We present SparseGen, a novel framework for efficient image-to-3D generation, which exhibits low input-view bias while being significantly faster. Unlike traditional approaches that rely on dense volumetric grids, triplanes, or pixel-aligned primitives, we model scenes with a compact sparse set of learned 3D anchor queries and a learned expansion operator that decodes each transformed query into a small local set of 3D Gaussian primitives. Trained under a rectified-flow reconstruction objective without 3D supervision, our model learns to allocate representation capacity where geometry and appearance matter, achieving significant reductions in memory and inference time while preserving multi-view fidelity. We introduce quantitative measures of input-view bias and utilization to show that sparse queries reduce overfitting to conditioning views while being representationally efficient. Our results argue that sparse set-latent expansion is a principled, practical alternative for efficient 3D generative modeling.
Figures & tables
Figure 2: Overview of SparseGen . Given V input views (clean and/or noisy) with known camera poses, an image encoder (with adaLN timesteps) and a 3D position encoder generate position-aware image features. A sparse set of learnable 3D anchor queries attends to these fused features in a transformer-based expansion network and is decoded into a compact set of 3D Gaussians. Finally, the generated Gaussians are rendered for target views via differentiable splatting, enabling fast, high-quality 3D generation and rendering.
Figure 3: 3D Position-Aware Encoder. Pixels are unprojected along the camera frustum to fixed depths and mapped by a small Conv–ReLU–Conv into per-pixel 3D features. These 3D features are merged with DINO-extracted image features and flattened into 3D position-aware tokens for the following transformer.
Method
PSNR ↑
LPIPS ↓
SSIM ↑
FID ↓
Reconstruction Time ↓
3D Representation Size ↓
OpenLRM [ 9 ]
18.286
0.134
0.815
51.421
0.301s
3,840KB (12,288 Triplane Cells)
Splatter Image [ 33 ]
23.933
0.077
0.922
44.908
0.042s
1,472KB (16,384 Gaussians)
Viewset Diffusion [ 32 ]
22.688
0.096
0.891
39.807
16.32s
8,192KB (32,768 Voxel Cells)
SparseGen
24.018
0.081
0.913
23.595
0.027s
280KB (5,120 Gaussians)
Table 1: Single-view reconstruction on ShapeNet-SRN Cars. One conditioning view is provided; metrics are averaged over the remaining ground-truth views. Higher is better for PSNR/SSIM; lower is better for LPIPS/FID. “Reconstruction Time” is the wall-clock time to produce the 3D representation on a single NVIDIA L40; “3D Representation Size” reports memory footprint and the number/type of primitives. Best results are in bold while runners-up are underlined . SparseGen uses 5,120 Gaussians and achieves the best PSNR and FID with the fastest runtime and smallest footprint. Note that Splatter Image uses degree 1 spherical harmonics for color representation, while SparseGen uses RGB colors, and therefore the number of parameters per Gaussian is different.
Subset
Method
PSNR ↑
LPIPS ↓
SSIM ↑
Hydrant
Viewset Diffusion
19.664
0.232
0.693
SparseGen
20.366
0.192
0.724
Teddybear
Viewset Diffusion
15.473
0.405
0.492
SparseGen
19.005
0.353
0.568
Table 2: Single-view reconstruction on CO3D subsets. One input view per object; metrics computed on a held-out target view. Results are reported per category. SparseGen improves PSNR/LPIPS/SSIM over Viewset Diffusion on both Hydrant and Teddybear.
Method
PSNR ↑
LPIPS ↓
SSIM ↑
FID ↓
w/o rectified flow
23.069
0.092
0.895
28.415
w/o 3d pos embed
20.757
0.108
0.861
27.946
w/o learnable queries
17.159
0.209
0.807
178.129
SparseGen
24.018
0.081
0.913
23.595
Table 3: Ablations on ShapeNet-SRN Cars. Each row removes one component from SparseGen . Rectified flow improves realism and fidelity; 3D positional embeddings inject essential geometry; learnable 3D anchor queries are critical—removing them causes a quality drop and a large FID increase.
