Daily Papers

Recent developments in differentiable and neural rendering have made impressive breakthroughs in a variety of 2D and 3D tasks, e.g. novel view synthesis, 3D reconstruction. Typically, differentiable rendering relies on a dense viewpoint coverage of the scene, such that the geometry can be disambiguated from appearance observations alone. Several challenges arise when only a few input views are available, often referred to as sparse or few-shot neural rendering. As this is an underconstrained problem, most existing approaches introduce the use of regularisation, together with a diversity of learnt and hand-crafted priors. A recurring problem in sparse rendering literature is the lack of an homogeneous, up-to-date, dataset and evaluation protocol. While high-resolution datasets are standard in dense reconstruction literature, sparse rendering methods often evaluate with low-resolution images. Additionally, data splits are inconsistent across different manuscripts, and testing ground-truth images are often publicly available, which may lead to over-fitting. In this work, we propose the Sparse Rendering (SpaRe) dataset and benchmark. We introduce a new dataset that follows the setup of the DTU MVS dataset. The dataset is composed of 97 new scenes based on synthetic, high-quality assets. Each scene has up to 64 camera views and 7 lighting configurations, rendered at 1600x1200 resolution. We release a training split of 82 scenes to foster generalizable approaches, and provide an online evaluation platform for the validation and test sets, whose ground-truth images remain hidden. We propose two different sparse configurations (3 and 9 input images respectively). This provides a powerful and convenient tool for reproducible evaluation, and enable researchers easy access to a public leaderboard with the state-of-the-art performance scores. Available at: https://sparebenchmark.github.io/

We propose an efficient radiance field rendering algorithm that incorporates a rasterization process on adaptive sparse voxels without neural networks or 3D Gaussians. There are two key contributions coupled with the proposed system. The first is to adaptively and explicitly allocate sparse voxels to different levels of detail within scenes, faithfully reproducing scene details with 65536^3 grid resolution while achieving high rendering frame rates. Second, we customize a rasterizer for efficient adaptive sparse voxels rendering. We render voxels in the correct depth order by using ray direction-dependent Morton ordering, which avoids the well-known popping artifact found in Gaussian splatting. Our method improves the previous neural-free voxel model by over 4db PSNR and more than 10x FPS speedup, achieving state-of-the-art comparable novel-view synthesis results. Additionally, our voxel representation is seamlessly compatible with grid-based 3D processing techniques such as Volume Fusion, Voxel Pooling, and Marching Cubes, enabling a wide range of future extensions and applications.

Although 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has demonstrated promising results in novel view synthesis, its performance degrades dramatically with sparse inputs and generates undesirable artifacts. As the number of training views decreases, the novel view synthesis task degrades to a highly under-determined problem such that existing methods suffer from the notorious overfitting issue. Interestingly, we observe that models with fewer Gaussian primitives exhibit less overfitting under sparse inputs. Inspired by this observation, we propose a Random Dropout Regularization (RDR) to exploit the advantages of low-complexity models to alleviate overfitting. In addition, to remedy the lack of high-frequency details for these models, an Edge-guided Splitting Strategy (ESS) is developed. With these two techniques, our method (termed DropoutGS) provides a simple yet effective plug-in approach to improve the generalization performance of existing 3DGS methods. Extensive experiments show that our DropoutGS produces state-of-the-art performance under sparse views on benchmark datasets including Blender, LLFF, and DTU. The project page is at: https://xuyx55.github.io/DropoutGS/.

Reconstructing dynamic urban scenes remains challenging due to the unbounded nature of driving environments and the presence of multiple dynamic objects. Currently, potentially faster sparse voxel methods are mainly designed for static scenarios. On the other hand, dynamic approaches based on 3D Gaussian Splatting, despite their high-fidelity, are often time-consuming for driving scenarios and exhibit uncontrollable memory growth in large scenes. To address these limitations, we present DrivingVoxels, a compositional sparse voxel rendering framework for dynamic driving scenes. Our method jointly rasterizes sparse voxels from multiple independent octrees within a single rendering pass. Each rigid dynamic object is represented by an octree defined in its local coordinate frame, while a separate static octree models the stationary background. DrivingVoxels adopts a fully explicit, neural-free representation together with a LiDAR-guided structural initialization that efficiently captures scene geometry. We evaluate our framework on the PandaSet benchmark, demonstrating that DrivingVoxels performs on par on perceptual metrics and better on structural metrics for NVS and reconstruction while requiring shorter training times than previous 3DGS-base methods to an efficient optimization workflow anchored by a strong LiDAR prior.

We introduce HART, a unified framework for sparse-view human reconstruction. Given a small set of uncalibrated RGB images of a person as input, it outputs a watertight clothed mesh, the aligned SMPL-X body mesh, and a Gaussian-splat representation for photorealistic novel-view rendering. Prior methods for clothed human reconstruction either optimize parametric templates, which overlook loose garments and human-object interactions, or train implicit functions under simplified camera assumptions, limiting applicability in real scenes. In contrast, HART predicts per-pixel 3D point maps, normals, and body correspondences, and employs an occlusion-aware Poisson reconstruction to recover complete geometry, even in self-occluded regions. These predictions also align with a parametric SMPL-X body model, ensuring that reconstructed geometry remains consistent with human structure while capturing loose clothing and interactions. These human-aligned meshes initialize Gaussian splats to further enable sparse-view rendering. While trained on only 2.3K synthetic scans, HART achieves state-of-the-art results: Chamfer Distance improves by 18-23 percent for clothed-mesh reconstruction, PA-V2V drops by 6-27 percent for SMPL-X estimation, LPIPS decreases by 15-27 percent for novel-view synthesis on a wide range of datasets. These results suggest that feed-forward transformers can serve as a scalable model for robust human reconstruction in real-world settings. Code and models will be released.

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) animation generation is pivotal for professional design due to their structural editability and resolution independence. However, this task remains challenging as it requires bridging discrete code representations with continuous visual dynamics. Existing optimization-based methods often destroy topological consistency, while general-purpose LLMs rely on rigid CSS/SMIL transformations, failing to model geometry-level non-rigid deformations. To address these limitations, we present VAnim, the first LLM-based framework for open-domain text-to-SVG animation. We reconceptualize animation not as sequence generation, but as Sparse State Updates (SSU) on a persistent SVG DOM tree. This paradigm compresses sequence length by over 9.8x while preserving the SVG DOM structure and non-participating elements by construction. To enable precise control, we propose an Identification-First Motion Planning mechanism that grounds textual instructions in explicit visual entities. Furthermore, to overcome the non-differentiable nature of SVG rendering, we employ Rendering-Aware Reinforcement Learning via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). By leveraging a hybrid reward from a state-of-the-art video perception encoder, we align discrete code updates with high-fidelity visual feedback. We also introduce SVGAnim-134k, the first benchmark for vector animation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VAnim significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in semantic alignment and structural validity, with additional appendix metrics further validating motion quality and identity preservation.

Rendering dynamic scenes from monocular videos is a crucial yet challenging task. The recent deformable Gaussian Splatting has emerged as a robust solution to represent real-world dynamic scenes. However, it often leads to heavily redundant Gaussians, attempting to fit every training view at various time steps, leading to slower rendering speeds. Additionally, the attributes of Gaussians in static areas are time-invariant, making it unnecessary to model every Gaussian, which can cause jittering in static regions. In practice, the primary bottleneck in rendering speed for dynamic scenes is the number of Gaussians. In response, we introduce Efficient Dynamic Gaussian Splatting (EDGS), which represents dynamic scenes via sparse time-variant attribute modeling. Our approach formulates dynamic scenes using a sparse anchor-grid representation, with the motion flow of dense Gaussians calculated via a classical kernel representation. Furthermore, we propose an unsupervised strategy to efficiently filter out anchors corresponding to static areas. Only anchors associated with deformable objects are input into MLPs to query time-variant attributes. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that our EDGS significantly improves the rendering speed with superior rendering quality compared to previous state-of-the-art methods.

Faithful human performance capture and free-view rendering from sparse RGB observations is a long-standing problem in Vision and Graphics. The main challenges are the lack of observations and the inherent ambiguities of the setting, e.g. occlusions and depth ambiguity. As a result, radiance fields, which have shown great promise in capturing high-frequency appearance and geometry details in dense setups, perform poorly when naively supervising them on sparse camera views, as the field simply overfits to the sparse-view inputs. To address this, we propose MetaCap, a method for efficient and high-quality geometry recovery and novel view synthesis given very sparse or even a single view of the human. Our key idea is to meta-learn the radiance field weights solely from potentially sparse multi-view videos, which can serve as a prior when fine-tuning them on sparse imagery depicting the human. This prior provides a good network weight initialization, thereby effectively addressing ambiguities in sparse-view capture. Due to the articulated structure of the human body and motion-induced surface deformations, learning such a prior is non-trivial. Therefore, we propose to meta-learn the field weights in a pose-canonicalized space, which reduces the spatial feature range and makes feature learning more effective. Consequently, one can fine-tune our field parameters to quickly generalize to unseen poses, novel illumination conditions as well as novel and sparse (even monocular) camera views. For evaluating our method under different scenarios, we collect a new dataset, WildDynaCap, which contains subjects captured in, both, a dense camera dome and in-the-wild sparse camera rigs, and demonstrate superior results compared to recent state-of-the-art methods on, both, public and WildDynaCap dataset.

Efficiently synthesizing novel views from sparse inputs while maintaining accuracy remains a critical challenge in 3D reconstruction. While advanced techniques like radiance fields and 3D Gaussian Splatting achieve rendering quality and impressive efficiency with dense view inputs, they suffer from significant geometric reconstruction errors when applied to sparse input views. Moreover, although recent methods leverage monocular depth estimation to enhance geometric learning, their dependence on single-view estimated depth often leads to view inconsistency issues across different viewpoints. Consequently, this reliance on absolute depth can introduce inaccuracies in geometric information, ultimately compromising the quality of scene reconstruction with Gaussian splats. In this paper, we present RDG-GS, a novel sparse-view 3D rendering framework with Relative Depth Guidance based on 3D Gaussian Splatting. The core innovation lies in utilizing relative depth guidance to refine the Gaussian field, steering it towards view-consistent spatial geometric representations, thereby enabling the reconstruction of accurate geometric structures and capturing intricate textures. First, we devise refined depth priors to rectify the coarse estimated depth and insert global and fine-grained scene information to regular Gaussians. Building on this, to address spatial geometric inaccuracies from absolute depth, we propose relative depth guidance by optimizing the similarity between spatially correlated patches of depth and images. Additionally, we also directly deal with the sparse areas challenging to converge by the adaptive sampling for quick densification. Across extensive experiments on Mip-NeRF360, LLFF, DTU, and Blender, RDG-GS demonstrates state-of-the-art rendering quality and efficiency, making a significant advancement for real-world application.

Recent progress in neural rendering has brought forth pioneering methods, such as NeRF and Gaussian Splatting, which revolutionize view rendering across various domains like AR/VR, gaming, and content creation. While these methods excel at interpolating {\em within the training data}, the challenge of generalizing to new scenes and objects from very sparse views persists. Specifically, modeling 3D humans from sparse views presents formidable hurdles due to the inherent complexity of human geometry, resulting in inaccurate reconstructions of geometry and textures. To tackle this challenge, this paper leverages recent advancements in Gaussian Splatting and introduces a new method to learn generalizable human Gaussians that allows photorealistic and accurate view-rendering of a new human subject from a limited set of sparse views in a feed-forward manner. A pivotal innovation of our approach involves reformulating the learning of 3D Gaussian parameters into a regression process defined on the 2D UV space of a human template, which allows leveraging the strong geometry prior and the advantages of 2D convolutions. In addition, a multi-scaffold is proposed to effectively represent the offset details. Our method outperforms recent methods on both within-dataset generalization as well as cross-dataset generalization settings.

Many materials show anisotropic light scattering patterns due to the shape and local alignment of their underlying micro structures: surfaces with small elements such as fibers, or the ridges of a brushed metal, are very sparse and require a high spatial resolution to be properly represented as a volume. The acquisition of voxel data from such objects is a time and memory-intensive task, and most rendering approaches require an additional Level-of-Detail (LoD) data structure to aggregate the visual appearance, as observed from multiple distances, in order to reduce the number of samples computed per pixel (E.g.: MIP mapping). In this work we introduce first, an efficient parallel voxelization method designed to facilitate fast data aggregation at multiple resolution levels, and second, a novel representation based on hierarchical SGGX clustering that provides better accuracy than baseline methods. We validate our approach with a CUDA-based implementation of the voxelizer, tested both on triangle meshes and volumetric fabrics modeled with explicit fibers. Finally, we show the results generated with a path tracer based on the proposed LoD rendering model.

3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) is an innovative rendering technique that surpasses the neural radiance field (NeRF) in both rendering speed and visual quality by leveraging an explicit 3D scene representation. Existing 3DGS approaches require a large number of calibrated views to generate a consistent and complete scene representation. When input views are limited, 3DGS tends to overfit the training views, leading to noticeable degradation in rendering quality. To address this limitation, we propose a Point-wise Feature-Aware Gaussian Splatting framework that enables real-time, high-quality rendering from sparse training views. Specifically, we first employ the latest stereo foundation model to estimate accurate camera poses and reconstruct a dense point cloud for Gaussian initialization. We then encode the colour attributes of each 3D Gaussian by sampling and aggregating multiscale 2D appearance features from sparse inputs. To enhance point-wise appearance representation, we design a point interaction network based on a self-attention mechanism, allowing each Gaussian point to interact with its nearest neighbors. These enriched features are subsequently decoded into Gaussian parameters through two lightweight multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) for final rendering. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms NeRF-based approaches and achieves competitive performance under few-shot settings compared to the state-of-the-art 3DGS methods.

3D Gaussian splatting enables high-quality novel view synthesis (NVS) at real-time frame rates. However, its quality drops sharply as we depart from the training views. Thus, dense captures are needed to match the high-quality expectations of some applications, e.g. Virtual Reality (VR). However, such dense captures are very laborious and expensive to obtain. Existing works have explored using 2D generative models to alleviate this requirement by distillation or generating additional training views. These methods are often conditioned only on a handful of reference input views and thus do not fully exploit the available 3D information, leading to inconsistent generation results and reconstruction artifacts. To tackle this problem, we propose a multi-view, flow matching model that learns a flow to connect novel view renderings from possibly sparse reconstructions to renderings that we expect from dense reconstructions. This enables augmenting scene captures with novel, generated views to improve reconstruction quality. Our model is trained on a novel dataset of 3.6M image pairs and can process up to 45 views at 540x960 resolution (91K tokens) on one H100 GPU in a single forward pass. Our pipeline consistently improves NVS in sparse- and dense-view scenarios, leading to higher-quality reconstructions than prior works across multiple, widely-used NVS benchmarks.

Driving a high-quality and photorealistic full-body virtual human from a few RGB cameras is a challenging problem that has become increasingly relevant with emerging virtual reality technologies. A promising solution to democratize such technology would be a generalizable method that takes sparse multi-view images of any person and then generates photoreal free-view renderings of them. However, the state-of-the-art approaches are not scalable to very large datasets and, thus, lack diversity and photorealism. To address this problem, we propose GIGA, a novel, generalizable full-body model for rendering photoreal humans in free viewpoint, driven by a single-view or sparse multi-view video. Notably, GIGA can scale training to a few thousand subjects while maintaining high photorealism and synthesizing dynamic appearance. At the core, we introduce a MultiHeadUNet architecture, which takes an approximate RGB texture accumulated from a single or multiple sparse views and predicts 3D Gaussian primitives represented as 2D texels on top of a human body mesh. At test time, our method performs novel view synthesis of a virtual 3D Gaussian-based human from 1 to 4 input views and a tracked body template for unseen identities. Our method excels over prior works by a significant margin in terms of identity generalization capability and photorealism.

