InverseCrafter: Efficient Video ReCapture as a Latent Domain Inverse Problem
Authors: Yeobin Hong, Suhyeon Lee, Hyungjin Chung, Jong Chul Ye
Organizations: Graduate School of AI, KAIST, South Korea · EverEx, South Korea · Korea University, South Korea
Abstract
Recent approaches in controllable novel view video generation often rely on fine-tuning pre-trained Video Diffusion Models (VDMs). This dominant paradigm is computationally expensive and frequently suffers from catastrophic forgetting of the model's original generative priors. To address this challenge, here we propose InverseCrafter, a VDM training-free framework that reformulates novel view video generation as an inpainting-based inverse problem in the latent space, eliminating the need for any annotated 4D training data. The core of our method is to establish operator equivalence by employing a lightweight latent mask encoder to define a latent-domain masking operation via a continuous, multi-channel representation. This principled representation faithfully models the forward process in the latent domain, enabling efficient, backpropagation-free solvers while bypassing the costly bottleneck of repeated VAE operations. InverseCrafter achieves high-fidelity, spatio-temporally coherent novel view synthesis with near-zero additional inference overhead and excels at general-purpose video inpainting and editing by fully preserving the pre-trained VDM's generative capabilities.
We tackle the problem of sparse novel view synthesis (NVS) using video diffusion models; given K (≈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/
Training-free, camera-controlled novel view synthesis from a single image using pre-trained video diffusion models often becomes unstable under large camera motion and long generation horizons. Existing approaches commonly combine several inference-time components, making it unclear which design choices are most important for stability. We show that the main source of stability is simple. Decomposing camera motion into small autoregressive steps limits per-step geometric distortion and reduces error accumulation. A controlled camera-step study shows that performance remains stable for small motions and degrades more strongly as the per-step motion approaches 18-20∘. We further evaluate geometry-constrained spatial attention and low-frequency appearance anchoring as supporting refinements, together with an efficient registration-free warping pipeline. Across RealEstate10K and MegaScene, CamTrol++ improves temporal and geometric consistency, downstream 3D reconstruction quality, and generation efficiency over training-free baselines. The method remains effective for 56-frame generation and under substantial controlled depth corruption. These results show that careful control of camera motion at inference time can substantially improve the stability of camera-controlled novel view synthesis without retraining or modifying the diffusion backbone.
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.