Free-Range Gaussians: Non-Grid-Aligned Generative 3D Gaussian Reconstruction

Current feed-forward 3D reconstruction methods predict pixel aligned Gaussian primitives, resulting in highly redundant representations. A natural solution is to prune the redundant Gaussians, but naive pruning introduces severe artifacts and often requires inference time fine-tuning, breaking the feed-forward paradigm. Based on previous works, high frequency regions require more Gaussian primitives, while low frequency regions can be represented with significantly fewer primitives. Motivated by this, we propose a novel approach to explicitly control the number of Gaussians by leveraging local texture information. Our approach achieves this through three key components: (1) texture estimation to capture spatial variation in scene detail, (2) texture-aware pruning that removes redundant Gaussians from low frequency regions, and (3) an adaptive Gaussian head that predicts the modified attributes of the retained primitives without breaking the feed-forward paradigm. Experiments on RE10K, ACID, DL3DV, Tanks and Temples, and DTU demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, while ablation studies validate the contributions of its key components.

Generating photorealistic novel views from unposed images requires both 3D geometric understanding and the ability to synthesize unseen content. A natural strategy combines feed-forward 3DGS reconstruction with multi-view diffusion. Yet prior pipelines extract at most one signal from the reconstruction, either pixel rendering or learned features, while none exploits per-Gaussian visibility for occlusion-aware reference selection. This information disconnect leaves renderable geometry, visibility cues, and learned features unused. SplatGuide closes this disconnect by reusing a single 3DGS scene across three complementary roles. Rendered images provide pixel-aligned geometric conditioning. Per-Gaussian source-view indices are rendered into a target-view voting map for occlusion-aware reference selection. Reconstruction tokens supply feature-level guidance via cross-attention. All three signals derive from the same reconstruction forward pass. Across RealEstate10K, DL3DV, Tanks-and-Temples, and Mip-NeRF 360, SplatGuide achieves state-of-the-art pose-free novel view synthesis. On RealEstate10K, with a moderate number of input views, it surpasses the ground-truth-pose baseline.

Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting reconstructs an explicit Gaussian representation from multiple input images in one network execution, making 3D reconstruction increasingly accessible for casual captures. However, such captures frequently contain transient objects that appear in only a subset of the views. Such content can be encoded into the per-view Gaussians associated with the inputs that observe it and remain in the combined representation despite being observed by no other input. As a result, it may produce blurred, duplicated, or floating artifacts in novel views. We introduce a training-free filtering procedure that exploits this per-view prediction structure. For each input, we exclude its associated Gaussians and render the same camera using the remaining representation, revealing content that is inconsistent with the other inputs. Feature similarity forms candidate regions, and rendering-based verification retains only candidates whose removal reduces reconstruction error in the other input views. The procedure operates on a single frozen prediction without retraining or scene-specific optimization. Across three reconstruction models and two distractor benchmarks, it consistently improves novel-view quality with varying numbers of input views. On clean scenes, evaluations across four models show that the original reconstructions are largely preserved.