Having precise perception of the environment is crucial for ensuring the secure and reliable functioning of autonomous driving systems. Radar object detection networks are one fundamental part of such systems. CNN-based object detectors showed good performance in this context, but they require large compute resources. This paper investigates sparse convolutional object detection networks, which combine powerful grid-based detection with low compute resources. We investigate radar specific challenges and propose sparse kernel point pillars (SKPP) and dual voxel point convolutions (DVPC) as remedies for the grid rendering and sparse backbone architectures. We evaluate our SKPP-DPVCN architecture on nuScenes, which outperforms the baseline by 5.89% and the previous state of the art by 4.19% in Car AP4.0. Moreover, SKPP-DPVCN reduces the average scale error (ASE) by 21.41% over the baseline.

Given just a few glimpses of a scene, can you imagine the movie playing out as the camera glides through it? That's the lens we take on sparse-input novel view synthesis, not only as filling spatial gaps between widely spaced views, but also as completing a natural video unfolding through space. We recast the task as test-time natural video completion, using powerful priors from pretrained video diffusion models to hallucinate plausible in-between views. Our zero-shot, generation-guided framework produces pseudo views at novel camera poses, modulated by an uncertainty-aware mechanism for spatial coherence. These synthesized frames densify supervision for 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) for scene reconstruction, especially in under-observed regions. An iterative feedback loop lets 3D geometry and 2D view synthesis inform each other, improving both the scene reconstruction and the generated views. The result is coherent, high-fidelity renderings from sparse inputs without any scene-specific training or fine-tuning. On LLFF, DTU, DL3DV, and MipNeRF-360, our method significantly outperforms strong 3D-GS baselines under extreme sparsity.

Accurate 3D semantic occupancy perception is essential for autonomous driving in complex environments with diverse and irregular objects. While vision-centric methods suffer from geometric inaccuracies, LiDAR-based approaches often lack rich semantic information. To address these limitations, MS-Occ, a novel multi-stage LiDAR-camera fusion framework which includes middle-stage fusion and late-stage fusion, is proposed, integrating LiDAR's geometric fidelity with camera-based semantic richness via hierarchical cross-modal fusion. The framework introduces innovations at two critical stages: (1) In the middle-stage feature fusion, the Gaussian-Geo module leverages Gaussian kernel rendering on sparse LiDAR depth maps to enhance 2D image features with dense geometric priors, and the Semantic-Aware module enriches LiDAR voxels with semantic context via deformable cross-attention; (2) In the late-stage voxel fusion, the Adaptive Fusion (AF) module dynamically balances voxel features across modalities, while the High Classification Confidence Voxel Fusion (HCCVF) module resolves semantic inconsistencies using self-attention-based refinement. Experiments on the nuScenes-OpenOccupancy benchmark show that MS-Occ achieves an Intersection over Union (IoU) of 32.1% and a mean IoU (mIoU) of 25.3%, surpassing the state-of-the-art by +0.7% IoU and +2.4% mIoU. Ablation studies further validate the contribution of each module, with substantial improvements in small-object perception, demonstrating the practical value of MS-Occ for safety-critical autonomous driving scenarios.

Identifying affordance regions on 3D objects from semantic cues is essential for robotics and human-machine interaction. However, existing 3D affordance learning methods struggle with generalization and robustness due to limited annotated data and a reliance on 3D backbones focused on geometric encoding, which often lack resilience to real-world noise and data corruption. We propose GEAL, a novel framework designed to enhance the generalization and robustness of 3D affordance learning by leveraging large-scale pre-trained 2D models. We employ a dual-branch architecture with Gaussian splatting to establish consistent mappings between 3D point clouds and 2D representations, enabling realistic 2D renderings from sparse point clouds. A granularity-adaptive fusion module and a 2D-3D consistency alignment module further strengthen cross-modal alignment and knowledge transfer, allowing the 3D branch to benefit from the rich semantics and generalization capacity of 2D models. To holistically assess the robustness, we introduce two new corruption-based benchmarks: PIAD-C and LASO-C. Extensive experiments on public datasets and our benchmarks show that GEAL consistently outperforms existing methods across seen and novel object categories, as well as corrupted data, demonstrating robust and adaptable affordance prediction under diverse conditions. Code and corruption datasets have been made publicly available.

Current learning-based methods predict NeRF or 3D Gaussians from point clouds to achieve photo-realistic rendering but still depend on categorical priors, dense point clouds, or additional refinements. Hence, we introduce a novel point cloud rendering method by predicting 2D Gaussians from point clouds. Our method incorporates two identical modules with an entire-patch architecture enabling the network to be generalized to multiple datasets. The module normalizes and initializes the Gaussians utilizing the point cloud information including normals, colors and distances. Then, splitting decoders are employed to refine the initial Gaussians by duplicating them and predicting more accurate results, making our methodology effectively accommodate sparse point clouds as well. Once trained, our approach exhibits direct generalization to point clouds across different categories. The predicted Gaussians are employed directly for rendering without additional refinement on the rendered images, retaining the benefits of 2D Gaussians. We conduct extensive experiments on various datasets, and the results demonstrate the superiority and generalization of our method, which achieves SOTA performance. The code is available at https://github.com/murcherful/GauPCRender}{https://github.com/murcherful/GauPCRender.

We introduce SparseNeuS, a novel neural rendering based method for the task of surface reconstruction from multi-view images. This task becomes more difficult when only sparse images are provided as input, a scenario where existing neural reconstruction approaches usually produce incomplete or distorted results. Moreover, their inability of generalizing to unseen new scenes impedes their application in practice. Contrarily, SparseNeuS can generalize to new scenes and work well with sparse images (as few as 2 or 3). SparseNeuS adopts signed distance function (SDF) as the surface representation, and learns generalizable priors from image features by introducing geometry encoding volumes for generic surface prediction. Moreover, several strategies are introduced to effectively leverage sparse views for high-quality reconstruction, including 1) a multi-level geometry reasoning framework to recover the surfaces in a coarse-to-fine manner; 2) a multi-scale color blending scheme for more reliable color prediction; 3) a consistency-aware fine-tuning scheme to control the inconsistent regions caused by occlusion and noise. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach not only outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, but also exhibits good efficiency, generalizability, and flexibility.

Modern video generative models based on diffusion models can produce very realistic clips, but they are computationally inefficient, often requiring minutes of GPU time for just a few seconds of video. This inefficiency poses a critical barrier to deploying generative video in applications that require real-time interactions, such as embodied AI and VR/AR. This paper explores a new strategy for camera-conditioned video generation of static scenes: using diffusion-based generative models to generate a sparse set of keyframes, and then synthesizing the full video through 3D reconstruction and rendering. By lifting keyframes into a 3D representation and rendering intermediate views, our approach amortizes the generation cost across hundreds of frames while enforcing geometric consistency. We further introduce a model that predicts the optimal number of keyframes for a given camera trajectory, allowing the system to adaptively allocate computation. Our final method, SRENDER, uses very sparse keyframes for simple trajectories and denser ones for complex camera motion. This results in video generation that is more than 40 times faster than the diffusion-based baseline in generating 20 seconds of video, while maintaining high visual fidelity and temporal stability, offering a practical path toward efficient and controllable video synthesis.

Rendering high-fidelity images from sparse point clouds is still challenging. Existing learning-based approaches suffer from either hole artifacts, missing details, or expensive computations. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to render high-quality images from sparse points. This method first attempts to bridge the 3D Gaussian Splatting and point cloud rendering, which includes several cascaded modules. We first use a regressor to estimate Gaussian properties in a point-wise manner, the estimated properties are used to rasterize neural feature descriptors into 2D planes which are extracted from a multiscale extractor. The projected feature volume is gradually decoded toward the final prediction via a multiscale and progressive decoder. The whole pipeline experiences a two-stage training and is driven by our well-designed progressive and multiscale reconstruction loss. Experiments on different benchmarks show the superiority of our method in terms of rendering qualities and the necessities of our main components.

We present a method for Sparse view reconstruction with surface element splatting that runs within 3 minutes on a consumer grade GPU. While few methods address sparse radiance field learning from noisy or unposed sparse cameras, shape recovery remains relatively underexplored in this setting. Several radiance and shape learning test-time optimization methods address the sparse posed setting by learning data priors or using combinations of external monocular geometry priors. Differently, we propose an efficient and simple pipeline harnessing a single recent 3D foundation model. We leverage its various task heads, notably point maps and camera initializations to instantiate a bundle adjusting 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) model, and image correspondences to guide camera optimization midst 2DGS training. Key to our contribution is a novel formulation of splatted color variance along rays, which can be computed efficiently. Reducing this moment in training leads to more accurate shape reconstructions. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performances in the sparse uncalibrated setting in reconstruction and novel view benchmarks based on established multi-view datasets.

Sparse-view 3D reconstruction is essential for applications in which dense image acquisition is impractical, such as robotics, augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR), and autonomous systems. In these settings, minimal image overlap prevents reliable correspondence matching, causing traditional methods, such as structure-from-motion (SfM) and multiview stereo (MVS), to fail. This survey reviews the latest advances in neural implicit models (e.g., NeRF and its regularized versions), explicit point-cloud-based approaches (e.g., 3D Gaussian Splatting), and hybrid frameworks that leverage priors from diffusion and vision foundation models (VFMs).We analyze how geometric regularization, explicit shape modeling, and generative inference are used to mitigate artifacts such as floaters and pose ambiguities in sparse-view settings. Comparative results on standard benchmarks reveal key trade-offs between the reconstruction accuracy, efficiency, and generalization. Unlike previous reviews, our survey provides a unified perspective on geometry-based, neural implicit, and generative (diffusion-based) methods. We highlight the persistent challenges in domain generalization and pose-free reconstruction and outline future directions for developing 3D-native generative priors and achieving real-time, unconstrained sparse-view reconstruction.

Neural rendering of implicit surfaces performs well in 3D vision applications. However, it requires dense input views as supervision. When only sparse input images are available, output quality drops significantly due to the shape-radiance ambiguity problem. We note that this ambiguity can be constrained when a 3D point is visible in multiple views, as is the case in multi-view stereo (MVS). We thus propose to regularize neural rendering optimization with an MVS solution. The use of an MVS probability volume and a generalized cross entropy loss leads to a noise-tolerant optimization process. In addition, neural rendering provides global consistency constraints that guide the MVS depth hypothesis sampling and thus improves MVS performance. Given only three sparse input views, experiments show that our method not only outperforms generic neural rendering models by a large margin but also significantly increases the reconstruction quality of MVS models. Project page: https://hao-yu-wu.github.io/s-volsdf/.

Surface reconstruction from sparse views aims to reconstruct a 3D shape or scene from few RGB images. The latest methods are either generalization-based or overfitting-based. However, the generalization-based methods do not generalize well on views that were unseen during training, while the reconstruction quality of overfitting-based methods is still limited by the limited geometry clues. To address this issue, we propose SparseRecon, a novel neural implicit reconstruction method for sparse views with volume rendering-based feature consistency and uncertainty-guided depth constraint. Firstly, we introduce a feature consistency loss across views to constrain the neural implicit field. This design alleviates the ambiguity caused by insufficient consistency information of views and ensures completeness and smoothness in the reconstruction results. Secondly, we employ an uncertainty-guided depth constraint to back up the feature consistency loss in areas with occlusion and insignificant features, which recovers geometry details for better reconstruction quality. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, which can produce high-quality geometry with sparse-view input, especially in the scenarios with small overlapping views. Project page: https://hanl2010.github.io/SparseRecon/.

We propose Strivec, a novel neural representation that models a 3D scene as a radiance field with sparsely distributed and compactly factorized local tensor feature grids. Our approach leverages tensor decomposition, following the recent work TensoRF, to model the tensor grids. In contrast to TensoRF which uses a global tensor and focuses on their vector-matrix decomposition, we propose to utilize a cloud of local tensors and apply the classic CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) decomposition to factorize each tensor into triple vectors that express local feature distributions along spatial axes and compactly encode a local neural field. We also apply multi-scale tensor grids to discover the geometry and appearance commonalities and exploit spatial coherence with the tri-vector factorization at multiple local scales. The final radiance field properties are regressed by aggregating neural features from multiple local tensors across all scales. Our tri-vector tensors are sparsely distributed around the actual scene surface, discovered by a fast coarse reconstruction, leveraging the sparsity of a 3D scene. We demonstrate that our model can achieve better rendering quality while using significantly fewer parameters than previous methods, including TensoRF and Instant-NGP.

We introduce S2C-3D, a novel sparse-view 3D reconstruction framework for high-fidelity and complete scene reconstruction from as few as six to eight images. Our framework features three components: a specialized diffusion model for scene-specific image restoration, a training-free view-consistency conditioned sampling process in the diffusion model for refined Gaussian optimization, and a camera trajectory planning scheme to ensure comprehensive scene coverage. The specialized diffusion model is developed by finetuning a pretrained architecture on the input views and their corresponding degraded counterparts. The adaptation to the scene distribution allows the model to repair Gaussian renderings while effectively eliminating domain gaps. Meanwhile, the trajectory planning scheme optimizes scene coverage by connecting each newly sampled camera to its two nearest neighbors. By iteratively constructing paths and retaining only those that significantly enhance visibility, the scheme establishes a trajectory that covers the entire scene. To address multi-view conflicts, the view-consistency conditioned sampling process quantifies the consistency between neighboring repaired images. This information is injected as a condition into the sampling process of the frozen diffusion model, facilitating the generation of view-consistent images without additional training. Consequently, our approach produces high-fidelity 3D Gaussians that are robust to artifacts. Experimental results demonstrate that S2C-3D outperforms state-of-the-art methods, constructing high-quality scenes that are free from missing regions, blurring, or other artifacts with very sparse inputs. The source code and data are available at https://gapszju.github.io/S2C-3D.

This paper tackles the challenge of creating relightable and animatable neural avatars from sparse-view (or even monocular) videos of dynamic humans under unknown illumination. Compared to studio environments, this setting is more practical and accessible but poses an extremely challenging ill-posed problem. Previous neural human reconstruction methods are able to reconstruct animatable avatars from sparse views using deformed Signed Distance Fields (SDF) but cannot recover material parameters for relighting. While differentiable inverse rendering-based methods have succeeded in material recovery of static objects, it is not straightforward to extend them to dynamic humans as it is computationally intensive to compute pixel-surface intersection and light visibility on deformed SDFs for inverse rendering. To solve this challenge, we propose a Hierarchical Distance Query (HDQ) algorithm to approximate the world space distances under arbitrary human poses. Specifically, we estimate coarse distances based on a parametric human model and compute fine distances by exploiting the local deformation invariance of SDF. Based on the HDQ algorithm, we leverage sphere tracing to efficiently estimate the surface intersection and light visibility. This allows us to develop the first system to recover animatable and relightable neural avatars from sparse view (or monocular) inputs. Experiments demonstrate that our approach is able to produce superior results compared to state-of-the-art methods. Our code will be released for reproducibility.

Hand-object interaction understanding and the barely addressed novel view synthesis are highly desired in the immersive communication, whereas it is challenging due to the high deformation of hand and heavy occlusions between hand and object. In this paper, we propose a neural rendering and pose estimation system for hand-object interaction from sparse views, which can also enable 3D hand-object interaction editing. We share the inspiration from recent scene understanding work that shows a scene specific model built beforehand can significantly improve and unblock vision tasks especially when inputs are sparse, and extend it to the dynamic hand-object interaction scenario and propose to solve the problem in two stages. We first learn the shape and appearance prior knowledge of hands and objects separately with the neural representation at the offline stage. During the online stage, we design a rendering-based joint model fitting framework to understand the dynamic hand-object interaction with the pre-built hand and object models as well as interaction priors, which thereby overcomes penetration and separation issues between hand and object and also enables novel view synthesis. In order to get stable contact during the hand-object interaction process in a sequence, we propose a stable contact loss to make the contact region to be consistent. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Code and dataset are available in project webpage https://iscas3dv.github.io/HO-NeRF.

