Can These Views Be One Scene? Evaluating Multiview 3D Consistency when 3D Foundation Models Hallucinate
Authors: Soumava Paul, Prakhar Kaushik, Alan Yuille
Organizations: CCVL, Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
Multiview 3D evaluation assumes that the images being scored are observations of one static 3D scene. This assumption can fail in NVS and sparse-view reconstruction: inputs or generated outputs may contain artifacts, outlier frames, repeated views, or noise, yet still receive high 3D consistency scores. Existing reference-based metrics require ground truth, while ground-truth-free metrics such as MEt3R depend on learned reconstruction backbones whose failure modes are poorly characterized. We study this reliability problem by comparing neural reconstruction priors with classical geometric verification. We introduce \benchmark, a controlled robustness benchmark for multiview 3D consistency, and a parametric family that decomposes neural metrics into backbone, residual, and aggregation components. This family recovers MEt3R and yields variants up to 3× more robust. Our analysis shows that VGGT, MASt3R, DUSt3R, and Fast3R can hallucinate dense geometry and cross-view support for unrelated scenes, repeated images, and random noise. We introduce COLMAP-based metrics that use matches, registration, dense support, and reconstruction failure as failure-aware consistency signals. On real NVS outputs and a structured human study, these metrics achieve up to 4× higher correlation with human judgments than MEt3R.
Multi-view 3D reconstruction has achieved remarkable progress with the advent of feed-forward 3D reconstruction models. However, these models are typically trained and evaluated under ideal, degradation-free imaging conditions, whereas real-world observations often contain degradations that differ significantly from such settings. Improving robustness for multi-view 3D reconstruction under degraded conditions therefore remains an important challenge. We present Geometry-Aware Representation Denoising (GARD), a novel framework that performs diffusion-based multi-view restoration directly in the feature space of a feed-forward 3D reconstruction model. This design exploits the geometry-aware feature representations of the 3D reconstructor to effectively recover accurate scene geometry. Furthermore, by employing an additional RGB image decoder, the refined representations can also be used to restore high-quality RGB images, thereby enabling the simultaneous recovery of 3D scene geometry and high-quality imagery. Comprehensive experiments on the Depth Anything 3 (DA3) benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed GARD framework.
Recent benchmarks for VLMs largely assess single- or limited-view perception, leaving untested the core cognitive ability to integrate observations across viewpoints into a coherent, world-centric (allocentric) 3D mental model. We introduce MultiView-Bench, a diagnostic benchmark expressly designed to evaluate multi-view integration for holistic 3D scene comprehension. Unlike existing datasets that focus on pixel-level mapping or camera-relative navigation, MultiView-Bench requires models to decouple object positioning from transient perspectives and ground them in a fixed global coordinate system. This capability serves as a prerequisite for VLMs before being deployed for downstream tasks such as mechanical part assembly. Our systematic evaluation of frontier VLMs reveals consistent failure modes: strong performance on 2D planar relations from a single image, but marked difficulty with 3D spatial relations and with aggregating information across views. We further identify biases in VLMs, such as struggles with unconventional axis directions and sensitivity to object colorways and texture variations. Acknowledging these limitations, we propose ViewNavigator, a multi-agent framework that actively selects informative viewpoints, perceives, and fuses multi-view evidence, improving diverse base models on MultiView-Bench even under a strict budget-matched comparison (and by 3-5x for the full agent).
Reconstructing high-fidelity 3D scenes from sparse-views remains a central problem in generalizable neural rendering. Existing generalizable 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) methods often exhibit geometric artifacts in sparse-view settings, since supervision based solely on 2D photometric losses cannot resolve depth and correspondence ambiguities. To address this issue, we propose MAC-Splat, a training framework built around direct 3D consistency supervision. MAC-Splat builds on the MASt3R geometric backbone and a frozen DINOv3 encoder to obtain semantically informed 2D correspondences, which serve as geometric anchors for 3D supervision. Using these anchors, we define the Multi-Attribute Consistency (MAC) loss. This objective jointly regularizes the 3D attributes of matched Gaussians, including their position, shape, and appearance, by enforcing agreement in a common world coordinate frame. The formulation is robust to outliers and respects the geometry of covariance matrices, which leads to stable training under sparse-view conditions. Experiments on ScanNet++ show that MAC-Splat outperforms strong baselines, with particularly large gains under different overlap regimes. In particular, it improves average PSNR over Splatt3R by more than 4.5 dB, reduces LPIPS, and maintains performance as the camera pose gap increases. These results indicate that a direct, multi-attribute 3D consistency objective, when combined with high-quality correspondences, is effective for addressing the ill-posed sparse-view reconstruction problem.