Method
PSNR ↑
LPIPS ↓
SSIM ↑
FID ↓
Reconstruction Time ↓
Representation Size ↓
Viewset Diffusion [ 32 ]
25.053
0.079
0.919
35.934
21.26s
1 ×
Splatter Image [ 33 ]
23.257
0.075
0.916
40.957
0.052s
2 ×
SparseGen
25.982
0.065
0.935
19.536
0.029s
1 ×
Table 4: Two-view reconstruction on ShapeNet-SRN Cars. Higher is better for PSNR/SSIM; lower is better for LPIPS/FID. “Representation Size” indicates the relative size of the 3D representation compared to, when using one view as input. We evaluated baselines with their released checkpoints. Best results are in bold .
Method
Δ PSNR
Δ LPIPS
Δ SSIM
OpenLRM
8.819
-0.103
0.138
Splatter Image
14.821
-0.072
0.073
Viewset Diffusion
8.445
-0.061
0.084
SparseGen
3.502
-0.025
0.041
Table 5: Input-view bias analysis. Gap between conditioning and novel views on ShapeNet-SRN Cars. Larger absolute values indicate stronger bias.
Figure 4: Back-view conditioning qualitative example. The input view observes the object from the back, providing limited information about the front. SparseGen produces plausible novel views, while deterministic feed-forward baselines fail.
Figure 5: Qualitative results on ShapeNet-SRN Cars. We show examples under one-view conditioning. SparseGen yields sharper details, cleaner boundaries, with fastest generation speed.
Figure 6: Scalability with respect to the number of queries. Increasing the number of learned 3D anchor queries ( M ) consistently improves reconstruction quality, supporting the view that queries provide a principled, low-waste representation bottleneck.
Figure 7: Opacity/density utilization. Histogram comparison across methods. Splatter Image produces many near-transparent Gaussians, whereas SparseGen yields predominantly non-trivial opacities. Viewset Diffusion has many zero-density voxels. For Viewset Diffusion, densities are passed through a sigmoid and rescaled to [0,1] for visualization.
Figure 8: Qualitative visualization of query utilization and locality. (a) Projection of per-query mean decoded Gaussian centers onto the image plane. (b) Corresponding RGB image. (c) A subset of decoded Gaussian centers, colored by the anchor query that generated them, illustrating query-induced locality.
Method
GPU Device
Training Time
Viewset Diffusion
L40
3 Days
Splatter Image
A6000
7 Days
LRM
A100
300 Days
LVSM
A100
200 Days
SparseGen
L40
3 Days
Table 6: Training efficiency. Approximate training cost in GPU-days on the indicated hardware. SparseGen is comparable to Viewset Diffusion and Splatter Image, yet far less expensive than large models (e.g., LRM, LVSM).
Appendix figures & tables4 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Parameter
Value
Description
M
512
Number of anchor queries
K
10
Gaussians per query (expansion factor)
d
512
Transformer hidden dimension
H,W
128
Input image resolution (pixels)
dth
64
Depth samples per ray
smax
0.1
Maximum Gaussian scale
Appendix
Table 7: Default hyperparameters used in our experiments.
Figure 9: Qualitative results on CO3D subsets. We show examples under one-view conditioning settings. Compared to other methods, SparseGen yields better visual quality, with significantly faster speed and smaller representation size.
Figure 10: Additional qualitative results on the ShapeNet-SRN dataset. Each group features one input image (left) and two novel view renderings (right) from all tested methods. Generally, deterministic feed-forward methods (i.e., Splatter Image [ 33 ] ) tend to produce unsatisfactory details on regions not well observed in the input view, while generative methods with iterative diffusion (i.e., Viewset Diffusion [ 32 ] ) can synthesize plausible details but sometimes introduce artifacts. Our SparseGen effectively generates high-quality novel views with ultra-fast speed.