A recent trend among generalizable novel view synthesis methods is to learn a rendering operator acting over single camera rays. This approach is promising because it removes the need for explicit volumetric rendering, but it effectively treats target images as collections of independent pixels. Here, we propose to learn a global rendering operator acting over all camera rays jointly. We show that the right representation to enable such rendering is a 5-dimensional plane sweep volume consisting of the projection of the input images on a set of planes facing the target camera. Based on this understanding, we introduce our Convolutional Global Latent Renderer (ConvGLR), an efficient convolutional architecture that performs the rendering operation globally in a low-resolution latent space. Experiments on various datasets under sparse and generalizable setups show that our approach consistently outperforms existing methods by significant margins.

Recent communities have seen significant progress in building photo-realistic animatable avatars from sparse multi-view videos. However, current workflows struggle to render realistic garment dynamics for loose-fitting characters as they predominantly rely on naked body models for human modeling while leaving the garment part un-modeled. This is mainly due to that the deformations yielded by loose garments are highly non-rigid, and capturing such deformations often requires dense views as supervision. In this paper, we introduce AniDress, a novel method for generating animatable human avatars in loose clothes using very sparse multi-view videos (4-8 in our setting). To allow the capturing and appearance learning of loose garments in such a situation, we employ a virtual bone-based garment rigging model obtained from physics-based simulation data. Such a model allows us to capture and render complex garment dynamics through a set of low-dimensional bone transformations. Technically, we develop a novel method for estimating temporal coherent garment dynamics from a sparse multi-view video. To build a realistic rendering for unseen garment status using coarse estimations, a pose-driven deformable neural radiance field conditioned on both body and garment motions is introduced, providing explicit control of both parts. At test time, the new garment poses can be captured from unseen situations, derived from a physics-based or neural network-based simulator to drive unseen garment dynamics. To evaluate our approach, we create a multi-view dataset that captures loose-dressed performers with diverse motions. Experiments show that our method is able to render natural garment dynamics that deviate highly from the body and generalize well to both unseen views and poses, surpassing the performance of existing methods. The code and data will be publicly available.

Sparse Multi-view Images can be Learned to predict explicit radiance fields via Generalizable Gaussian Splatting approaches, which can achieve wider application prospects in real-life when ground-truth camera parameters are not required as inputs. In this paper, a novel generalizable Gaussian Splatting method, SmileSplat, is proposed to reconstruct pixel-aligned Gaussian surfels for diverse scenarios only requiring unconstrained sparse multi-view images. First, Gaussian surfels are predicted based on the multi-head Gaussian regression decoder, which can are represented with less degree-of-freedom but have better multi-view consistency. Furthermore, the normal vectors of Gaussian surfel are enhanced based on high-quality of normal priors. Second, the Gaussians and camera parameters (both extrinsic and intrinsic) are optimized to obtain high-quality Gaussian radiance fields for novel view synthesis tasks based on the proposed Bundle-Adjusting Gaussian Splatting module. Extensive experiments on novel view rendering and depth map prediction tasks are conducted on public datasets, demonstrating that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in various 3D vision tasks. More information can be found on our project page (https://yanyan-li.github.io/project/gs/smilesplat)

Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have noticeably advanced photo-realistic novel view synthesis using images from densely spaced camera viewpoints. However, these methods struggle in few-shot scenarios due to limited supervision. In this paper, we present NexusGS, a 3DGS-based approach that enhances novel view synthesis from sparse-view images by directly embedding depth information into point clouds, without relying on complex manual regularizations. Exploiting the inherent epipolar geometry of 3DGS, our method introduces a novel point cloud densification strategy that initializes 3DGS with a dense point cloud, reducing randomness in point placement while preventing over-smoothing and overfitting. Specifically, NexusGS comprises three key steps: Epipolar Depth Nexus, Flow-Resilient Depth Blending, and Flow-Filtered Depth Pruning. These steps leverage optical flow and camera poses to compute accurate depth maps, while mitigating the inaccuracies often associated with optical flow. By incorporating epipolar depth priors, NexusGS ensures reliable dense point cloud coverage and supports stable 3DGS training under sparse-view conditions. Experiments demonstrate that NexusGS significantly enhances depth accuracy and rendering quality, surpassing state-of-the-art methods by a considerable margin. Furthermore, we validate the superiority of our generated point clouds by substantially boosting the performance of competing methods. Project page: https://usmizuki.github.io/NexusGS/.

This paper addresses the challenge of high-fidelity view synthesis of humans with sparse-view videos as input. Previous methods solve the issue of insufficient observation by leveraging 4D diffusion models to generate videos at novel viewpoints. However, the generated videos from these models often lack spatio-temporal consistency, thus degrading view synthesis quality. In this paper, we propose a novel sliding iterative denoising process to enhance the spatio-temporal consistency of the 4D diffusion model. Specifically, we define a latent grid in which each latent encodes the image, camera pose, and human pose for a certain viewpoint and timestamp, then alternately denoising the latent grid along spatial and temporal dimensions with a sliding window, and finally decode the videos at target viewpoints from the corresponding denoised latents. Through the iterative sliding, information flows sufficiently across the latent grid, allowing the diffusion model to obtain a large receptive field and thus enhance the 4D consistency of the output, while making the GPU memory consumption affordable. The experiments on the DNA-Rendering and ActorsHQ datasets demonstrate that our method is able to synthesize high-quality and consistent novel-view videos and significantly outperforms the existing approaches. See our project page for interactive demos and video results: https://diffuman4d.github.io/ .

Neural volume rendering became increasingly popular recently due to its success in synthesizing novel views of a scene from a sparse set of input images. So far, the geometry learned by neural volume rendering techniques was modeled using a generic density function. Furthermore, the geometry itself was extracted using an arbitrary level set of the density function leading to a noisy, often low fidelity reconstruction. The goal of this paper is to improve geometry representation and reconstruction in neural volume rendering. We achieve that by modeling the volume density as a function of the geometry. This is in contrast to previous work modeling the geometry as a function of the volume density. In more detail, we define the volume density function as Laplace's cumulative distribution function (CDF) applied to a signed distance function (SDF) representation. This simple density representation has three benefits: (i) it provides a useful inductive bias to the geometry learned in the neural volume rendering process; (ii) it facilitates a bound on the opacity approximation error, leading to an accurate sampling of the viewing ray. Accurate sampling is important to provide a precise coupling of geometry and radiance; and (iii) it allows efficient unsupervised disentanglement of shape and appearance in volume rendering. Applying this new density representation to challenging scene multiview datasets produced high quality geometry reconstructions, outperforming relevant baselines. Furthermore, switching shape and appearance between scenes is possible due to the disentanglement of the two.

Advancements in 3D scene reconstruction have transformed 2D images from the real world into 3D models, producing realistic 3D results from hundreds of input photos. Despite great success in dense-view reconstruction scenarios, rendering a detailed scene from insufficient captured views is still an ill-posed optimization problem, often resulting in artifacts and distortions in unseen areas. In this paper, we propose ReconX, a novel 3D scene reconstruction paradigm that reframes the ambiguous reconstruction challenge as a temporal generation task. The key insight is to unleash the strong generative prior of large pre-trained video diffusion models for sparse-view reconstruction. However, 3D view consistency struggles to be accurately preserved in directly generated video frames from pre-trained models. To address this, given limited input views, the proposed ReconX first constructs a global point cloud and encodes it into a contextual space as the 3D structure condition. Guided by the condition, the video diffusion model then synthesizes video frames that are both detail-preserved and exhibit a high degree of 3D consistency, ensuring the coherence of the scene from various perspectives. Finally, we recover the 3D scene from the generated video through a confidence-aware 3D Gaussian Splatting optimization scheme. Extensive experiments on various real-world datasets show the superiority of our ReconX over state-of-the-art methods in terms of quality and generalizability.

Camera relocalization methods range from dense image alignment to direct camera pose regression from a query image. Among these, sparse feature matching stands out as an efficient, versatile, and generally lightweight approach with numerous applications. However, feature-based methods often struggle with significant viewpoint and appearance changes, leading to matching failures and inaccurate pose estimates. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel approach that leverages a globally sparse yet locally dense 3D representation of 2D features. By tracking and triangulating landmarks over a sequence of frames, we construct a sparse voxel map optimized to render image patch descriptors observed during tracking. Given an initial pose estimate, we first synthesize descriptors from the voxels using volumetric rendering and then perform feature matching to estimate the camera pose. This methodology enables the generation of descriptors for unseen views, enhancing robustness to view changes. We extensively evaluate our method on the 7-Scenes and Cambridge Landmarks datasets. Our results show that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art feature representation techniques in indoor environments, achieving up to a 39% improvement in median translation error. Additionally, our approach yields comparable results to other methods for outdoor scenarios while maintaining lower memory and computational costs.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has achieved impressive rendering performance in novel view synthesis. However, its efficacy diminishes considerably in sparse image sequences, where inherent data sparsity amplifies geometric uncertainty during optimization. This often leads to convergence at suboptimal local minima, resulting in noticeable structural artifacts in the reconstructed scenes.To mitigate these issues, we propose Uncertainty-aware Normal-Guided Gaussian Splatting (UNG-GS), a novel framework featuring an explicit Spatial Uncertainty Field (SUF) to quantify geometric uncertainty within the 3DGS pipeline. UNG-GS enables high-fidelity rendering and achieves high-precision reconstruction without relying on priors. Specifically, we first integrate Gaussian-based probabilistic modeling into the training of 3DGS to optimize the SUF, providing the model with adaptive error tolerance. An uncertainty-aware depth rendering strategy is then employed to weight depth contributions based on the SUF, effectively reducing noise while preserving fine details. Furthermore, an uncertainty-guided normal refinement method adjusts the influence of neighboring depth values in normal estimation, promoting robust results. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UNG-GS significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both sparse and dense sequences. The code will be open-source.

We introduce SPFSplat, an efficient framework for 3D Gaussian splatting from sparse multi-view images, requiring no ground-truth poses during training or inference. It employs a shared feature extraction backbone, enabling simultaneous prediction of 3D Gaussian primitives and camera poses in a canonical space from unposed inputs within a single feed-forward step. Alongside the rendering loss based on estimated novel-view poses, a reprojection loss is integrated to enforce the learning of pixel-aligned Gaussian primitives for enhanced geometric constraints. This pose-free training paradigm and efficient one-step feed-forward design make SPFSplat well-suited for practical applications. Remarkably, despite the absence of pose supervision, SPFSplat achieves state-of-the-art performance in novel view synthesis even under significant viewpoint changes and limited image overlap. It also surpasses recent methods trained with geometry priors in relative pose estimation. Code and trained models are available on our project page: https://ranrhuang.github.io/spfsplat/.

Reconstructing high-fidelity underwater scenes remains a challenging task due to light absorption, scattering, and limited visibility inherent in aquatic environments. This paper presents an enhanced Gaussian Splatting-based framework that improves both the visual quality and geometric accuracy of deep underwater rendering. We propose decoupled learning for RGB channels, guided by the physics of underwater attenuation, to enable more accurate colour restoration. To address sparse-view limitations and improve view consistency, we introduce a frame interpolation strategy with a novel adaptive weighting scheme. Additionally, we introduce a new loss function aimed at reducing noise while preserving edges, which is essential for deep-sea content. We also release a newly collected dataset, Submerged3D, captured specifically in deep-sea environments. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods with PSNR gains up to 1.90dB, delivering superior perceptual quality and robustness, and offering promising directions for marine robotics and underwater visual analytics. The code of RUSplatting is available at https://github.com/theflash987/RUSplatting and the dataset Submerged3D can be downloaded at https://zenodo.org/records/15482420.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) is a recent 3D scene reconstruction technique that enables real-time rendering of novel views by modeling scenes as parametric point clouds of differentiable 3D Gaussians. However, its rendering speed and model size still present bottlenecks, especially in resource-constrained settings. In this paper, we identify and address two key inefficiencies in 3D-GS to substantially improve rendering speed. These improvements also yield the ancillary benefits of reduced model size and training time. First, we optimize the rendering pipeline to precisely localize Gaussians in the scene, boosting rendering speed without altering visual fidelity. Second, we introduce a novel pruning technique and integrate it into the training pipeline, significantly reducing model size and training time while further raising rendering speed. Our Speedy-Splat approach combines these techniques to accelerate average rendering speed by a drastic 6.71times across scenes from the Mip-NeRF 360, Tanks & Temples, and Deep Blending datasets.

Reconstructing 3D scenes from sparse, unposed images remains challenging under real-world conditions with varying illumination and transient occlusions. Existing methods rely on scene-specific optimization using appearance embeddings or dynamic masks, which requires extensive per-scene training and fails under sparse views. Moreover, evaluations on limited scenes raise questions about generalization. We present GenWildSplat, a feed-forward framework for sparse-view outdoor reconstruction that requires no per-scene optimization. Given unposed internet images, GenWildSplat predicts depth, camera parameters, and 3D Gaussians in a canonical space using learned geometric priors. An appearance adapter modulates appearance for target lighting conditions, while semantic segmentation handles transient objects. Through curriculum learning on synthetic and real data, GenWildSplat generalizes across diverse illumination and occlusion patterns. Evaluations on PhotoTourism and MegaScenes benchmark demonstrate state-of-the-art feed-forward rendering quality, achieving real-time inference without test-time optimization

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a prominent paradigm for 3D reconstruction and novel view synthesis. However, it remains vulnerable to severe artifacts when trained under sparse-view constraints. While recent methods attempt to rectify artifacts in rendered views using image diffusion models, they typically rely on multi-view self-attention to retrieve information from reference images. We observe that this mechanism often fails when the rendered novel views output by 3DGS are heavily corrupted: damaged query features lead to erroneous cross-view retrieval, resulting in inconsistent rendering refinement. To address this, we propose GeoQuery, a geometry-guided diffusion framework that integrates generative priors with explicit geometric cues via a novel Geometry-guided Cross-view Attention (GCA) mechanism. First, by leveraging predicted depth maps and camera poses, we construct a geometry-induced correspondence field to sample reference features, forming a geometry-aligned proxy query that replaces the corrupted rendering features. Furthermore, we design a new cross-view feature aggregation pipeline, in which we restrict the cross-view attention to a local window around each proxy query to effectively retrieve useful features while suppressing spurious matches. GeoQuery can be seamlessly integrated into existing diffusion-based pipelines, enabling robust reconstruction even under extreme view sparsity. Extensive experiments on sparse-view novel view synthesis and rendering artifact removal demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have emerged as a powerful representation for the task of novel view synthesis due to their simplicity and state-of-the-art performance. Though NeRF can produce photorealistic renderings of unseen viewpoints when many input views are available, its performance drops significantly when this number is reduced. We observe that the majority of artifacts in sparse input scenarios are caused by errors in the estimated scene geometry, and by divergent behavior at the start of training. We address this by regularizing the geometry and appearance of patches rendered from unobserved viewpoints, and annealing the ray sampling space during training. We additionally use a normalizing flow model to regularize the color of unobserved viewpoints. Our model outperforms not only other methods that optimize over a single scene, but in many cases also conditional models that are extensively pre-trained on large multi-view datasets.

Radiance Field methods have recently revolutionized novel-view synthesis of scenes captured with multiple photos or videos. However, achieving high visual quality still requires neural networks that are costly to train and render, while recent faster methods inevitably trade off speed for quality. For unbounded and complete scenes (rather than isolated objects) and 1080p resolution rendering, no current method can achieve real-time display rates. We introduce three key elements that allow us to achieve state-of-the-art visual quality while maintaining competitive training times and importantly allow high-quality real-time (>= 30 fps) novel-view synthesis at 1080p resolution. First, starting from sparse points produced during camera calibration, we represent the scene with 3D Gaussians that preserve desirable properties of continuous volumetric radiance fields for scene optimization while avoiding unnecessary computation in empty space; Second, we perform interleaved optimization/density control of the 3D Gaussians, notably optimizing anisotropic covariance to achieve an accurate representation of the scene; Third, we develop a fast visibility-aware rendering algorithm that supports anisotropic splatting and both accelerates training and allows realtime rendering. We demonstrate state-of-the-art visual quality and real-time rendering on several established datasets.

