SG-Splat: Stable Geometry Learning under Pose Uncertainty for Pose-Free 3D Gaussian Splatting

We introduce SPFSplatV2, an efficient feed-forward framework for 3D Gaussian splatting from sparse multi-view images, requiring no ground-truth poses during training or inference. The framework employs a shared feature extraction backbone to jointly predict 3D Gaussian primitives and camera poses in a canonical space from unposed inputs. To enable efficient and accurate pose estimation, we introduce a masked attention mechanism for target-view pose prediction and a reprojection loss that enforces pixel-aligned Gaussian primitives, providing stronger geometric constraints. We further demonstrate the compatibility of our training framework with different reconstruction architectures, resulting in two model variants. Remarkably, despite the absence of pose supervision, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both in-domain and out-of-domain novel view synthesis, even under extreme viewpoint changes and limited image overlap. It also surpasses many methods that rely on geometric supervision in relative pose estimation. By eliminating dependence on ground-truth poses, our method offers the scalability to leverage larger and more diverse datasets. Code and pretrained models will be available on our project page: https://ranrhuang.github.io/spfsplatv2/.

Pose-free feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) reconstructs a scene from sparse, unposed images in a single network pass, removing the need for camera calibration and per-scene optimization. However, camera estimation errors propagate into the predicted Gaussians and compound the geometric and photometric inaccuracies of single-pass prediction. To correct these errors, we introduce DeltaSplat, a lightweight Gaussian refinement module for pose-free feed-forward 3DGS. It iteratively renders the current Gaussians at the input context views and predicts per-Gaussian updates from the resulting residuals. A 2D residual alone, however, underdetermines the 3D correction. DeltaSplat therefore conditions each update on per-pixel Plücker rays and rendered depth as a soft geometric prior. A dual-branch convolutional mixer efficiently encodes these inputs, and per-attribute heads decode the fused features into position, opacity, and color updates. The module adds only ~2.2% parameters to the backbone and remains fully feed-forward at inference. On DL3DV, DeltaSplat reaches 26.64 dB PSNR in the pose-free setting, improving its state-of-the-art backbone by 1.75 dB and surpassing even baselines supplied with ground-truth cameras; consistent gains hold across 6-24 views and all camera regimes.

3D Gaussians have become a powerful scene representation for real-time splatting and high-quality novel-view synthesis. This has motivated generalizable splatting -- methods that adapt feed-forward geometry prediction networks to produce per-pixel Gaussians from a set of images. However, most generalizable splatting pipelines are supervised primarily through a view-synthesis loss to predict Gaussian orientation, anisotropic scale, opacity, and appearance in addition to their locations. We show that this learning objective is under-constrained. Models trained with view synthesis alone produce splats whose orientations and scales have no geometric connotation. The result is that, while producing decent view-synthesis performance, nearly all generalizable splatting methods produce geometrically inaccurate and misaligned Gaussians. We introduce G3Splat, a geometry-consistent generalizable splatting framework that addresses these degeneracies through differentiable geometric priors on the predicted 3D Gaussians, making the learning problem well-posed. These priors encourage the per-pixel splats to remain on their viewing rays and to orient themselves in accordance with local surfaces. Our priors are architecture-agnostic and can be incorporated into any previously studied geometric backbone for generalizable splatting, as well as different scene representations. We test G3Splat with both DUSt3R-style and VGGT-style backbones to predict pixel-aligned full-rank 3DGS as well as surfel-like 2DGS. Trained on RE10K, G3Splat produces Gaussian splats with significantly higher geometric fidelity than baselines, providing state-of-the-art novel-view depth, mesh reconstruction, and relative pose estimation performance while preserving novel-view synthesis quality, as evaluated on datasets such as ACID and ScanNet. Code and pretrained models are released on our project page.