Do Flat Minima Improve Sparse Novel View Synthesis?
Authors: Youngsik Yun, Dongjun Gu, Youngjung Uh
Organizations: Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea
Abstract
Despite the success of recent novel view synthesis methods, they tend to struggle in sparse-view settings. This poor generalization to unseen viewpoints is an inherent challenge when training with limited data. To address this, we investigate the relationship between loss sharpness and generalization in novel view synthesis-an underexplored direction. Interestingly, while pursuing flatter minima is widely known to improve generalization in deep learning, reducing loss sharpness is not always beneficial in novel view synthesis. We demonstrate that this difference arises because high-detail regions inherently require a sharp loss landscape for accurate reconstruction, whereas low-detail regions benefit from a flat loss landscape for improving generalization. Based on this insight, we introduce structure-aware sharpness, defined within structure-adaptive neighborhoods, and propose to adaptively adjust the sharpness regularization weight according to the local image structure. This strategy encourages flatter minima for generalization while preserving the loss sharpness necessary to reconstruct fine details. Across various datasets and configurations, our strategy consistently improves a wide range of baselines. Code is available at https://bbangsik13.github.io/FASR.
Recent advances in neural rendering have established 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) as a highly efficient representation for novel view synthesis, enabling fast training and real-time rendering with strong fidelity. However, when supervision is limited to sparse input views, 3DGS tends to overfit to the observed images and generalize poorly to unseen viewpoints. We address this challenge from the perspective of flat minima (FM) optimization, which seeks solutions that remain stable under small parameter perturbations. Viewing Gaussian parameters as trainable weights, we adapt FM principles to the geometric and dynamic nature of 3DGS with a lightweight training framework. Our method regularizes optimization with controlled Gaussian perturbations that account for each Gaussian's anisotropy and the training progress, preserving fine details while improving robustness to sparse-view overfitting. To further stabilize this flat minima optimization process, we introduce periodic reinitialization, which temporarily returns non-positional parameters to their initial states for a short window. Together, these techniques integrate seamlessly into existing 3DGS pipelines without architectural changes. Experiments on LLFF and Mip-NeRF360 datasets demonstrate improved quantitative metrics and perceptual quality under sparse-view supervision, producing reconstructions that are sharper, more stable, and better generalized to novel viewpoints.
We study the challenging problem of novel view video synthesis from single images or monocular videos. Existing methods, which operate under the assumption that pre-trained video models lack native novel view synthesis capability and enforce view alignment via camera conditioning, task-specific fine-tuning, or stepwise hard denoising guidance, often suffer from artifacts and compromised global scene consistency. In this paper, we introduce NeoMap, a novel training-free framework designed to locate high-fidelity, view-consistent novel view solutions from general pre-trained video models. The key to our approach is the core insight that promising novel view solutions are inherently encoded within the natural video data manifold learned by pre-trained models, and the core challenge is simply to locate this optimal solution. We solve this via our core mechanism: convergent manifold alternating projection iterations that optimize the initial noise. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NeoMap significantly outperforms all existing methods across 3 standard novel view synthesis benchmarks, including the challenging Tanks-and-Temples, LLFF and DAVIS datasets, achieving state-of-the-art generation fidelity and top-tier view consistency.
Generalizable novel view synthesis aims to render unseen views from uncalibrated input images without requiring per-scene optimization. Recent feed-forward approaches based on 3D Gaussian Splatting have achieved promising efficiency and rendering quality. However, most of them assign a fixed number of Gaussians to each pixel or voxel, ignoring the spatially varying complexity of real-world scenes. Such uniform allocation often wastes Gaussian primitives in smooth regions while providing insufficient capacity for fine structures, complex geometry, and high-frequency details. This motivates us to predict region-dependent primitive cardinalities rather than impose a fixed primitive budget everywhere, enabling a more expressive 3D scene representation. Therefore, we propose SplatWeaver, a generalizable novel view synthesis framework that is able to dynamically allocate Gaussian primitives over different regions in a feed-forward manner. Specifically, SplatWeaver introduces cardinality Gaussian experts and a pixel-level routing scheme, wherein each expert specializes in producing a specific number of primitives from 0 to M, and the routing scheme coordinates these experts to adaptively determine how many Gaussian primitives should be allocated to each spatial location. Moreover, SplatWeaver incorporates a high-frequency prior with attendant guidance module and routing regularization to stabilize expert selection and promote complexity-aware allocation. By leveraging high-frequency cues, the routing process is encouraged to assign more Gaussian primitives to fine structures and textured regions, while suppressing redundancy in smooth areas. Extensive experiments across diverse scenarios show that SplatWeaver consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, delivering more faithful novel-view renderings with fewer Gaussian primitives. Project Page: https://yecongwan.github.io/SplatWeaver/