Modeling dynamic, large-scale urban scenes is challenging due to their highly intricate geometric structures and unconstrained dynamics in both space and time. Prior methods often employ high-level architectural priors, separating static and dynamic elements, resulting in suboptimal capture of their synergistic interactions. To address this challenge, we present a unified representation model, called Periodic Vibration Gaussian (PVG). PVG builds upon the efficient 3D Gaussian splatting technique, originally designed for static scene representation, by introducing periodic vibration-based temporal dynamics. This innovation enables PVG to elegantly and uniformly represent the characteristics of various objects and elements in dynamic urban scenes. To enhance temporally coherent representation learning with sparse training data, we introduce a novel flow-based temporal smoothing mechanism and a position-aware adaptive control strategy. Extensive experiments on Waymo Open Dataset and KITTI benchmarks demonstrate that PVG surpasses state-of-the-art alternatives in both reconstruction and novel view synthesis for both dynamic and static scenes. Notably, PVG achieves this without relying on manually labeled object bounding boxes or expensive optical flow estimation. Moreover, PVG exhibits 50/6000-fold acceleration in training/rendering over the best alternative.

We introduce methods for discovering and applying sparse feature circuits. These are causally implicated subnetworks of human-interpretable features for explaining language model behaviors. Circuits identified in prior work consist of polysemantic and difficult-to-interpret units like attention heads or neurons, rendering them unsuitable for many downstream applications. In contrast, sparse feature circuits enable detailed understanding of unanticipated mechanisms. Because they are based on fine-grained units, sparse feature circuits are useful for downstream tasks: We introduce SHIFT, where we improve the generalization of a classifier by ablating features that a human judges to be task-irrelevant. Finally, we demonstrate an entirely unsupervised and scalable interpretability pipeline by discovering thousands of sparse feature circuits for automatically discovered model behaviors.

Creating relightable and animatable avatars from multi-view or monocular videos is a challenging task for digital human creation and virtual reality applications. Previous methods rely on neural radiance fields or ray tracing, resulting in slow training and rendering processes. By utilizing Gaussian Splatting, we propose a simple and efficient method to decouple body materials and lighting from sparse-view or monocular avatar videos, so that the avatar can be rendered simultaneously under novel viewpoints, poses, and lightings at interactive frame rates (6.9 fps). Specifically, we first obtain the canonical body mesh using a signed distance function and assign attributes to each mesh vertex. The Gaussians in the canonical space then interpolate from nearby body mesh vertices to obtain the attributes. We subsequently deform the Gaussians to the posed space using forward skinning, and combine the learnable environment light with the Gaussian attributes for shading computation. To achieve fast shadow modeling, we rasterize the posed body mesh from dense viewpoints to obtain the visibility. Our approach is not only simple but also fast enough to allow interactive rendering of avatar animation under environmental light changes. Experiments demonstrate that, compared to previous works, our method can render higher quality results at a faster speed on both synthetic and real datasets.

We introduce MVSplat360, a feed-forward approach for 360{\deg} novel view synthesis (NVS) of diverse real-world scenes, using only sparse observations. This setting is inherently ill-posed due to minimal overlap among input views and insufficient visual information provided, making it challenging for conventional methods to achieve high-quality results. Our MVSplat360 addresses this by effectively combining geometry-aware 3D reconstruction with temporally consistent video generation. Specifically, it refactors a feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) model to render features directly into the latent space of a pre-trained Stable Video Diffusion (SVD) model, where these features then act as pose and visual cues to guide the denoising process and produce photorealistic 3D-consistent views. Our model is end-to-end trainable and supports rendering arbitrary views with as few as 5 sparse input views. To evaluate MVSplat360's performance, we introduce a new benchmark using the challenging DL3DV-10K dataset, where MVSplat360 achieves superior visual quality compared to state-of-the-art methods on wide-sweeping or even 360{\deg} NVS tasks. Experiments on the existing benchmark RealEstate10K also confirm the effectiveness of our model. The video results are available on our project page: https://donydchen.github.io/mvsplat360.

Reward-based optimization algorithms require both exploration, to find rewards, and exploitation, to maximize performance. The need for efficient exploration is even more significant in sparse reward settings, in which performance feedback is given sparingly, thus rendering it unsuitable for guiding the search process. In this work, we introduce the SparsE Reward Exploration via Novelty and Emitters (SERENE) algorithm, capable of efficiently exploring a search space, as well as optimizing rewards found in potentially disparate areas. Contrary to existing emitters-based approaches, SERENE separates the search space exploration and reward exploitation into two alternating processes. The first process performs exploration through Novelty Search, a divergent search algorithm. The second one exploits discovered reward areas through emitters, i.e. local instances of population-based optimization algorithms. A meta-scheduler allocates a global computational budget by alternating between the two processes, ensuring the discovery and efficient exploitation of disjoint reward areas. SERENE returns both a collection of diverse solutions covering the search space and a collection of high-performing solutions for each distinct reward area. We evaluate SERENE on various sparse reward environments and show it compares favorably to existing baselines.

The success of the Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) in novel view synthesis has inspired researchers to propose neural implicit scene reconstruction. However, most existing neural implicit reconstruction methods optimize per-scene parameters and therefore lack generalizability to new scenes. We introduce VolRecon, a novel generalizable implicit reconstruction method with Signed Ray Distance Function (SRDF). To reconstruct the scene with fine details and little noise, VolRecon combines projection features aggregated from multi-view features, and volume features interpolated from a coarse global feature volume. Using a ray transformer, we compute SRDF values of sampled points on a ray and then render color and depth. On DTU dataset, VolRecon outperforms SparseNeuS by about 30% in sparse view reconstruction and achieves comparable accuracy as MVSNet in full view reconstruction. Furthermore, our approach exhibits good generalization performance on the large-scale ETH3D benchmark.

Why must vision-language navigation be bound to detailed and verbose language instructions? While such details ease decision-making, they fundamentally contradict the goal for navigation in the real-world. Ideally, agents should possess the autonomy to navigate in unknown environments guided solely by simple and high-level intents. Realizing this ambition introduces a formidable challenge: Beyond-the-View Navigation (BVN), where agents must locate distant, unseen targets without dense and step-by-step guidance. Existing large language model (LLM)-based methods, though adept at following dense instructions, often suffer from short-sighted behaviors due to their reliance on short-horimzon supervision. Simply extending the supervision horizon, however, destabilizes LLM training. In this work, we identify that video generation models inherently benefit from long-horizon supervision to align with language instructions, rendering them uniquely suitable for BVN tasks. Capitalizing on this insight, we propose introducing the video generation model into this field for the first time. Yet, the prohibitive latency for generating videos spanning tens of seconds makes real-world deployment impractical. To bridge this gap, we propose SparseVideoNav, achieving sub-second trajectory inference guided by a generated sparse future spanning a 20-second horizon. This yields a remarkable 27x speed-up compared to the unoptimized counterpart. Extensive real-world zero-shot experiments demonstrate that SparseVideoNav achieves 2.5x the success rate of state-of-the-art LLM baselines on BVN tasks and marks the first realization of such capability in challenging night scenes.

Modern 3D visual learning relies on observations sampled from metric 3D assets, yet existing scans, meshes, point clouds, simulations, and reconstructions do not directly provide a sparse, comparable, and geometry-consistent panoramic training interface. Dense trajectories duplicate nearby views, source-specific rendering policies yield heterogeneous annotations, and sparse heuristics may miss important regions or introduce depth-inconsistent observations. We study how to convert 3D assets into sparse panoramic RGB-D-pose data that preserves complete scene coverage with low redundancy and auditable provenance. We propose COVER (Coverage-Oriented Viewpoint curation with ERP Range-depth warping), a training-free ERP viewpoint curator that projects geometry observed from selected views into candidate ERP probes, scores incremental coverage, and penalizes depth conflicts. Under bounded proxy error, its greedy coverage proxy preserves the standard coverage-style approximation behavior up to an additive error term. Using COVER, we build CM-EVS (Coverage-curated Metric ERP View Set), a panoramic RGB-D-pose dataset with 36,373 curated ERP frames from 1,275 indoor scenes across Blender indoor, HM3D, and ScanNet++, complemented by outdoor panoramas from TartanGround and OB3D re-encoded into the same schema. Each frame provides full-sphere RGB, metric range depth, calibrated pose; COVER-produced indoor frames include per-step provenance logs. With a median of only 25 frames per indoor scene, CM-EVS covers all 13 unified room types while maintaining compact scene-level coverage. Experiments show that COVER improves the coverage-conflict trade-off, making CM-EVS a sparse, compact, and auditable RGB-D-pose resource for geometry-consistent panoramic 3D learning.

Novel view synthesis for dynamic scenes is still a challenging problem in computer vision and graphics. Recently, Gaussian splatting has emerged as a robust technique to represent static scenes and enable high-quality and real-time novel view synthesis. Building upon this technique, we propose a new representation that explicitly decomposes the motion and appearance of dynamic scenes into sparse control points and dense Gaussians, respectively. Our key idea is to use sparse control points, significantly fewer in number than the Gaussians, to learn compact 6 DoF transformation bases, which can be locally interpolated through learned interpolation weights to yield the motion field of 3D Gaussians. We employ a deformation MLP to predict time-varying 6 DoF transformations for each control point, which reduces learning complexities, enhances learning abilities, and facilitates obtaining temporal and spatial coherent motion patterns. Then, we jointly learn the 3D Gaussians, the canonical space locations of control points, and the deformation MLP to reconstruct the appearance, geometry, and dynamics of 3D scenes. During learning, the location and number of control points are adaptively adjusted to accommodate varying motion complexities in different regions, and an ARAP loss following the principle of as rigid as possible is developed to enforce spatial continuity and local rigidity of learned motions. Finally, thanks to the explicit sparse motion representation and its decomposition from appearance, our method can enable user-controlled motion editing while retaining high-fidelity appearances. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing approaches on novel view synthesis with a high rendering speed and enables novel appearance-preserved motion editing applications. Project page: https://yihua7.github.io/SC-GS-web/

Large-scale terrain scans are the basis for many important tasks, such as topographic mapping, forestry, agriculture, and infrastructure planning. The resulting point cloud data sets are so massive in size that even basic tasks like viewing take hours to days of pre-processing in order to create level-of-detail structures that allow inspecting the data set in their entirety in real time. In this paper, we propose a method that is capable of instantly visualizing massive country-sized scans with hundreds of billions of points. Upon opening the data set, we first load a sparse subsample of points and initialize an overview of the entire point cloud, immediately followed by a surface reconstruction process to generate higher-quality, hole-free heightmaps. As users start navigating towards a region of interest, we continue to prioritize the heightmap construction process to the user's viewpoint. Once a user zooms in closely, we load the full-resolution point cloud data for that region and update the corresponding height map textures with the full-resolution data. As users navigate elsewhere, full-resolution point data that is no longer needed is unloaded, but the updated heightmap textures are retained as a form of medium level of detail. Overall, our method constitutes a form of direct out-of-core rendering for massive point cloud data sets (terabytes, compressed) that requires no preprocessing and no additional disk space. Source code, executable, pre-trained model, and dataset are available at: https://github.com/cg-tuwien/lidarscout

We propose Ming-Flash-Omni, an upgraded version of Ming-Omni, built upon a sparser Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) variant of Ling-Flash-2.0 with 100 billion total parameters, of which only 6.1 billion are active per token. This architecture enables highly efficient scaling (dramatically improving computational efficiency while significantly expanding model capacity) and empowers stronger unified multimodal intelligence across vision, speech, and language, representing a key step toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Compared to its predecessor, the upgraded version exhibits substantial improvements across multimodal understanding and generation. We significantly advance speech recognition capabilities, achieving state-of-the-art performance in contextual ASR and highly competitive results in dialect-aware ASR. In image generation, Ming-Flash-Omni introduces high-fidelity text rendering and demonstrates marked gains in scene consistency and identity preservation during image editing. Furthermore, Ming-Flash-Omni introduces generative segmentation, a capability that not only achieves strong standalone segmentation performance but also enhances spatial control in image generation and improves editing consistency. Notably, Ming-Flash-Omni achieves state-of-the-art results in text-to-image generation and generative segmentation, and sets new records on all 12 contextual ASR benchmarks, all within a single unified architecture.

Digital twins are fundamental to the development of autonomous driving and embodied artificial intelligence. However, achieving high-granularity surface reconstruction and high-fidelity rendering remains a challenge. Gaussian splatting offers efficient photorealistic rendering but struggles with geometric inconsistencies due to fragmented primitives and sparse observational data in robotics applications. Existing regularization methods, which rely on render-derived constraints, often fail in complex environments. Moreover, effectively integrating sparse LiDAR data with Gaussian splatting remains challenging. We propose a unified LiDAR-visual system that synergizes Gaussian splatting with a neural signed distance field. The accurate LiDAR point clouds enable a trained neural signed distance field to offer a manifold geometry field. This motivates us to offer an SDF-based Gaussian initialization for physically grounded primitive placement and a comprehensive geometric regularization for geometrically consistent rendering and reconstruction. Experiments demonstrate superior reconstruction accuracy and rendering quality across diverse trajectories. To benefit the community, the codes are released at https://github.com/hku-mars/GS-SDF.

We address the problem of dynamic scene reconstruction from sparse-view videos. Prior work often requires dense multi-view captures with hundreds of calibrated cameras (e.g. Panoptic Studio). Such multi-view setups are prohibitively expensive to build and cannot capture diverse scenes in-the-wild. In contrast, we aim to reconstruct dynamic human behaviors, such as repairing a bike or dancing, from a small set of sparse-view cameras with complete scene coverage (e.g. four equidistant inward-facing static cameras). We find that dense multi-view reconstruction methods struggle to adapt to this sparse-view setup due to limited overlap between viewpoints. To address these limitations, we carefully align independent monocular reconstructions of each camera to produce time- and view-consistent dynamic scene reconstructions. Extensive experiments on PanopticStudio and Ego-Exo4D demonstrate that our method achieves higher quality reconstructions than prior art, particularly when rendering novel views. Code, data, and data-processing scripts are available on https://github.com/ImNotPrepared/MonoFusion.

Though Gaussian splatting has achieved impressive results in novel view synthesis, it requires millions of primitives to model highly textured scenes, even when the geometry of the scene is simple. We propose a representation that goes beyond point-based rendering and decouples geometry and appearance in order to achieve a compact representation. We use surfels for geometry and a combination of a global neural field and per-primitive colours for appearance. The neural field textures a fixed number of primitives for each pixel, ensuring that the added compute is low. Our representation matches the perceptual quality of 3D Gaussian splatting while using 9.7times fewer primitives and 5.5times less memory on outdoor scenes and using 31times fewer primitives and 3.7times less memory on indoor scenes. Our representation also renders twice as fast as existing textured primitives while improving upon their visual quality.

Conventional physically based rendering (PBR) pipelines generate photorealistic images through computationally intensive light transport simulations. Although recent deep learning approaches leverage diffusion model priors with geometry buffers (G-buffers) to produce visually compelling results without explicit scene geometry or light simulation, they remain constrained by two major limitations. First, the iterative nature of the diffusion process introduces substantial latency. Second, the inherent stochasticity of these generative models compromises physical accuracy and temporal consistency. In response to these challenges, we propose a novel, end-to-end, deterministic, single-step neural rendering framework, RenderFlow, built upon a flow matching paradigm. To further strengthen both rendering quality and generalization, we propose an efficient and effective module for sparse keyframe guidance. Our method significantly accelerates the rendering process and, by optionally incorporating sparsely rendered keyframes as guidance, enhances both the physical plausibility and overall visual quality of the output. The resulting pipeline achieves near real-time performance with photorealistic rendering quality, effectively bridging the gap between the efficiency of modern generative models and the precision of traditional physically based rendering. Furthermore, we demonstrate the versatility of our framework by introducing a lightweight, adapter-based module that efficiently repurposes the pretrained forward model for the inverse rendering task of intrinsic decomposition.

