Reflection-aware Generative Novel View Synthesis

We present BetterScene, an approach to enhance novel view synthesis (NVS) quality for diverse real-world scenes using extremely sparse, unconstrained photos. BetterScene leverages the production-ready Stable Video Diffusion (SVD) model pretrained on billions of frames as a strong backbone, aiming to mitigate artifacts and recover view-consistent details at inference time. Conventional methods have developed similar diffusion-based solutions to address these challenges of novel view synthesis. Despite significant improvements, these methods typically rely on off-the-shelf pretrained diffusion priors and fine-tune only the UNet module while keeping other components frozen, which still leads to inconsistent details and artifacts even when incorporating geometry-aware regularizations like depth or semantic conditions. To address this, we investigate the latent space of the diffusion model and introduce two components: (1) temporal equivariance regularization and (2) vision foundation model-aligned representation, both applied to the variational autoencoder (VAE) module within the SVD pipeline. BetterScene integrates a feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) model to render features as inputs for the SVD enhancer and generate continuous, artifact-free, consistent novel views. We evaluate on the challenging DL3DV-10K dataset and demonstrate superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Recent advances in video diffusion models (VDMs) have enabled high-fidelity video synthesis. However, generating mirror reflections remains challenging because the content within a mirror must remain consistent with the surrounding scene. Existing VDMs are not specifically designed to model scene-to-mirror relationships, which can lead to reflections with incorrect content or inconsistent spatial arrangements. We observe that mirror reflection generation involves two complementary challenges: determining what scene content should be reflected and how the reflected content should be spatially arranged within the mirror region. Motivated by this observation, we propose MirrorWorld, a reflection-aware video inpainting framework that models scene-to-mirror relationships during generation. Specifically, we introduce Semantic Relation Distillation (SRD), which transfers relational information from a frozen visual foundation model to encourage semantic associations between visible scene content and mirror regions. We further propose Geometric Transformation Alignment (GTA), which learns a transformation that guides the spatial arrangement of reflected content. The two components play complementary roles, with SRD modeling what should be reflected and GTA modeling how it should be arranged. To facilitate research on this problem, we construct a benchmark for video mirror reflection generation by repurposing four existing video mirror datasets into a unified reflection reconstruction task. Experimental results show that MirrorWorld achieves improved reflection reconstruction quality over representative image-based reflection generation methods and strong video inpainting baselines.

Generative novel view synthesis from sparse input images is rarely all reconstruction or all generation: pixels visible in some source view have a unique correct value modulated only by view-dependent shading, while pixels in disocclusions or beyond the captured volume admit a distribution of plausible completions. Existing generative novel-view-synthesis methods conflate these regimes under a single uniform loss, blurring the line between geometric fidelity and creative hallucinations even when scene geometry is injected through warped point clouds or projected depth. We introduce GenRec, a multi-view flow matching model that builds the reconstruction--generation split directly into its architecture, supervision, and gradient flow. Guided by an observation mask derived from the source cameras and a monocular depth estimator, a flow matching backbone jointly denoises RGB and scene-coordinate maps across all target views, while a pixel-space refinement stage restores high-frequency detail on observed pixels; the same mask gates supervision so regression signals do not contaminate the generative prior. Across RealEstate10K, DL3DV-10K, and Mip-NeRF~360, in both single-view extrapolation and two-view interpolation, GenRec attains the best reconstruction fidelity in observed regions while also surpassing purely generative baselines on perceptual quality in unobserved ones, showing the effectiveness of our approach.