Practical hex-mesh optimization via edge-cone rectification
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The usability of hexahedral meshes depends on the degree to which the shape of their elements deviates from a perfect cube; a single concave, or inverted element makes a mesh unusable. While a range of methods exist for discretizing 3D objects with an initial topologically suitable hex mesh, their output meshes frequently contain poorly shaped and even inverted elements, requiring a further quality optimization step. We introduce a novel framework for optimizing hex-mesh quality capable of generating inversion-free high-quality meshes from such poor initial inputs. We recast hex quality improvement as an optimization of the shape of overlapping cones, or unions, of tetrahedra surrounding every directed edge in the hex mesh, and show the two to be equivalent. We then formulate cone shape optimization as a sequence of convex quadratic optimization problems, where hex convexity is encoded via simple linear inequality constraints. As this solution space may be empty, we therefore present an alternate formulation which allows the solver to proceed even when constraints cannot be satisfied exactly. We iteratively improve mesh element quality by solving at each step a set of local, per-cone, convex constrained optimization problems, followed by a global energy minimization step which reconciles these local solutions. This latter method provides no theoretical guarantees on the solution but produces inversion-free, high quality meshes in practice. We demonstrate the robustness of our framework by optimizing numerous poor quality input meshes generated using a variety of initial meshing methods and producing high-quality inversion-free meshes in each case. We further validate our algorithm by comparing it against previous work, and demonstrate a significant improvement in both worst and average element quality.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it