Fast and Lightweight Novel View Synthesis with Differentiable Multiplane Image
Authors: Kaidi Zhang, Guanxu Zhu
Organizations: Universiti Malaya · Wuhan University
Abstract
Recently, novel view synthesis has witnessed remarkable progress, with mainstream methods such as Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) delivering impressive results. However, these approaches often struggle to balance rendering speed and model size, and their optimization-based training can be highly time-consuming. Furthermore, they typically rely on dense observations, often failing to produce satisfactory results under sparse-view conditions. Although feed-forward reconstruction significantly reduces the optimization time of 3DGS, its pixel-aligned formulation generates millions of Gaussians from a single image, severely limiting its practical deployment on mobile devices. To address these limitations, we revisit the Multiplane Image(MPI) representation, which represents scenes using a compact set of planar layers for efficient novel view synthesis. Leveraging recent advances in visual foundation models, we utilize predicted point maps for reliable geometric initialization, followed by differentiable optimization. To address the issues of holes and artifacts in sparsely initialized MPI, we introduce one-step diffusion, which participates in both the differentiable optimization of MPI and the postprocessing of rendering results. Compared with a representative GS-based method, our approach is 30.7% faster and uses only 14.8% of its model size, while achieving competitive synthesis quality on front-view scenarios
We study the challenging problem of novel view video synthesis from single images or monocular videos. Existing methods, which operate under the assumption that pre-trained video models lack native novel view synthesis capability and enforce view alignment via camera conditioning, task-specific fine-tuning, or stepwise hard denoising guidance, often suffer from artifacts and compromised global scene consistency. In this paper, we introduce NeoMap, a novel training-free framework designed to locate high-fidelity, view-consistent novel view solutions from general pre-trained video models. The key to our approach is the core insight that promising novel view solutions are inherently encoded within the natural video data manifold learned by pre-trained models, and the core challenge is simply to locate this optimal solution. We solve this via our core mechanism: convergent manifold alternating projection iterations that optimize the initial noise. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NeoMap significantly outperforms all existing methods across 3 standard novel view synthesis benchmarks, including the challenging Tanks-and-Temples, LLFF and DAVIS datasets, achieving state-of-the-art generation fidelity and top-tier view consistency.
Generalizable novel view synthesis aims to render unseen views from uncalibrated input images without requiring per-scene optimization. Recent feed-forward approaches based on 3D Gaussian Splatting have achieved promising efficiency and rendering quality. However, most of them assign a fixed number of Gaussians to each pixel or voxel, ignoring the spatially varying complexity of real-world scenes. Such uniform allocation often wastes Gaussian primitives in smooth regions while providing insufficient capacity for fine structures, complex geometry, and high-frequency details. This motivates us to predict region-dependent primitive cardinalities rather than impose a fixed primitive budget everywhere, enabling a more expressive 3D scene representation. Therefore, we propose SplatWeaver, a generalizable novel view synthesis framework that is able to dynamically allocate Gaussian primitives over different regions in a feed-forward manner. Specifically, SplatWeaver introduces cardinality Gaussian experts and a pixel-level routing scheme, wherein each expert specializes in producing a specific number of primitives from 0 to M, and the routing scheme coordinates these experts to adaptively determine how many Gaussian primitives should be allocated to each spatial location. Moreover, SplatWeaver incorporates a high-frequency prior with attendant guidance module and routing regularization to stabilize expert selection and promote complexity-aware allocation. By leveraging high-frequency cues, the routing process is encouraged to assign more Gaussian primitives to fine structures and textured regions, while suppressing redundancy in smooth areas. Extensive experiments across diverse scenarios show that SplatWeaver consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, delivering more faithful novel-view renderings with fewer Gaussian primitives. Project Page: https://yecongwan.github.io/SplatWeaver/
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.