edu


3D/4D Research Portfolio

I am funded by the IARPA Walk-through Rendering from Images of Varying Altitude (WRIVA) program, which aims to develop software systems for site modeling in scenarios where only a limited amount of ground-level imagery with reliable metadata is available. My research focuses on unconstrained 3D reconstruction and novel view synthesis in challenging real-world environments, with contributions in the following areas:

The Principal Investigators overseeing my research include Professor Tom Goldstein, Professor Matthias Zwicker, Professor Abhinav Shrivastava, Dr. Abhay Yadav, Dr. Cheng Peng, and Professor Rama Chellappa. My team at the University of Maryland Institute of Advanced Computer Studies partners with Johns Hopkins University, with whom I previously collaborated on multimodal biometric recognition research under the IARPA BRIAR program at STR. Additional institutional partners include Rice University, University of California San Diego, and Arizona State University.

Diffusion Model Priors for 3D Reconstruction

Diffusion in the Loop produces sharper reconstructions with fewer artifacts than the baseline 3D model in sparse-view reconstruction settings. Applying posthoc diffusion cleanup further enhances visual quality and fine detail.

Research Highlights


Boost DeformableGS rendering speed from 20 to 276 FPS using temporal sensitivity pruning and groupwise SE(3) motion distillation, all while preserving the superior image quality of per-Gaussian neural motion.




Enhance 3D Gaussian Splatting by selectively injecting super-resolution only where high-frequency detail is missing, yielding sharper results and improved perceptual quality without introducing multi-view inconsistencies.




Accelerate 3D Gaussian Splatting rendering speed by 2× for free by accurately localizing primitives during rasterization and over 6× in total by pruning the scene by more than 90% during training, providing a significantly higher speedup than existing techniques while maintaining competitive image quality.




Prune 90% of primitives from any pretrained 3D Gaussian Splatting model using a mathematically principled sensitivity score, more than tripling rendering speed while retaining more salient foreground information and higher visual fidelity than previous techniques at a substantially higher compression ratio.




The SPAR-3D workshop brings together the 3D vision, AI security, and multimodal reasoning communities to advance robustness, traceability, and trustworthy 3D generative systems.


* denotes equal contribution.