Rendering views using 3D scene representations such as Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), meshes, or even point clouds produces artifacts when input views are sparse or target views lie far from the input. Recent work mitigates these artifacts using diffusion-based generative priors, but is specialized to individual representations and require custom architectures or extensive retraining. We present FixAnything, a single model for fixing a wide range of rendering artifacts. It does so by repurposing a pretrained video generative model, leveraging its implicit multi-view priors with only minimal modification and lightweight finetuning. Our key insight is that even noisily-rendered sequences preserve camera motion and coarse scene structure, allowing cleanup to be formulated as video-to-video translation. To control what scene structure should be preserved, we introduce a binary mask denoting the clean pixels, enabling the model to anchor its output to high-quality inputs (e.g. training views) while refining the rest. To encourage FixAnything to produce 3D-consistent renderings that support downstream reconstruction, we use camera pose accuracy (recovered via structure-from-motion) as a reward signal for direct preference optimization (DPO). Across four distinct 3D representations, FixAnything consistently improves rendering quality with lightweight finetuning, demonstrating that a single generalist video prior can replace multiple specialist refinement pipelines. The simplicity of the framework enables immediate adoption of stronger future video models without architectural redesign.

Reconstructing 3D human heads in low-view settings presents technical challenges, mainly due to the pronounced risk of overfitting with limited views and high-frequency signals. To address this, we propose geometry decomposition and adopt a two-stage, coarse-to-fine training strategy, allowing for progressively capturing high-frequency geometric details. We represent 3D human heads using the zero level-set of a combined signed distance field, comprising a smooth template, a non-rigid deformation, and a high-frequency displacement field. The template captures features that are independent of both identity and expression and is co-trained with the deformation network across multiple individuals with sparse and randomly selected views. The displacement field, capturing individual-specific details, undergoes separate training for each person. Our network training does not require 3D supervision or object masks. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our geometry decomposition and two-stage training strategy. Our method outperforms existing neural rendering approaches in terms of reconstruction accuracy and novel view synthesis under low-view settings. Moreover, the pre-trained template serves a good initialization for our model when encountering unseen individuals.

The problem of novel view synthesis has grown significantly in popularity recently with the introduction of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) and other implicit scene representation methods. A recent advance, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), leverages an explicit representation to achieve real-time rendering with high-quality results. However, 3DGS still requires an abundance of training views to generate a coherent scene representation. In few shot settings, similar to NeRF, 3DGS tends to overfit to training views, causing background collapse and excessive floaters, especially as the number of training views are reduced. We propose a method to enable training coherent 3DGS-based radiance fields of 360 scenes from sparse training views. We find that using naive depth priors is not sufficient and integrate depth priors with generative and explicit constraints to reduce background collapse, remove floaters, and enhance consistency from unseen viewpoints. Experiments show that our method outperforms base 3DGS by up to 30.5% and NeRF-based methods by up to 15.6% in LPIPS on the MipNeRF-360 dataset with substantially less training and inference cost.

The development of text-to-video (T2V), i.e., generating videos with a given text prompt, has been significantly advanced in recent years. However, relying solely on text prompts often results in ambiguous frame composition due to spatial uncertainty. The research community thus leverages the dense structure signals, e.g., per-frame depth/edge sequences, to enhance controllability, whose collection accordingly increases the burden of inference. In this work, we present SparseCtrl to enable flexible structure control with temporally sparse signals, requiring only one or a few inputs, as shown in Figure 1. It incorporates an additional condition encoder to process these sparse signals while leaving the pre-trained T2V model untouched. The proposed approach is compatible with various modalities, including sketches, depth maps, and RGB images, providing more practical control for video generation and promoting applications such as storyboarding, depth rendering, keyframe animation, and interpolation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the generalization of SparseCtrl on both original and personalized T2V generators. Codes and models will be publicly available at https://guoyww.github.io/projects/SparseCtrl .

3D occupancy prediction holds significant promise in the fields of robot perception and autonomous driving, which quantifies 3D scenes into grid cells with semantic labels. Recent works mainly utilize complete occupancy labels in 3D voxel space for supervision. However, the expensive annotation process and sometimes ambiguous labels have severely constrained the usability and scalability of 3D occupancy models. To address this, we present RenderOcc, a novel paradigm for training 3D occupancy models only using 2D labels. Specifically, we extract a NeRF-style 3D volume representation from multi-view images, and employ volume rendering techniques to establish 2D renderings, thus enabling direct 3D supervision from 2D semantics and depth labels. Additionally, we introduce an Auxiliary Ray method to tackle the issue of sparse viewpoints in autonomous driving scenarios, which leverages sequential frames to construct comprehensive 2D rendering for each object. To our best knowledge, RenderOcc is the first attempt to train multi-view 3D occupancy models only using 2D labels, reducing the dependence on costly 3D occupancy annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RenderOcc achieves comparable performance to models fully supervised with 3D labels, underscoring the significance of this approach in real-world applications.

Many advanced Large Language Model (LLM) applications require long-context processing, but the self-attention module becomes a bottleneck during the prefilling stage of inference due to its quadratic time complexity with respect to sequence length. Existing sparse attention methods accelerate attention computation by skipping less significant regions of the attention map. However, these approaches typically perform coarse-grained inspection of the attention map, rendering considerable loss in model accuracy. In this paper, we propose SALE, a fine-grained sparse attention method that accelerates the long-context prefilling stage of LLM with negligible loss in model accuracy. SALE achieves fast and accurate fine-grained attention weight estimation through 4-bit quantized query-key products, followed by block-sparse attention to accelerate prefilling computations. For importance evaluation for query-key pairs, we adopt our Relative Attention Score metric, which offers significantly higher efficiency within our framework. We implement a custom CUDA kernel optimized for our approach for hardware efficiency, reducing the additional overhead to approximately 11% of the full attention latency. Notably, SALE requires no parameter training and can be seamlessly integrated into existing systems with trivial code modifications. Experiments on long-context benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches in accuracy-efficiency trade-offs, achieving at least 3.36x speedups on Llama-3.1-8B for sequences longer than 64K while maintaining model quality.

Feed-forward 3D reconstruction offers substantial runtime advantages over per-scene optimization, which remains slow at inference and often fragile under sparse views. However, existing feed-forward methods still have potential for further performance gains, especially for out-of-domain data, and struggle to retain second-level inference time once a generative prior is introduced. These limitations stem from the one-shot prediction paradigm in existing feed-forward pipeline: models are strictly bounded by capacity, lack inference-time refinement, and are ill-suited for continuously injecting generative priors. We introduce GIFSplat, a purely feed-forward iterative refinement framework for 3D Gaussian Splatting from sparse unposed views. A small number of forward-only residual updates progressively refine current 3D scene using rendering evidence, achieve favorable balance between efficiency and quality. Furthermore, we distill a frozen diffusion prior into Gaussian-level cues from enhanced novel renderings without gradient backpropagation or ever-increasing view-set expansion, thereby enabling per-scene adaptation with generative prior while preserving feed-forward efficiency. Across DL3DV, RealEstate10K, and DTU, GIFSplat consistently outperforms state-of-the-art feed-forward baselines, improving PSNR by up to +2.1 dB, and it maintains second-scale inference time without requiring camera poses or any test-time gradient optimization.

Recently, the Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) advancement has facilitated few-shot Novel View Synthesis (NVS), which is a significant challenge in 3D vision applications. Despite numerous attempts to reduce the dense input requirement in NeRF, it still suffers from time-consumed training and rendering processes. More recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) achieves real-time high-quality rendering with an explicit point-based representation. However, similar to NeRF, it tends to overfit the train views for lack of constraints. In this paper, we propose MVPGS, a few-shot NVS method that excavates the multi-view priors based on 3D Gaussian Splatting. We leverage the recent learning-based Multi-view Stereo (MVS) to enhance the quality of geometric initialization for 3DGS. To mitigate overfitting, we propose a forward-warping method for additional appearance constraints conforming to scenes based on the computed geometry. Furthermore, we introduce a view-consistent geometry constraint for Gaussian parameters to facilitate proper optimization convergence and utilize a monocular depth regularization as compensation. Experiments show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance with real-time rendering speed. Project page: https://zezeaaa.github.io/projects/MVPGS/

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has demonstrated impressive performance in novel view synthesis under dense-view settings. However, in sparse-view scenarios, despite the realistic renderings in training views, 3DGS occasionally manifests appearance artifacts in novel views. This paper investigates the appearance artifacts in sparse-view 3DGS and uncovers a core limitation of current approaches: the optimized Gaussians are overly-entangled with one another to aggressively fit the training views, which leads to a neglect of the real appearance distribution of the underlying scene and results in appearance artifacts in novel views. The analysis is based on a proposed metric, termed Co-Adaptation Score (CA), which quantifies the entanglement among Gaussians, i.e., co-adaptation, by computing the pixel-wise variance across multiple renderings of the same viewpoint, with different random subsets of Gaussians. The analysis reveals that the degree of co-adaptation is naturally alleviated as the number of training views increases. Based on the analysis, we propose two lightweight strategies to explicitly mitigate the co-adaptation in sparse-view 3DGS: (1) random gaussian dropout; (2) multiplicative noise injection to the opacity. Both strategies are designed to be plug-and-play, and their effectiveness is validated across various methods and benchmarks. We hope that our insights into the co-adaptation effect will inspire the community to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of sparse-view 3DGS.

Digitizing 3D static scenes and 4D dynamic events from multi-view images has long been a challenge in computer vision and graphics. Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a practical and scalable reconstruction method, gaining popularity due to its impressive reconstruction quality, real-time rendering capabilities, and compatibility with widely used visualization tools. However, the method requires a substantial number of input views to achieve high-quality scene reconstruction, introducing a significant practical bottleneck. This challenge is especially severe in capturing dynamic scenes, where deploying an extensive camera array can be prohibitively costly. In this work, we identify the lack of spatial autocorrelation of splat features as one of the factors contributing to the suboptimal performance of the 3DGS technique in sparse reconstruction settings. To address the issue, we propose an optimization strategy that effectively regularizes splat features by modeling them as the outputs of a corresponding implicit neural field. This results in a consistent enhancement of reconstruction quality across various scenarios. Our approach effectively handles static and dynamic cases, as demonstrated by extensive testing across different setups and scene complexities.

Recent advancements in human avatar synthesis have utilized radiance fields to reconstruct photo-realistic animatable human avatars. However, both NeRFs-based and 3DGS-based methods struggle with maintaining 3D consistency and exhibit suboptimal detail reconstruction, especially with sparse inputs. To address this challenge, we propose CHASE, which introduces supervision from intrinsic 3D consistency across poses and 3D geometry contrastive learning, achieving performance comparable with sparse inputs to that with full inputs. Following previous work, we first integrate a skeleton-driven rigid deformation and a non-rigid cloth dynamics deformation to coordinate the movements of individual Gaussians during animation, reconstructing basic avatar with coarse 3D consistency. To improve 3D consistency under sparse inputs, we design Dynamic Avatar Adjustment(DAA) to adjust deformed Gaussians based on a selected similar pose/image from the dataset. Minimizing the difference between the image rendered by adjusted Gaussians and the image with the similar pose serves as an additional form of supervision for avatar. Furthermore, we propose a 3D geometry contrastive learning strategy to maintain the 3D global consistency of generated avatars. Though CHASE is designed for sparse inputs, it surprisingly outperforms current SOTA methods in both full and sparse settings on the ZJU-MoCap and H36M datasets, demonstrating that our CHASE successfully maintains avatar's 3D consistency, hence improving rendering quality.

Personalized Head-Related Transfer Functions (HRTFs) are starting to be introduced in many commercial immersive audio applications and are crucial for realistic spatial audio rendering. However, one of the main hesitations regarding their introduction is that creating personalized HRTFs is impractical at scale due to the complexities of the HRTF measurement process. To mitigate this drawback, HRTF spatial upsampling has been proposed with the aim of reducing measurements required. While prior work has seen success with different machine learning (ML) approaches, these models often struggle with long-range spatial consistency and generalization at high upsampling factors. In this paper, we propose a novel transformer-based architecture for HRTF upsampling, leveraging the attention mechanism to better capture spatial correlations across the HRTF sphere. Working in the spherical harmonic (SH) domain, our model learns to reconstruct high-resolution HRTFs from sparse input measurements with significantly improved accuracy. To enhance spatial coherence, we introduce a neighbor dissimilarity loss that promotes magnitude smoothness, yielding more realistic upsampling. We evaluate our method using both perceptual localization models and objective spectral distortion metrics. Experiments show that our model surpasses leading methods by a substantial margin in generating realistic, high-fidelity HRTFs.

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) promise a unified approach for mechanistic interpretability, concept discovery, and model steering in LLMs and LVLMs. However, realizing this potential requires that the learned features be both interpretable and steerable. To that end, we introduce two new computationally inexpensive interpretability and steerability metrics and conduct a systematic analysis on LVLMs. Our analysis uncovers two observations; (i) a majority of SAE neurons exhibit either low interpretability or low steerability or both, rendering them ineffective for downstream use; and (ii) due to the unsupervised nature of SAEs, user-desired concepts are often absent in the learned dictionary, thus limiting their practical utility. To address these limitations, we propose Concept Bottleneck Sparse Autoencoders (CB-SAE) - a novel post-hoc framework that prunes low-utility neurons and augments the latent space with a lightweight concept bottleneck aligned to a user-defined concept set. The resulting CB-SAE improves interpretability by +32.1% and steerability by +14.5% across LVLMs and image generation tasks. We will make our code and model weights available.

3D human reconstruction from a single image is a challenging problem and has been exclusively studied in the literature. Recently, some methods have resorted to diffusion models for guidance, optimizing a 3D representation via Score Distillation Sampling(SDS) or generating a back-view image for facilitating reconstruction. However, these methods tend to produce unsatisfactory artifacts (e.g. flattened human structure or over-smoothing results caused by inconsistent priors from multiple views) and struggle with real-world generalization in the wild. In this work, we present MVD-HuGaS, enabling free-view 3D human rendering from a single image via a multi-view human diffusion model. We first generate multi-view images from the single reference image with an enhanced multi-view diffusion model, which is well fine-tuned on high-quality 3D human datasets to incorporate 3D geometry priors and human structure priors. To infer accurate camera poses from the sparse generated multi-view images for reconstruction, an alignment module is introduced to facilitate joint optimization of 3D Gaussians and camera poses. Furthermore, we propose a depth-based Facial Distortion Mitigation module to refine the generated facial regions, thereby improving the overall fidelity of the reconstruction. Finally, leveraging the refined multi-view images, along with their accurate camera poses, MVD-HuGaS optimizes the 3D Gaussians of the target human for high-fidelity free-view renderings. Extensive experiments on Thuman2.0 and 2K2K datasets show that the proposed MVD-HuGaS achieves state-of-the-art performance on single-view 3D human rendering.

We present Edit3r, a feed-forward framework that reconstructs and edits 3D scenes in a single pass from unposed, view-inconsistent, instruction-edited images. Unlike prior methods requiring per-scene optimization, Edit3r directly predicts instruction-aligned 3D edits, enabling fast and photorealistic rendering without optimization or pose estimation. A key challenge in training such a model lies in the absence of multi-view consistent edited images for supervision. We address this with (i) a SAM2-based recoloring strategy that generates reliable, cross-view-consistent supervision, and (ii) an asymmetric input strategy that pairs a recolored reference view with raw auxiliary views, encouraging the network to fuse and align disparate observations. At inference, our model effectively handles images edited by 2D methods such as InstructPix2Pix, despite not being exposed to such edits during training. For large-scale quantitative evaluation, we introduce DL3DV-Edit-Bench, a benchmark built on the DL3DV test split, featuring 20 diverse scenes, 4 edit types and 100 edits in total. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative results show that Edit3r achieves superior semantic alignment and enhanced 3D consistency compared to recent baselines, while operating at significantly higher inference speed, making it promising for real-time 3D editing applications.