Method
PSNR ↑
LPIPS ↓
SSIM ↑
OpenLRM
14.526
0.199
0.741
Splatter Image
21.065
0.111
0.878
SparseGen
21.427
0.160
0.850
Appendix
Table 8: Quantitative evaluation on the GSO dataset. Best results in bold , second best underlined . Our method achieves the highest PSNR while maintaining competitive perceptual quality.
Generating complete 3D scenes from sparse, unconstrained views is a fundamental challenge in 3D vision which requires reasoning beyond observed content while remaining computationally tractable. Existing feed-forward reconstruction methods are inherently limited to content visible in the input images, while 3D generative modeling is hindered by the high computational cost of dense volumetric representations and the scarcity of large-scale 3D supervision. We introduce SPAR3S, a sparse voxel-aligned 3D latent generative model for conditional scene completion without requiring ground-truth 3D data for supervision. Our key insight is to formulate 3D scene generation in a structured, compact, voxel-aligned 3D latent space where only occupied voxels are represented. We learn this sparse latent space directly from multi-view images using photometric supervision via differentiable 3D Gaussian Splatting. Given a partial set of observed voxels encoded from sparse input views, scene completion reduces to predicting the missing latent tokens and their spatial support within the voxel grid. To this end, we train a masked autoregressive transformer that jointly models voxel occupancy and latent token values, enabling efficient and spatially consistent generation of unseen regions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on synthetic indoor scenes, achieving higher novel-view quality than prior work. We further validate its generalization on RealEstate10k, highlighting its applicability to real-world data.
Thomas Lucas, Maxime Pietrantoni, Philippe Weinzaepfel +4
1NAVER LABS Europe, France · 2NAVER LABS, South Korea · 3Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Scaling image-to-3D generation to ultra-high resolutions requires controlling rapidly growing computational costs without sacrificing fine geometric detail. We present Filigree3D, a sparse latent flow-matching framework that generates 3D geometry from a single image at voxel resolutions up to 20483, with straightforward extensibility to 40963. To make training tractable, we introduce Structure-Aware Sparse Scaling, which combines spatial bounding with alternating local-global attention to constrain token growth while preserving both fine-scale details and long-range structural context. To enhance detail reconstruction, we curate training samples based on their high-resolution geometric gains and inject multi-scale image features into a sparse 3D DiT, effectively coupling structural semantics with fine-grained visual cues. Furthermore, a visibility-aware voxel regularization strategy improves robustness against sparse perturbations and facilitates the completion of unobserved geometry. Under our default configuration, Filigree3D maintains peak GPU memory consumption within practical limits for contemporary hardware, enabling the generation of highly intricate 3D geometry in approximately one minute. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method yields substantial improvements in overall geometric fidelity and fine-detail preservation compared to existing baselines, validating practical, detail-preserving 3D generation at unprecedented resolutions.
Single-image-to-3D generative models can now produce high-quality geometry, yet conditioning on a single view inevitably introduces ambiguity about unseen regions. Multi-view conditioning can reduce this ambiguity, but existing methods either require fixed canonical viewpoints or rely on external reconstruction modules that impose heavy training costs and limit generation quality. We observe that pretrained single-view models already possess strong 2D-to-3D grounding that can be reused for multi-view conditioning. However, a closer analysis reveals that their conditioning mechanism entangles orientation control with geometry transfer, two functions that conflict when images from different viewpoints are naively combined. Based on this analysis, we propose ROAR-3D, a lightweight method that upgrades a pretrained single-view model to accept an arbitrary number of unposed images. A token-wise view router assigns each 3D latent token to its most relevant view, implicitly establishing 2D-to-3D correspondences without explicit pose input. A dual-stream attention design preserves the pretrained primary-view behavior while routing auxiliary views through a separate path dedicated to geometric enrichment. An orientation perturbation strategy ensures the auxiliary path learns orientation-independent geometry transfer. These components introduce minimal trainable parameters and add negligible inference overhead relative to the single-view baseline. ROAR-3D achieves state-of-the-art multi-view 3D generation quality and supports test-time view scaling from 1 to 12+ views with consistent improvements.
Hanxiao Sun, Mingxin Yang, Shuhui Yang +5
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · Tencent Hunyuan