GrapeSplat: Geometry-Grounded Reconstruction via Amalgamated Pose-Free Encoding for Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting

The efficient spatial allocation of primitives serves as the foundation of 3D Gaussian Splatting, as it directly dictates the synergy between representation compactness, reconstruction speed, and rendering fidelity. Previous solutions, whether based on iterative optimization or feed-forward inference, suffer from significant trade-offs between these goals, mainly due to the reliance on local, heuristic-driven allocation strategies that lack global scene awareness. Specifically, current feed-forward methods are largely pixel-aligned or voxel-aligned. By unprojecting pixels into dense, view-aligned primitives, they bake redundancy into the 3D asset. As more input views are added, the representation size increases and global consistency becomes fragile. To this end, we introduce GlobalSplat, a framework built on the principle of align first, decode later. Our approach learns a compact, global, latent scene representation that encodes multi-view input and resolves cross-view correspondences before decoding any explicit 3D geometry. Crucially, this formulation enables compact, globally consistent reconstructions without relying on pretrained pixel-prediction backbones or reusing latent features from dense baselines. Utilizing a coarse-to-fine training curriculum that gradually increases decoded capacity, GlobalSplat natively prevents representation bloat. On RealEstate10K and ACID, our model achieves competitive novel-view synthesis performance while utilizing as few as 16K Gaussians, significantly less than required by dense pipelines, obtaining a light 4MB footprint. Further, GlobalSplat enables significantly faster inference than the baselines, operating under 78 milliseconds in a single forward pass. Project page is available at https://r-itk.github.io/globalsplat/

Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting methods reconstruct a scene from posed or pose-free images in a single forward pass, yet current approaches predict one Gaussian per input pixel, tying the representation budget to camera resolution rather than scene complexity. A flat wall and a richly textured object thus produce equally many Gaussians despite very different geometric needs. We propose ZipSplat, a token-based feed-forward model that decouples Gaussian placement from the pixel grid. A multi-view backbone extracts dense visual tokens, and k-means clustering compresses them into a compact set of scene tokens. Cross- and self-attention refine these tokens, and a lightweight MLP decodes each into a group of Gaussians with unconstrained 3D positions. Because clustering is applied at inference, a single trained model spans the quality-efficiency curve without retraining. ZipSplat operates without ground-truth poses or intrinsics, yet sets a new state of the art on DL3DV and RealEstate10K with ${\sim}6{\times}$ fewer Gaussians than pixel-aligned methods, surpassing the best pose-free baseline by 2.1dB and 1.2dB PSNR, respectively. It further generalizes zero-shot to Mip-NeRF360 and ScanNet++, outperforming all comparable baselines. Our project page is at https://veichta.com/zipsplat.

We present StructSplat, a feed-forward and generalizable 3D Gaussian reconstruction framework that operates directly on uncalibrated images without requiring camera parameters. Existing methods either rely on per-scene optimization or assume known camera poses, and often entangle geometry and appearance within a unified backbone, limiting reconstruction fidelity and generalization. Our key idea is to adopt a structured representation that organizes geometry, semantic, and texture cues with explicit roles in the reconstruction process. Specifically, we introduce a pixel-aligned feature injection mechanism to enable accurate texture modeling from 2D observations, incorporate semantic-aware priors to improve global consistency, and design a camera alignment strategy to prevent information leakage and improve generalization. Experiments show that our method significantly outperforms prior approaches on challenging benchmarks. On DL3DV, our method achieves 28.045 PSNR, surpassing AnySplat (22.377) by +5.67 dB. In cross-dataset evaluation, our method achieves +1.94 dB over AnySplat on ACID and +1.72 dB on RealEstate10K. Project page: https://structsplat.github.io Code: https://github.com/J-C-Zhao/StructSplat