Gaussian splatting has achieved impressive improvements for both novel-view synthesis and surface reconstruction from multi-view images. However, current methods still struggle to reconstruct high-quality surfaces from only sparse view input images using Gaussian splatting. In this paper, we propose a novel method called SolidGS to address this problem. We observed that the reconstructed geometry can be severely inconsistent across multi-views, due to the property of Gaussian function in geometry rendering. This motivates us to consolidate all Gaussians by adopting a more solid kernel function, which effectively improves the surface reconstruction quality. With the additional help of geometrical regularization and monocular normal estimation, our method achieves superior performance on the sparse view surface reconstruction than all the Gaussian splatting methods and neural field methods on the widely used DTU, Tanks-and-Temples, and LLFF datasets.

Sign Language Production (SLP) faces a fundamental trade-off: direct text-to-pose models suffer from regression-to-the-mean effects, while dictionary-retrieval methods produce disjointed transitions. To resolve this, we propose a novel training paradigm that leverages sparse keyframes to capture the underlying kinematic distribution of human signing. By generating dense motion from discrete anchors, our approach mitigates regression-to-the-mean while ensuring fluid articulation. To achieve this at scale, we introduce FAST, an ultra-efficient sign segmentation model that automatically mines precise temporal boundaries. We then present SignSparK, a Conditional Flow Matching (CFM) framework that utilizes these temporal anchors to synthesize 3D signing sequences. This keyframe-driven formulation also unlocks Keyframe-to-Pose (KF2P) generation, making precise spatiotemporal editing of signing sequences possible. Furthermore, SignSparK scales across four distinct sign languages, constituting the largest multilingual SLP framework to date, and integrates 3D Gaussian Splatting for photorealistic rendering. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that SignSparK achieves state-of-the-art across diverse SLP tasks and multilingual benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/JianHe0628/SignSparK.

Dynamic human rendering from video sequences has achieved remarkable progress by formulating the rendering as a mapping from static poses to human images. However, existing methods focus on the human appearance reconstruction of every single frame while the temporal motion relations are not fully explored. In this paper, we propose a new 4D motion modeling paradigm, SurMo, that jointly models the temporal dynamics and human appearances in a unified framework with three key designs: 1) Surface-based motion encoding that models 4D human motions with an efficient compact surface-based triplane. It encodes both spatial and temporal motion relations on the dense surface manifold of a statistical body template, which inherits body topology priors for generalizable novel view synthesis with sparse training observations. 2) Physical motion decoding that is designed to encourage physical motion learning by decoding the motion triplane features at timestep t to predict both spatial derivatives and temporal derivatives at the next timestep t+1 in the training stage. 3) 4D appearance decoding that renders the motion triplanes into images by an efficient volumetric surface-conditioned renderer that focuses on the rendering of body surfaces with motion learning conditioning. Extensive experiments validate the state-of-the-art performance of our new paradigm and illustrate the expressiveness of surface-based motion triplanes for rendering high-fidelity view-consistent humans with fast motions and even motion-dependent shadows. Our project page is at: https://taohuumd.github.io/projects/SurMo/

We present a novel appearance model that simultaneously realizes explicit high-quality 3D surface mesh recovery and photorealistic novel view synthesis from sparse view samples. Our key idea is to model the underlying scene geometry Mesh as an Atlas of Charts which we render with 2D Gaussian surfels (MAtCha Gaussians). MAtCha distills high-frequency scene surface details from an off-the-shelf monocular depth estimator and refines it through Gaussian surfel rendering. The Gaussian surfels are attached to the charts on the fly, satisfying photorealism of neural volumetric rendering and crisp geometry of a mesh model, i.e., two seemingly contradicting goals in a single model. At the core of MAtCha lies a novel neural deformation model and a structure loss that preserve the fine surface details distilled from learned monocular depths while addressing their fundamental scale ambiguities. Results of extensive experimental validation demonstrate MAtCha's state-of-the-art quality of surface reconstruction and photorealism on-par with top contenders but with dramatic reduction in the number of input views and computational time. We believe MAtCha will serve as a foundational tool for any visual application in vision, graphics, and robotics that require explicit geometry in addition to photorealism. Our project page is the following: https://anttwo.github.io/matcha/

We introduce Tinker, a versatile framework for high-fidelity 3D editing that operates in both one-shot and few-shot regimes without any per-scene finetuning. Unlike prior techniques that demand extensive per-scene optimization to ensure multi-view consistency or to produce dozens of consistent edited input views, Tinker delivers robust, multi-view consistent edits from as few as one or two images. This capability stems from repurposing pretrained diffusion models, which unlocks their latent 3D awareness. To drive research in this space, we curate the first large-scale multi-view editing dataset and data pipeline, spanning diverse scenes and styles. Building on this dataset, we develop our framework capable of generating multi-view consistent edited views without per-scene training, which consists of two novel components: (1) Referring multi-view editor: Enables precise, reference-driven edits that remain coherent across all viewpoints. (2) Any-view-to-video synthesizer: Leverages spatial-temporal priors from video diffusion to perform high-quality scene completion and novel-view generation even from sparse inputs. Through extensive experiments, Tinker significantly reduces the barrier to generalizable 3D content creation, achieving state-of-the-art performance on editing, novel-view synthesis, and rendering enhancement tasks. We believe that Tinker represents a key step towards truly scalable, zero-shot 3D editing. Project webpage: https://aim-uofa.github.io/Tinker

Reconstructing unbounded outdoor scenes from sparse outward-facing views poses significant challenges due to minimal view overlap. Previous methods often lack cross-scene understanding and their primitive-centric formulations overload local features to compensate for missing global context, resulting in blurriness in unseen parts of the scene. We propose sshELF, a fast, single-shot pipeline for sparse-view 3D scene reconstruction via hierarchal extrapolation of latent features. Our key insights is that disentangling information extrapolation from primitive decoding allows efficient transfer of structural patterns across training scenes. Our method: (1) learns cross-scene priors to generate intermediate virtual views to extrapolate to unobserved regions, (2) offers a two-stage network design separating virtual view generation from 3D primitive decoding for efficient training and modular model design, and (3) integrates a pre-trained foundation model for joint inference of latent features and texture, improving scene understanding and generalization. sshELF can reconstruct 360 degree scenes from six sparse input views and achieves competitive results on synthetic and real-world datasets. We find that sshELF faithfully reconstructs occluded regions, supports real-time rendering, and provides rich latent features for downstream applications. The code will be released.

We study the problem of single-image 3D object reconstruction. Recent works have diverged into two directions: regression-based modeling and generative modeling. Regression methods efficiently infer visible surfaces, but struggle with occluded regions. Generative methods handle uncertain regions better by modeling distributions, but are computationally expensive and the generation is often misaligned with visible surfaces. In this paper, we present SPAR3D, a novel two-stage approach aiming to take the best of both directions. The first stage of SPAR3D generates sparse 3D point clouds using a lightweight point diffusion model, which has a fast sampling speed. The second stage uses both the sampled point cloud and the input image to create highly detailed meshes. Our two-stage design enables probabilistic modeling of the ill-posed single-image 3D task while maintaining high computational efficiency and great output fidelity. Using point clouds as an intermediate representation further allows for interactive user edits. Evaluated on diverse datasets, SPAR3D demonstrates superior performance over previous state-of-the-art methods, at an inference speed of 0.7 seconds. Project page with code and model: https://spar3d.github.io

Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) based rendering has attracted growing attention thanks to its state-of-the-art (SOTA) rendering quality and wide applications in Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR). However, immersive real-time (> 30 FPS) NeRF based rendering enabled interactions are still limited due to the low achievable throughput on AR/VR devices. To this end, we first profile SOTA efficient NeRF algorithms on commercial devices and identify two primary causes of the aforementioned inefficiency: (1) the uniform point sampling and (2) the dense accesses and computations of the required embeddings in NeRF. Furthermore, we propose RT-NeRF, which to the best of our knowledge is the first algorithm-hardware co-design acceleration of NeRF. Specifically, on the algorithm level, RT-NeRF integrates an efficient rendering pipeline for largely alleviating the inefficiency due to the commonly adopted uniform point sampling method in NeRF by directly computing the geometry of pre-existing points. Additionally, RT-NeRF leverages a coarse-grained view-dependent computing ordering scheme for eliminating the (unnecessary) processing of invisible points. On the hardware level, our proposed RT-NeRF accelerator (1) adopts a hybrid encoding scheme to adaptively switch between a bitmap- or coordinate-based sparsity encoding format for NeRF's sparse embeddings, aiming to maximize the storage savings and thus reduce the required DRAM accesses while supporting efficient NeRF decoding; and (2) integrates both a dual-purpose bi-direction adder & search tree and a high-density sparse search unit to coordinate the two aforementioned encoding formats. Extensive experiments on eight datasets consistently validate the effectiveness of RT-NeRF, achieving a large throughput improvement (e.g., 9.7x - 3,201x) while maintaining the rendering quality as compared with SOTA efficient NeRF solutions.

During image editing, existing deep generative models tend to re-synthesize the entire output from scratch, including the unedited regions. This leads to a significant waste of computation, especially for minor editing operations. In this work, we present Spatially Sparse Inference (SSI), a general-purpose technique that selectively performs computation for edited regions and accelerates various generative models, including both conditional GANs and diffusion models. Our key observation is that users prone to gradually edit the input image. This motivates us to cache and reuse the feature maps of the original image. Given an edited image, we sparsely apply the convolutional filters to the edited regions while reusing the cached features for the unedited areas. Based on our algorithm, we further propose Sparse Incremental Generative Engine (SIGE) to convert the computation reduction to latency reduction on off-the-shelf hardware. With about 1%-area edits, SIGE accelerates DDPM by 3.0times on NVIDIA RTX 3090 and 4.6times on Apple M1 Pro GPU, Stable Diffusion by 7.2times on 3090, and GauGAN by 5.6times on 3090 and 5.2times on M1 Pro GPU. Compared to our conference version, we extend SIGE to accommodate attention layers and apply it to Stable Diffusion. Additionally, we offer support for Apple M1 Pro GPU and include more results with large and sequential edits.

We present a novel approach for recovering 3D shape and view dependent appearance from a few colored images, enabling efficient 3D reconstruction and novel view synthesis. Our method learns an implicit neural representation in the form of a Signed Distance Function (SDF) and a radiance field. The model is trained progressively through ray marching enabled volumetric rendering, and regularized with learning-free multi-view stereo (MVS) cues. Key to our contribution is a novel implicit neural shape function learning strategy that encourages our SDF field to be as linear as possible near the level-set, hence robustifying the training against noise emanating from the supervision and regularization signals. Without using any pretrained priors, our method, called SparseCraft, achieves state-of-the-art performances both in novel-view synthesis and reconstruction from sparse views in standard benchmarks, while requiring less than 10 minutes for training.

We introduce the Large Sparse Reconstruction Model to study how scaling transformer context windows impacts feed-forward 3D reconstruction. Although recent object-centric feed-forward methods deliver robust, high-quality reconstruction, they still lag behind dense-view optimization in recovering fine-grained texture and appearance. We show that expanding the context window -- by substantially increasing the number of active object and image tokens -- remarkably narrows this gap and enables high-fidelity 3D object reconstruction and inverse rendering. To scale effectively, we adapt native sparse attention in our architecture design, unlocking its capacity for 3D reconstruction with three key contributions: (1) an efficient coarse-to-fine pipeline that focuses computation on informative regions by predicting sparse high-resolution residuals; (2) a 3D-aware spatial routing mechanism that establishes accurate 2D-3D correspondences using explicit geometric distances rather than standard attention scores; and (3) a custom block-aware sequence parallelism strategy utilizing an All-gather-KV protocol to balance dynamic, sparse workloads across GPUs. As a result, LSRM handles 20x more object tokens and >2x more image tokens than prior state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Extensive evaluations on standard novel-view synthesis benchmarks show substantial gains over the current SOTA, yielding 2.5 dB higher PSNR and 40% lower LPIPS. Furthermore, when extending LSRM to inverse rendering tasks, qualitative and quantitative evaluations on widely-used benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements in texture and geometry details, achieving an LPIPS that matches or exceeds that of SOTA dense-view optimization methods. Code and model will be released on our project page.

Synthesizing novel views of large-scale scenes from unconstrained in-the-wild images is an important but challenging task in computer vision. Existing methods, which optimize per-image appearance and transient occlusion through implicit neural networks from dense training views (approximately 1000 images), struggle to perform effectively under sparse input conditions, resulting in noticeable artifacts. To this end, we propose SparseGS-W, a novel framework based on 3D Gaussian Splatting that enables the reconstruction of complex outdoor scenes and handles occlusions and appearance changes with as few as five training images. We leverage geometric priors and constrained diffusion priors to compensate for the lack of multi-view information from extremely sparse input. Specifically, we propose a plug-and-play Constrained Novel-View Enhancement module to iteratively improve the quality of rendered novel views during the Gaussian optimization process. Furthermore, we propose an Occlusion Handling module, which flexibly removes occlusions utilizing the inherent high-quality inpainting capability of constrained diffusion priors. Both modules are capable of extracting appearance features from any user-provided reference image, enabling flexible modeling of illumination-consistent scenes. Extensive experiments on the PhotoTourism and Tanks and Temples datasets demonstrate that SparseGS-W achieves state-of-the-art performance not only in full-reference metrics, but also in commonly used non-reference metrics such as FID, ClipIQA, and MUSIQ.

Rendering photo-realistic novel-view images of complex scenes has been a long-standing challenge in computer graphics. In recent years, great research progress has been made on enhancing rendering quality and accelerating rendering speed in the realm of view synthesis. However, when rendering complex dynamic scenes with sparse views, the rendering quality remains limited due to occlusion problems. Besides, for rendering high-resolution images on dynamic scenes, the rendering speed is still far from real-time. In this work, we propose a generalizable view synthesis method that can render high-resolution novel-view images of complex static and dynamic scenes in real-time from sparse views. To address the occlusion problems arising from the sparsity of input views and the complexity of captured scenes, we introduce an explicit 3D visibility reasoning approach that can efficiently estimate the visibility of sampled 3D points to the input views. The proposed visibility reasoning approach is fully differentiable and can gracefully fit inside the volume rendering pipeline, allowing us to train our networks with only multi-view images as supervision while refining geometry and texture simultaneously. Besides, each module in our pipeline is carefully designed to bypass the time-consuming MLP querying process and enhance the rendering quality of high-resolution images, enabling us to render high-resolution novel-view images in real-time.Experimental results show that our method outperforms previous view synthesis methods in both rendering quality and speed, particularly when dealing with complex dynamic scenes with sparse views.

Sparse attention is a primary approach to reducing the latency of diffusion transformers in long-sequence generation tasks, such as video and high-resolution 3D asset generation. However, existing methods can degrade generation quality and fidelity at high sparsity levels. Through controlled oracle comparisons, we trace this degradation to three sources: constraints imposed by token grouping, inaccurate interaction selection, and the attention contributions lost when tokens are discarded. Guided by this analysis, we propose Meta-Cached Sparse Attention (MC-Sparse), a training-free framework that selects individual key-value (KV) tokens while organizing similar queries into tile-aligned groups for efficient GPU execution. MC-Sparse caches metadata comprising query groups, KV indices selected using exact attention probabilities, and residuals between dense and sparse attention outputs, and reuses them across subsequent denoising steps. Across video and 3D generation models, MC-Sparse achieves higher fidelity to dense-attention outputs and larger denoising speedups than existing sparse-attention baselines, without visible quality degradation. Relative to dense attention, it delivers a 1.80times denoising speedup on Minimax-H3-Base and a 2.32times speedup on 3D asset generation, both with negligible quality loss.

