Physical-Field-Bridged Material Parameter Inference from Multi-View Deformation Videos

arXiv:2610.17591v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Estimating simulation-ready material parameters from visual observations is crucial for deformable-object manipulation but challenging because material properties are only indirectly revealed through physical responses. We introduce physical-field-bridged material inference, a single-pass framework that uses dense physical responses to connect multi-view RGB deformation videos with constitutive-type classification and continuous parameter regression. Unlike inverse-physics methods requiring per-scene reconstruction, online tuning, or simulation-in-the-loop optimization, our model predicts force/contact masks, projected motion-flow fields, and projected stress-response maps, then conditions material inference on these fields to reduce reliance on appearance or category shortcuts. We construct DeformFieldBench, a 3DGS MPM learning environment comprising 5,000 simulations across 100 object shapes and five mechanically informative loading modes, with dense pixel-aligned physical supervision. Our method achieves the best median errors on all four continuous parameters, improves stress-hotspot recall from 0.0762 to 0.5121, and attains 0.8676 SSIM/36.82 dB PSNR in same-simulator replay on unseen objects. Under a protocol-matched GSO evaluation, inference and future-state prediction take approximately 30 seconds, compared with 15-120 minutes for per-scene optimization. The method also yields measurable replay agreement on five real-world sequences. These results support dense physical fields as an effective bridge for fast material inference, while cross-simulator and real-world tests reveal remaining domain and identifiability gaps.