AdaptSplat: Adapting Vision Foundation Models for Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting
Authors: Mingwei Xing, Xinliang Wang, Yifeng Shi
Organizations: Ke Holdings Inc.
Abstract
This work explores a simple yet powerful lightweight adapter design for feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Existing methods typically apply complex, architecture-specific designs on top of the generic pipeline of image feature extraction → multi-view interaction → feature decoding. However, constrained by the scale bottleneck of 3D training data and the low-pass filtering effect of deep networks, these methods still fall short in cross-domain generalization and high-frequency geometric fidelity. To address these problems, we propose AdaptSplat, which demonstrates that without complex component engineering, introducing a single adapter of only 1.5M parameters into the generic architecture is sufficient to achieve superior performance. Specifically, we design a lightweight Frequency-Preserving Adapter (FPA) that extracts direction-aware high-frequency structural priors from the shallow features of a powerful vision foundation model backbone, and seamlessly integrates them into the generic pipeline via high-frequency positional encodings and adaptive residual modulation. This effectively compensates for the high-frequency attenuation caused by over-smoothing in deep features, improving the fitting accuracy of Gaussian primitives on complex surfaces and sharp boundaries. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AdaptSplat achieves state-of-the-art feed-forward reconstruction performance on multiple standard benchmarks, with stable generalization across domains. Code available at: https://github.com/xmw666/AdaptSplat.
We present ViewSplat, a view-adaptive 3D Gaussian splatting network for novel view synthesis from unposed images. While recent feed-forward 3D Gaussian splatting has significantly accelerated 3D scene reconstruction by bypassing per-scene optimization, a fundamental fidelity gap remains. We attribute this gap to the limited capacity of single-step feed-forward networks to regress static Gaussian primitives that satisfy all viewpoints. To address this limitation, we shift the paradigm from static primitive regression to view-adaptive splatting. Instead of a rigid Gaussian representation, our pipeline learns a view-adaptive latent representation. Specifically, ViewSplat initially predicts base Gaussian primitives alongside the weights of scene-conditioned View MLPs. During rendering, these MLPs take target-view coordinates as input and predict view-dependent residual updates for each Gaussian attribute (i.e., 3D position, scale, rotation, opacity, and color). This mechanism, which we term view-adaptive splatting, allows each primitive to rectify initial estimation errors, effectively capturing high-fidelity appearances. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ViewSplat achieves state-of-the-art fidelity while maintaining fast inference and real-time rendering; our large backbone variant runs at 15 FPS during inference and 90 FPS during rendering. Our project page is available at https://cvlab-uos.github.io/ViewSplat.
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) achieves high-quality novel-view synthesis by optimizing freely placed primitives in 3D and adaptively densifying them in under-reconstructed regions. However, this scene-adaptive capacity allocation is largely lost in existing feed-forward 3DGS methods, which commonly regress Gaussians at input pixels and lift them along camera rays. Such pixel-aligned formulations make the number and placement of primitives depend on image resolution and input viewpoints rather than scene complexity, resulting in dense and often redundant Gaussian sets. We present ATSplat, a feed-forward 3DGS framework that restores the adaptive allocation capability of 3DGS optimization through Adaptive 3D Tokens. ATSplat first lifts coarse patch-level depth and camera cues into sparse 3D anchor tokens, forming a compact scaffold of the scene. Each token is then regressed into local Gaussians with learnable 3D offsets, decoupling primitive placement from input image grids. An Adaptive Token Expansion module predicts a token-level uncertainty score, supervised by rendering error maps, and selectively expands high-uncertainty tokens through learnable expansion layers. This sparse-to-adaptive formulation enables ATSplat to concentrate primitives in challenging regions while maintaining a compact representation. Experiments on two representative datasets, RealEstate10K and DL3DV, show that ATSplat achieves state-of-the-art rendering quality while reducing the number of Gaussians by more than 5.7× compared with dense feed-forward 3DGS methods. From 12 input images at 512×960 resolution, ATSplat completes reconstruction in less than a second using a single commercial GPU, and renders high-quality novel views at 1136 FPS (512×960) with only 311K Gaussians.
Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting models offer fast single-pass reconstruction,but scaling them to match per-scene optimization quality is fundamentally hindered by the scarcity of large-scale 3D annotations. A practical compromise is predict-then-refine,where post-prediction optimization compensates for the limited capacity of the feed-forward network. However,standard feed-forward 3DGS is trained solely for zero-step rendering error,ignoring whether its output constitutes a good initialization for the downstream optimizer. We present ForeSplat,an optimization-aware training framework that equips feed-forward 3DGS models to produce initializations explicitly designed for rapid,effective refinement. By offloading part of the scene-modeling burden to the optimizer,ForeSplat substantially reduces the capacity pressure on the feed-forward model,making high-quality reconstruction feasible even with compact networks. At its core is MetaGrad,a lightweight multi-anchor meta-gradient training rule that bypasses costly higher-order differentiation through the 3DGS optimizer. MetaGrad unrolls a short inner-loop refinement trajectory,samples anchor states,and back-propagates aggregated first-order gradients to the prediction head as a surrogate optimization-aware signal. This fine-tuning adds no inference cost and enables high-quality reconstruction within seconds after a few refinement steps. We instantiate ForeSplat on diverse backbones,including AnySplat,Pi3X,and a distilled variant tailored for edge deployment. Across all tested architectures,a ForeSplat-trained initialization converges in fewer refinement steps and reaches a higher peak reconstruction quality than its vanilla counterpart,even fully converged. The framework consistently bridges the gap between amortized prediction and per-scene optimization,establishing a practical path toward lightweight,high-fidelity 3D reconstruction.