Rethinking Pose Refinement in 3D Gaussian Splatting under Pose Prior and Geometric Uncertainty

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has become a promising representation for real-time novel view synthesis and 3D scene reconstruction. For practical deployment, recent studies have explored pose-free feed-forward 3DGS, which reconstructs Gaussian representations directly from unposed input images. However, these methods remain sensitive to residual pose errors, which perturb canonical-space Gaussian transformation, introducing noisy supervision for geometry and attribute learning. To address this problem, we present SG-Splat, a pose-free feed-forward 3DGS framework that improves robustness to pose uncertainty and stabilizes the learning of Gaussian primitives. SG-Splat decouples geometry estimation and Gaussian attribute prediction into two dedicated branches, reducing error coupling between pose-sensitive geometry and Gaussian attributes. We further introduce a coarse-to-fine refinement pipeline, consisting of Flow-Guided Pose Refinement (FGPR) and Residual-Guided Geometry Correction (RGC), to improve geometric alignment before Gaussian attribute reconstruction. Specifically, FGPR refines camera poses with flow-based correlation features and differentiable bundle adjustment. RGC then corrects initial point maps using depth residuals derived from FGPR, producing more reliable Gaussian centers. To stabilize training, we introduce a dual-path strategy that mixes ground-truth and predicted poses for canonical transformation. It provides clean supervision for Gaussian attributes while improving geometry robustness to residual pose errors. Extensive experiments on DL3DV and RealEstate10K show that SG-Splat achieves state-of-the-art performance in both novel view synthesis and pose estimation.

While Gaussian Splatting-based Feature Fields (GSFFs) have shown promise for visual localization, this paper highlights that photometrically optimized GSFFs are inherently ill-suited for 2D-3D matching. The volumetric extent of each Gaussian induces many-to-one pixel-to-point mappings that destabilize PnP-based pose estimation, while photometric optimization gives rise to superfluous Gaussians devoid of multi-view consistency. To address these issues, we propose SplitGS-Loc, a localization-specialized GSFFs construction framework that disambiguates 2D-3D correspondences by exploiting Gaussian attributes. Our key design, Mixture-of-Gaussians-based splitting, decomposes each Gaussian into smaller Gaussians, replacing ambiguous many-to-one with precise one-to-one correspondences. In parallel, we exploit composition weights from GS rasterization to select Gaussians that significantly and consistently contribute across multiple views and aggregate discriminative features through strong pixel-Gaussian associations, enforcing multi-view consistency. The resulting compact yet discriminative feature fields enable stable PnP convergence, achieving state-of-the-art performance on localization benchmarks. Extensive experiments validate that SplitGS-Loc extends the utility of photometric GSFFs to accurate and efficient localization by exploiting Gaussian attributes, without per-scene training or iterative pose refinement.

We introduce GSVisLoc, a visual localization method designed for 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) scene representations. Given a 3DGS model of a scene and a query image, our goal is to estimate the camera's position and orientation. We accomplish this by robustly matching scene features to image features. Scene features are produced by downsampling and encoding the 3D Gaussians while image features are obtained by encoding image patches. Our algorithm proceeds in three steps, starting with coarse matching, then fine matching, and finally by applying pose refinement for an accurate final estimate. Importantly, our method leverages the explicit 3DGS scene representation for visual localization without requiring modifications, retraining, or additional reference images. We evaluate GSVisLoc on both indoor and outdoor scenes, demonstrating competitive localization performance on standard benchmarks while outperforming existing 3DGS-based baselines. Moreover, our approach generalizes effectively to novel scenes without additional training.