We present a simple approach which can turn a ViT encoder into an efficient video model, which can seamlessly work with both image and video inputs. By sparsely sampling the inputs, the model is able to do training and inference from both inputs. The model is easily scalable and can be adapted to large-scale pre-trained ViTs without requiring full finetuning. The model achieves SOTA results and the code will be open-sourced.

We aim to address sparse-view reconstruction of a 3D scene by leveraging priors from large-scale vision models. While recent advancements such as 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have demonstrated remarkable successes in 3D reconstruction, these methods typically necessitate hundreds of input images that densely capture the underlying scene, making them time-consuming and impractical for real-world applications. However, sparse-view reconstruction is inherently ill-posed and under-constrained, often resulting in inferior and incomplete outcomes. This is due to issues such as failed initialization, overfitting on input images, and a lack of details. To mitigate these challenges, we introduce LM-Gaussian, a method capable of generating high-quality reconstructions from a limited number of images. Specifically, we propose a robust initialization module that leverages stereo priors to aid in the recovery of camera poses and the reliable point clouds. Additionally, a diffusion-based refinement is iteratively applied to incorporate image diffusion priors into the Gaussian optimization process to preserve intricate scene details. Finally, we utilize video diffusion priors to further enhance the rendered images for realistic visual effects. Overall, our approach significantly reduces the data acquisition requirements compared to previous 3DGS methods. We validate the effectiveness of our framework through experiments on various public datasets, demonstrating its potential for high-quality 360-degree scene reconstruction. Visual results are on our website.

Open-world 3D generation has recently attracted considerable attention. While many single-image-to-3D methods have yielded visually appealing outcomes, they often lack sufficient controllability and tend to produce hallucinated regions that may not align with users' expectations. In this paper, we explore an important scenario in which the input consists of one or a few unposed 2D images of a single object, with little or no overlap. We propose a novel method, SpaRP, to reconstruct a 3D textured mesh and estimate the relative camera poses for these sparse-view images. SpaRP distills knowledge from 2D diffusion models and finetunes them to implicitly deduce the 3D spatial relationships between the sparse views. The diffusion model is trained to jointly predict surrogate representations for camera poses and multi-view images of the object under known poses, integrating all information from the input sparse views. These predictions are then leveraged to accomplish 3D reconstruction and pose estimation, and the reconstructed 3D model can be used to further refine the camera poses of input views. Through extensive experiments on three datasets, we demonstrate that our method not only significantly outperforms baseline methods in terms of 3D reconstruction quality and pose prediction accuracy but also exhibits strong efficiency. It requires only about 20 seconds to produce a textured mesh and camera poses for the input views. Project page: https://chaoxu.xyz/sparp.

Reconstructing and rendering 3D objects from highly sparse views is of critical importance for promoting applications of 3D vision techniques and improving user experience. However, images from sparse views only contain very limited 3D information, leading to two significant challenges: 1) Difficulty in building multi-view consistency as images for matching are too few; 2) Partially omitted or highly compressed object information as view coverage is insufficient. To tackle these challenges, we propose GaussianObject, a framework to represent and render the 3D object with Gaussian splatting, that achieves high rendering quality with only 4 input images. We first introduce techniques of visual hull and floater elimination which explicitly inject structure priors into the initial optimization process for helping build multi-view consistency, yielding a coarse 3D Gaussian representation. Then we construct a Gaussian repair model based on diffusion models to supplement the omitted object information, where Gaussians are further refined. We design a self-generating strategy to obtain image pairs for training the repair model. Our GaussianObject is evaluated on several challenging datasets, including MipNeRF360, OmniObject3D, and OpenIllumination, achieving strong reconstruction results from only 4 views and significantly outperforming previous state-of-the-art methods.

Advanced autoregressive (AR) video generation models have improved visual fidelity and interactivity, but the quadratic complexity of attention remains a primary bottleneck for efficient deployment. While existing sparse attention solutions have shown promise on bidirectional models, we identify that applying these solutions to AR models leads to considerable performance degradation for two reasons: isolated consideration of chunk generation and insufficient utilization of past informative context. Motivated by these observations, we propose Light Forcing, the first sparse attention solution tailored for AR video generation models. It incorporates a Chunk-Aware Growth mechanism to quantitatively estimate the contribution of each chunk, which determines their sparsity allocation. This progressive sparsity increase strategy enables the current chunk to inherit prior knowledge in earlier chunks during generation. Additionally, we introduce a Hierarchical Sparse Attention to capture informative historical and local context in a coarse-to-fine manner. Such two-level mask selection strategy (\ie, frame and block level) can adaptively handle diverse attention patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing sparse attention in quality (\eg, 84.5 on VBench) and efficiency (\eg, 1.2{sim}1.3times end-to-end speedup). Combined with FP8 quantization and LightVAE, Light Forcing further achieves a 2.3times speedup and 19.7\,FPS on an RTX~5090 GPU. Code will be released at https://github.com/chengtao-lv/LightForcing{https://github.com/chengtao-lv/LightForcing}.

Directly generating scenes from satellite imagery offers exciting possibilities for integration into applications like games and map services. However, challenges arise from significant view changes and scene scale. Previous efforts mainly focused on image or video generation, lacking exploration into the adaptability of scene generation for arbitrary views. Existing 3D generation works either operate at the object level or are difficult to utilize the geometry obtained from satellite imagery. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel architecture for direct 3D scene generation by introducing diffusion models into 3D sparse representations and combining them with neural rendering techniques. Specifically, our approach generates texture colors at the point level for a given geometry using a 3D diffusion model first, which is then transformed into a scene representation in a feed-forward manner. The representation can be utilized to render arbitrary views which would excel in both single-frame quality and inter-frame consistency. Experiments in two city-scale datasets show that our model demonstrates proficiency in generating photo-realistic street-view image sequences and cross-view urban scenes from satellite imagery.

Sparse-view 3D reconstruction is essential for modeling scenes from casual captures, but remain challenging for non-generative reconstruction. Existing diffusion-based approaches mitigates this issues by synthesizing novel views, but they often condition on only one or two capture frames, which restricts geometric consistency and limits scalability to large or diverse scenes. We propose AnyRecon, a scalable framework for reconstruction from arbitrary and unordered sparse inputs that preserves explicit geometric control while supporting flexible conditioning cardinality. To support long-range conditioning, our method constructs a persistent global scene memory via a prepended capture view cache, and removes temporal compression to maintain frame-level correspondence under large viewpoint changes. Beyond better generative model, we also find that the interplay between generation and reconstruction is crucial for large-scale 3D scenes. Thus, we introduce a geometry-aware conditioning strategy that couples generation and reconstruction through an explicit 3D geometric memory and geometry-driven capture-view retrieval. To ensure efficiency, we combine 4-step diffusion distillation with context-window sparse attention to reduce quadratic complexity. Extensive experiments demonstrate robust and scalable reconstruction across irregular inputs, large viewpoint gaps, and long trajectories.

Recovering 3D information from scenes via multi-view stereo reconstruction (MVS) and novel view synthesis (NVS) is inherently challenging, particularly in scenarios involving sparse-view setups. The advent of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enabled real-time, photorealistic NVS. Following this, 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) leveraged perspective accurate 2D Gaussian primitive rasterization to achieve accurate geometry representation during rendering, improving 3D scene reconstruction while maintaining real-time performance. Recent approaches have tackled the problem of sparse real-time NVS using 3DGS within a generalizable, MVS-based learning framework to regress 3D Gaussian parameters. Our work extends this line of research by addressing the challenge of generalizable sparse 3D reconstruction and NVS jointly, and manages to perform successfully at both tasks. We propose an MVS-based learning pipeline that regresses 2DGS surface element parameters in a feed-forward fashion to perform 3D shape reconstruction and NVS from sparse-view images. We further show that our generalizable pipeline can benefit from preexisting foundational multi-view deep visual features. The resulting model attains the state-of-the-art results on the DTU sparse 3D reconstruction benchmark in terms of Chamfer distance to ground-truth, as-well as state-of-the-art NVS. It also demonstrates strong generalization on the BlendedMVS and Tanks and Temples datasets. We note that our model outperforms the prior state-of-the-art in feed-forward sparse view reconstruction based on volume rendering of implicit representations, while offering an almost 2 orders of magnitude higher inference speed.

Serving diffusion models for image-to-video generation is computationally expensive, posing significant challenges for large-scale deployment. Real I2V workloads often contain similar requests, such as repeated effect templates, related subjects, and recurring shot layouts. Existing cross-request acceleration methods mainly exploit this redundancy through feature reuse. We observe that similar I2V requests also share highly consistent sparse attention patterns, enabling historical sparse masks to serve as request-conditioned priors with almost no online mask-prediction overhead. We propose a cross-request reuse framework centered on sparsity reuse, with feature reuse as an optional extension safeguarded by a lightweight guidance enhancement. Our sparsity reuse is implemented as shared sparse mask reuse, which reuses high-quality sparse masks from similar historical requests to avoid per-request online mask prediction. Optional feature reuse applies downsampled computation to highly redundant spatiotemporal regions, mitigating boundary artifacts while preserving efficiency gains. Guidance enhancement reinforces image/text conditioning after reuse, mitigating semantic drift and condition-adherence issues. Experiments show that default sparsity reuse configuration preserves generation quality with a 2.16times speedup.

Current 3D content generation builds on generative models that output RGB images. Modern graphics pipelines, however, require physically-based rendering (PBR) material properties. We propose to model the PBR image distribution directly to avoid photometric inaccuracies in RGB generation and the inherent ambiguity in extracting PBR from RGB. Existing paradigms for cross-modal finetuning are not suited for PBR generation due to a lack of data and the high dimensionality of the output modalities: we overcome both challenges by retaining a frozen RGB model and tightly linking a newly trained PBR model using a novel cross-network communication paradigm. As the base RGB model is fully frozen, the proposed method does not risk catastrophic forgetting during finetuning and remains compatible with techniques such as IPAdapter pretrained for the base RGB model. We validate our design choices, robustness to data sparsity, and compare against existing paradigms with an extensive experimental section.

Reconstructing 3D objects from extremely sparse views is a long-standing and challenging problem. While recent techniques employ image diffusion models for generating plausible images at novel viewpoints or for distilling pre-trained diffusion priors into 3D representations using score distillation sampling (SDS), these methods often struggle to simultaneously achieve high-quality, consistent, and detailed results for both novel-view synthesis (NVS) and geometry. In this work, we present Sparse3D, a novel 3D reconstruction method tailored for sparse view inputs. Our approach distills robust priors from a multiview-consistent diffusion model to refine a neural radiance field. Specifically, we employ a controller that harnesses epipolar features from input views, guiding a pre-trained diffusion model, such as Stable Diffusion, to produce novel-view images that maintain 3D consistency with the input. By tapping into 2D priors from powerful image diffusion models, our integrated model consistently delivers high-quality results, even when faced with open-world objects. To address the blurriness introduced by conventional SDS, we introduce the category-score distillation sampling (C-SDS) to enhance detail. We conduct experiments on CO3DV2 which is a multi-view dataset of real-world objects. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that our approach outperforms previous state-of-the-art works on the metrics regarding NVS and geometry reconstruction.

We propose RelitLRM, a Large Reconstruction Model (LRM) for generating high-quality Gaussian splatting representations of 3D objects under novel illuminations from sparse (4-8) posed images captured under unknown static lighting. Unlike prior inverse rendering methods requiring dense captures and slow optimization, often causing artifacts like incorrect highlights or shadow baking, RelitLRM adopts a feed-forward transformer-based model with a novel combination of a geometry reconstructor and a relightable appearance generator based on diffusion. The model is trained end-to-end on synthetic multi-view renderings of objects under varying known illuminations. This architecture design enables to effectively decompose geometry and appearance, resolve the ambiguity between material and lighting, and capture the multi-modal distribution of shadows and specularity in the relit appearance. We show our sparse-view feed-forward RelitLRM offers competitive relighting results to state-of-the-art dense-view optimization-based baselines while being significantly faster. Our project page is available at: https://relit-lrm.github.io/.

We tackle the problem of sparse novel view synthesis (NVS) using video diffusion models; given K (approx 5) multi-view images of a scene and their camera poses, we predict the view from a target camera pose. Many prior approaches leverage generative image priors encoded via diffusion models. However, models trained on single images lack multi-view knowledge. We instead argue that video models already contain implicit multi-view knowledge and so should be easier to adapt for NVS. Our key insight is to formulate sparse NVS as a low frame-rate video completion task. However, one challenge is that sparse NVS is defined over an unordered set of inputs, often too sparse to admit a meaningful order, so the models should be invariant to permutations of that input set. To this end, we present FrameCrafter, which adapts video models (naturally trained with coherent frame orderings) to permutation-invariant NVS through several architectural modifications, including per-frame latent encodings and removal of temporal positional embeddings. Our results suggest that video models can be easily trained to "forget" about time with minimal supervision, producing competitive performance on sparse-view NVS benchmarks. Project page: https://frame-crafter.github.io/

Selecting a complete 3D object from a reconstructed scene with minimal user effort is essential for practical scene editing and embodied interaction. Existing 3DGS-based methods either retrain the Gaussian representation to embed per-object labels, or build dense multi-view SAM observations, both requiring heavy computation and dense viewpoint coverage that is rarely available in practice. We present GaussianSelector, a training-free framework for interactive 3D object selection from sparse views and sparse scribble guidance. Operating directly on native Gaussian primitives, we coarsen dense Gaussians into geometrically coherent superpoints and construct a continuity-weighted graph using appearance and spatial cues. Sparse user scribbles are lifted into 3D via visibility-aware transmittance coverage, and selection is solved as a global graph-cut energy minimization that propagates sparse evidence to a complete 3D object. This design naturally supports multi-round refinement, where users iteratively correct the selection from additional viewpoints to progressively improve the result. Experiments demonstrate that GaussianSelector achieves competitive selection quality against state-of-the-art multi-view SAM-based methods, while requiring significantly fewer interaction views and substantially lower computational overhead. These properties make it well suited for human-in-the-loop 3D scene editing and 3D asset extraction in real-world deployment scenarios.

Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) demonstrate exceptional capabilities in visual synthesis, yet their deployment remains constrained by substantial computational demands. To alleviate this bottleneck, many sparsity-based acceleration methods have been proposed. However, their diverse sparsity patterns often require customized kernels for high-performance inference, limiting universality. We propose FlashOmni, a unified sparse attention engine compatible with arbitrary DiT architectures. FlashOmni introduces flexible sparse symbols to standardize the representation of a wide range of sparsity strategies, such as feature caching and block-sparse skipping. This unified abstraction enables the execution of diverse sparse computations within a single attention kernel. In addition, FlashOmni designs optimized sparse GEMMs for attention blocks, leveraging sparse symbols to eliminate redundant computations and further improve efficiency. Experiments demonstrate that FlashOmni delivers near-linear, closely matching the sparsity ratio speedup (1:1) in attention and GEMM-Q, and achieves 2.5times-3.8times acceleration in GEMM-O (max peaking at about 87.5% of the theoretical limit). Applied with a multi-granularity sparsity strategy, it enables the Hunyuan model (33K) to achieve about 1.5times end-to-end acceleration without degrading visual quality.

