Concept Activation Vectors for Generating User-Defined 3D Shapes

We explore the interpretability of 3D geometric deep learning models in the context of Computer-Aided Design (CAD). The field of parametric CAD can be limited by the difficulty of expressing high-level design concepts in terms of a few numeric parameters.

In this paper, we use a deep learning architecture to encode high dimensional 3D shapes into a vectorized latent representation that can be used to describe arbitrary concepts. Specifically, we train a simple auto-encoder to parameterize a dataset of complex shapes.

To understand the latent encoded space, we use the idea of Concept Activation Vectors (CAV) to reinterpret the latent space in terms of user-defined concepts. This allows modification of a reference design to exhibit more or fewer characteristics of a chosen concept or group of concepts.

We also test the statistical significance of the identified concepts and determine the sensitivity of a physical quantity of interest across the dataset.