Sparsity in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has been widely studied to compress and accelerate the models on resource-constrained environments. It can be generally categorized into unstructured fine-grained sparsity that zeroes out multiple individual weights distributed across the neural network, and structured coarse-grained sparsity which prunes blocks of sub-networks of a neural network. Fine-grained sparsity can achieve a high compression ratio but is not hardware friendly and hence receives limited speed gains. On the other hand, coarse-grained sparsity cannot concurrently achieve both apparent acceleration on modern GPUs and decent performance. In this paper, we are the first to study training from scratch an N:M fine-grained structured sparse network, which can maintain the advantages of both unstructured fine-grained sparsity and structured coarse-grained sparsity simultaneously on specifically designed GPUs. Specifically, a 2:4 sparse network could achieve 2x speed-up without performance drop on Nvidia A100 GPUs. Furthermore, we propose a novel and effective ingredient, sparse-refined straight-through estimator (SR-STE), to alleviate the negative influence of the approximated gradients computed by vanilla STE during optimization. We also define a metric, Sparse Architecture Divergence (SAD), to measure the sparse network's topology change during the training process. Finally, We justify SR-STE's advantages with SAD and demonstrate the effectiveness of SR-STE by performing comprehensive experiments on various tasks. Source codes and models are available at https://github.com/NM-sparsity/NM-sparsity.

As deep learning models grow, sparsity is becoming an increasingly critical component of deep neural networks, enabling improved performance and reduced storage. However, existing frameworks offer poor support for sparsity. Specialized sparsity engines focus exclusively on sparse inference, while general frameworks primarily focus on sparse tensors in classical formats and neglect the broader sparsification pipeline necessary for using sparse models, especially during training. Further, existing frameworks are not easily extensible: adding a new sparse tensor format or operator is challenging and time-consuming. To address this, we propose STen, a sparsity programming model and interface for PyTorch, which incorporates sparsity layouts, operators, and sparsifiers, in an efficient, customizable, and extensible framework that supports virtually all sparsification methods. We demonstrate this by developing a high-performance grouped n:m sparsity layout for CPU inference at moderate sparsity. STen brings high performance and ease of use to the ML community, making sparsity easily accessible.

Embodied navigation aims to build agents that interpret multimodal goals, reason in 3D space, and reach target destinations reliably in the real world. However, progress remains constrained by the lack of scalable, high-fidelity, and physically grounded interactive environments. Although real-world scanned datasets offer visual realism, they are limited by scale. In contrast, synthetic simulators scale more easily but often exhibit large sim-to-real gaps. We introduce Image2Sim, a real-time neural simulation framework that constructs high-quality interactive environments from posed RGB-D image sequences. The central idea is to decouple 3D spatial anchoring from photorealistic observation synthesis. For scene construction, Image2Sim uses a feed-forward feature Gaussian model that lifts posed RGB-D observations into a 3D feature-Gaussian representation in a single pass. For rendering, we propose a Geometry-Aware One-Step Pixel Flow model that transforms sparse and noisy Gaussian projections into high-quality panoramic RGB-D observations. Image2Sim also serves as a fully automated embodied data engine that generates high-fidelity observations, executable actions, and diverse navigation instructions at scale. It converts large collections of videos and images into nearly 20K interactive scenes and synthesizes more than 10 million navigation training samples. Navigation models trained entirely in these neural environments achieve strong improvements on major benchmarks and transfer effectively to real-world zero-shot settings. These results suggest that scalable neural simulation can serve as a practical training substrate for embodied navigation at scale.

We present a new approach, termed GPS-Gaussian, for synthesizing novel views of a character in a real-time manner. The proposed method enables 2K-resolution rendering under a sparse-view camera setting. Unlike the original Gaussian Splatting or neural implicit rendering methods that necessitate per-subject optimizations, we introduce Gaussian parameter maps defined on the source views and regress directly Gaussian Splatting properties for instant novel view synthesis without any fine-tuning or optimization. To this end, we train our Gaussian parameter regression module on a large amount of human scan data, jointly with a depth estimation module to lift 2D parameter maps to 3D space. The proposed framework is fully differentiable and experiments on several datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods while achieving an exceeding rendering speed.

Differentiable rendering has advanced novel view synthesis (NVS), yet applying it to real-world driving remains difficult due to sparse capture viewpoints, dynamic objects, and limited multi-trajectory data. We introduce the Multi-View Multi-Vehicle (MV2) dataset and benchmark for evaluating NVS models under large viewpoint changes in dynamic urban scenes. MV2 features synchronized captures from a car, scooter, and drone, each following distinct yet synchronized trajectories. Training NVS methods on one vehicle's camera stream and testing on another enables evaluation under substantially larger viewpoint variations than existing single-trajectory datasets. All sequences are registered via Structure-from-Motion and camera poses verified using manual pixel-level correspondence annotations, yielding 50 high-quality scenes with 12000 images. Benchmarking recent NVS and camera pose estimation methods shows that NVS performance degrades with increasing viewpoint disparity, and that feed-forward pose estimators notably lag behind optimization-based approaches, highlighting MV2 as a rigorous testbed for NVS in driving. The dataset, benchmark protocol, and project resources are available at https://mv2-dataset.github.io/.

The computational demands of self-attention mechanisms pose a critical challenge for transformer-based video generation, particularly in synthesizing ultra-long sequences. Current approaches, such as factorized attention and fixed sparse patterns, fail to fully exploit the inherent spatio-temporal redundancies in video data. Through systematic analysis of video diffusion transformers (DiT), we uncover a key insight: Attention matrices exhibit structured, yet heterogeneous sparsity patterns, where specialized heads dynamically attend to distinct spatiotemporal regions (e.g., local pattern, cross-shaped pattern, or global pattern). Existing sparse attention methods either impose rigid constraints or introduce significant overhead, limiting their effectiveness. To address this, we propose Compact Attention, a hardware-aware acceleration framework featuring three innovations: 1) Adaptive tiling strategies that approximate diverse spatial interaction patterns via dynamic tile grouping, 2) Temporally varying windows that adjust sparsity levels based on frame proximity, and 3) An automated configuration search algorithm that optimizes sparse patterns while preserving critical attention pathways. Our method achieves 1.6~2.5x acceleration in attention computation on single-GPU setups while maintaining comparable visual quality with full-attention baselines. This work provides a principled approach to unlocking efficient long-form video generation through structured sparsity exploitation. Project Page: https://yo-ava.github.io/Compact-Attention.github.io/

Existing neural rendering methods for creating human avatars typically either require dense input signals such as video or multi-view images, or leverage a learned prior from large-scale specific 3D human datasets such that reconstruction can be performed with sparse-view inputs. Most of these methods fail to achieve realistic reconstruction when only a single image is available. To enable the data-efficient creation of realistic animatable 3D humans, we propose ELICIT, a novel method for learning human-specific neural radiance fields from a single image. Inspired by the fact that humans can effortlessly estimate the body geometry and imagine full-body clothing from a single image, we leverage two priors in ELICIT: 3D geometry prior and visual semantic prior. Specifically, ELICIT utilizes the 3D body shape geometry prior from a skinned vertex-based template model (i.e., SMPL) and implements the visual clothing semantic prior with the CLIP-based pretrained models. Both priors are used to jointly guide the optimization for creating plausible content in the invisible areas. Taking advantage of the CLIP models, ELICIT can use text descriptions to generate text-conditioned unseen regions. In order to further improve visual details, we propose a segmentation-based sampling strategy that locally refines different parts of the avatar. Comprehensive evaluations on multiple popular benchmarks, including ZJU-MoCAP, Human3.6M, and DeepFashion, show that ELICIT has outperformed strong baseline methods of avatar creation when only a single image is available. The code is public for research purposes at https://huangyangyi.github.io/ELICIT/.

Novel view synthesis from limited observations remains an important and persistent task. However, high efficiency in existing NeRF-based few-shot view synthesis is often compromised to obtain an accurate 3D representation. To address this challenge, we propose a few-shot view synthesis framework based on 3D Gaussian Splatting that enables real-time and photo-realistic view synthesis with as few as three training views. The proposed method, dubbed FSGS, handles the extremely sparse initialized SfM points with a thoughtfully designed Gaussian Unpooling process. Our method iteratively distributes new Gaussians around the most representative locations, subsequently infilling local details in vacant areas. We also integrate a large-scale pre-trained monocular depth estimator within the Gaussians optimization process, leveraging online augmented views to guide the geometric optimization towards an optimal solution. Starting from sparse points observed from limited input viewpoints, our FSGS can accurately grow into unseen regions, comprehensively covering the scene and boosting the rendering quality of novel views. Overall, FSGS achieves state-of-the-art performance in both accuracy and rendering efficiency across diverse datasets, including LLFF, Mip-NeRF360, and Blender. Project website: https://zehaozhu.github.io/FSGS/.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently transformed photorealistic reconstruction, achieving high visual fidelity and real-time performance. However, rendering quality significantly deteriorates when test views deviate from the camera angles used during training, posing a major challenge for applications in immersive free-viewpoint rendering and navigation. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 3DGS and related novel view synthesis methods under out-of-distribution (OOD) test camera scenarios. By creating diverse test cases with synthetic and real-world datasets, we demonstrate that most existing methods, including those incorporating various regularization techniques and data-driven priors, struggle to generalize effectively to OOD views. To address this limitation, we introduce SplatFormer, the first point transformer model specifically designed to operate on Gaussian splats. SplatFormer takes as input an initial 3DGS set optimized under limited training views and refines it in a single forward pass, effectively removing potential artifacts in OOD test views. To our knowledge, this is the first successful application of point transformers directly on 3DGS sets, surpassing the limitations of previous multi-scene training methods, which could handle only a restricted number of input views during inference. Our model significantly improves rendering quality under extreme novel views, achieving state-of-the-art performance in these challenging scenarios and outperforming various 3DGS regularization techniques, multi-scene models tailored for sparse view synthesis, and diffusion-based frameworks.

Advancements in neural implicit representations and differentiable rendering have markedly improved the ability to learn animatable 3D avatars from sparse multi-view RGB videos. However, current methods that map observation space to canonical space often face challenges in capturing pose-dependent details and generalizing to novel poses. While diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot capabilities in 2D image generation, their potential for creating animatable 3D avatars from 2D inputs remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce 3D^2-Actor, a novel approach featuring a pose-conditioned 3D-aware human modeling pipeline that integrates iterative 2D denoising and 3D rectifying steps. The 2D denoiser, guided by pose cues, generates detailed multi-view images that provide the rich feature set necessary for high-fidelity 3D reconstruction and pose rendering. Complementing this, our Gaussian-based 3D rectifier renders images with enhanced 3D consistency through a two-stage projection strategy and a novel local coordinate representation. Additionally, we propose an innovative sampling strategy to ensure smooth temporal continuity across frames in video synthesis. Our method effectively addresses the limitations of traditional numerical solutions in handling ill-posed mappings, producing realistic and animatable 3D human avatars. Experimental results demonstrate that 3D^2-Actor excels in high-fidelity avatar modeling and robustly generalizes to novel poses. Code is available at: https://github.com/silence-tang/GaussianActor.

3D human reconstruction and animation are long-standing topics in computer graphics and vision. However, existing methods typically rely on sophisticated dense-view capture and/or time-consuming per-subject optimization procedures. To address these limitations, we propose HumanRAM, a novel feed-forward approach for generalizable human reconstruction and animation from monocular or sparse human images. Our approach integrates human reconstruction and animation into a unified framework by introducing explicit pose conditions, parameterized by a shared SMPL-X neural texture, into transformer-based large reconstruction models (LRM). Given monocular or sparse input images with associated camera parameters and SMPL-X poses, our model employs scalable transformers and a DPT-based decoder to synthesize realistic human renderings under novel viewpoints and novel poses. By leveraging the explicit pose conditions, our model simultaneously enables high-quality human reconstruction and high-fidelity pose-controlled animation. Experiments show that HumanRAM significantly surpasses previous methods in terms of reconstruction accuracy, animation fidelity, and generalization performance on real-world datasets. Video results are available at https://zju3dv.github.io/humanram/.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) integrates the strengths of primitive-based representations and volumetric rendering techniques, enabling real-time, high-quality rendering. However, 3DGS models typically overfit to single-scene training and are highly sensitive to the initialization of Gaussian ellipsoids, heuristically derived from Structure from Motion (SfM) point clouds, which limits both generalization and practicality. To address these limitations, we propose GS-Net, a generalizable, plug-and-play 3DGS module that densifies Gaussian ellipsoids from sparse SfM point clouds, enhancing geometric structure representation. To the best of our knowledge, GS-Net is the first plug-and-play 3DGS module with cross-scene generalization capabilities. Additionally, we introduce the CARLA-NVS dataset, which incorporates additional camera viewpoints to thoroughly evaluate reconstruction and rendering quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that applying GS-Net to 3DGS yields a PSNR improvement of 2.08 dB for conventional viewpoints and 1.86 dB for novel viewpoints, confirming the method's effectiveness and robustness.

We introduce a method for novel view synthesis given only a single wide-baseline stereo image pair. In this challenging regime, 3D scene points are regularly observed only once, requiring prior-based reconstruction of scene geometry and appearance. We find that existing approaches to novel view synthesis from sparse observations fail due to recovering incorrect 3D geometry and due to the high cost of differentiable rendering that precludes their scaling to large-scale training. We take a step towards resolving these shortcomings by formulating a multi-view transformer encoder, proposing an efficient, image-space epipolar line sampling scheme to assemble image features for a target ray, and a lightweight cross-attention-based renderer. Our contributions enable training of our method on a large-scale real-world dataset of indoor and outdoor scenes. We demonstrate that our method learns powerful multi-view geometry priors while reducing the rendering time. We conduct extensive comparisons on held-out test scenes across two real-world datasets, significantly outperforming prior work on novel view synthesis from sparse image observations and achieving multi-view-consistent novel view synthesis.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) delivers high-fidelity real-time rendering but suffers from geometric and photometric degradations under sparse-view constraints. Current generative restoration approaches are often limited by insufficient temporal coherence, a lack of explicit spatial constraints, and a lack of large-scale training data, resulting in multi-view inconsistencies, erroneous geometric hallucinations, and limited generalization to diverse real-world artifact distributions. In this paper, we present ArtifactWorld, a framework that resolves 3DGS artifact repair through systematic data expansion and a homogeneous dual-model paradigm. To address the data bottleneck, we establish a fine-grained phenomenological taxonomy of 3DGS artifacts and construct a comprehensive training set of 107.5K diverse paired video clips to enhance model robustness. Architecturally, we unify the restoration process within a video diffusion backbone, utilizing an isomorphic predictor to localize structural defects via an artifact heatmap. This heatmap then guides the restoration through an Artifact-Aware Triplet Fusion mechanism, enabling precise, intensity-guided spatio-temporal repair within native self-attention. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ArtifactWorld achieves state-of-the-art performance in sparse novel view synthesis and robust 3D reconstruction. Code and dataset will be made public.

High-quality texture generation is essential for creating realistic and production-ready 3D assets. Recent multi-view diffusion methods have shown promising results for image-guided 3D texturing, but they are typically constrained to low operating resolutions such as 512 or 768, making it difficult to preserve high-frequency details from high-resolution reference images. Scaling this paradigm to 2048 resolution is computationally prohibitive, as the unified multi-view sequence exceeds 212K tokens and incurs excessive memory and latency. In this paper, we present UltraTex, an efficient end-to-end framework for high-resolution multi-view diffusion-based 3D texturing. Our key observation is that object-centric multi-view renderings contain two major sources of redundancy: background-induced sequence redundancy and sparse token interactions within the foreground. To address them, we introduce Background Token Dropping, which removes background tokens before the DiT backbone, and Block-Sparse Attention, which reduces attention computation over the retained foreground sequence. To enable efficient foreground-only inference while avoiding reconstruction artifacts, we further design Foreground-Aware VAE Decoding to ensure the quality of the final high-resolution views. To satisfy the demanding data requirements of 2K-resolution multi-view diffusion training, we construct G-buffer TexVerse, a large-scale, ultra-high-resolution multi-view rendering dataset covering over 268,000 3D assets. Extensive experiments show that UltraTex generates visually faithful textures with rich fine-grained details, while substantially improving efficiency, achieving 20.6times--91.1times training speedup and 22.3times--74.6times end-to-end inference speedup over the baseline on common samples in our dataset. Code and data is at https://yiboz2001.github.io/UltraTex.