CVPR 2026 Papers

Recent advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have focused on accelerating optimization while preserving reconstruction quality. However, many proposed methods entangle implementation-level improvements with fundamental algorithmic modifications or trade performance for fidelity, leading to a fragmented research landscape that complicates fair comparison. In this work, we consolidate and evaluate the most effective and broadly applicable strategies from prior 3DGS research and augment them with several novel optimizations. We further investigate underexplored aspects of the framework, including numerical stability, Gaussian truncation, and gradient approximation. The resulting system, Faster-GS, provides a rigorously optimized algorithm that we evaluate across a comprehensive suite of benchmarks. Our experiments demonstrate that Faster-GS achieves up to 5x faster training while maintaining visual quality, establishing a new cost-effective and resource efficient baseline for 3DGS optimization. Furthermore, we demonstrate that optimizations can be applied to 4D Gaussian reconstruction, leading to efficient non-rigid scene optimization. Source code available at: https://github.com/nerficg-project/faster-gaussian-splatting

Although 4D reconstruction based on Gaussian Splatting has achieved many impressive results, reconstructing real-world images captured by a casual monocular camera remains a significant challenge. In dynamic scenes, as the camera and objects move during the exposure time, these input images inevitably contain a considerable amount of motion blur, which severely compromises the quality of reconstruction and new viewpoint synthesis. The existing deblurring 3D Gaussian models still cannot handle motion blur issues in real dynamic scenes. To address these challenges, we propose MSCD-GS--a novel method for motion-separated collaborative deblurring 4D reconstruction via Gaussian Splatting, capable of effectively handling motion-blurred inputs. Specifically, due to the distinct motion characteristics of static and dynamic Gaussians, we perform separate motion models for dynamic scene reconstruction. To predict Gaussian changes over exposure time, we designed motion-aware networks for static and dynamic Gaussians, thereby synthesizing virtual blurred images. Finally, we utilize the results from the deblurring network and the synthesized images to supervise 4D reconstruction collaboratively. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MSCD-GS can effectively reconstruct high-quality dynamic scenes from blurred image inputs, with performance surpassing existing methods.

While 3DGS has emerged as a high-fidelity scene representation, encoding rich, general-purpose features directly from its primitives remains under-explored. We address this gap by introducing Chorus, a multi-teacher pretraining framework that learns a holistic feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) scene encoder by distilling complementary signals from 2D foundation models. Chorus employs a shared 3D encoder and teacher-specific projectors to learn from language-aligned, generalist, and object-aware teachers, encouraging a shared embedding space that captures signals from high-level semantics to fine-grained structure. We evaluate Chorus on a wide range of tasks: open-vocabulary semantic and instance segmentation, linear and decoder probing, data-efficient supervision, as well as LLM-based Q&A. Besides 3DGS, we also test Chorus on several benchmarks that only support point clouds by pretraining a variant using only Gaussians' centers, colors, estimated normals. Interestingly, this encoder shows strong transfer and outperforms the point clouds baseline while using 39.9xfewer training scenes. Finally, we propose a render-and-distill adaptation that facilitates out-of-domain finetuning. Our code and model is released at this codebase.

Recent significant advances in 3D scene representation have been driven by 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), which has enabled real-time rendering with photorealistic quality. 3DGS often requires a large number of primitives to achieve high fidelity, leading to redundant representations and high resource consumption, thereby limiting its scalability for complex or large-scale scenes. Consequently, effective pruning strategies and more expressive primitives that can reduce redundancy while preserving visual quality are crucial for practical deployment. We propose an efficient, integrated reconstruction-aware pruning strategy that adaptively determines pruning timing and refining intervals based on reconstruction quality, thus reducing model size while enhancing rendering quality. Moreover, we introduce a 3D Difference-of-Gaussians primitive that jointly models both positive and negative densities in a single primitive, improving the expressiveness of Gaussians under compact configurations. Our method significantly improves model compactness, achieving up to 90% reduction in Gaussian-count while delivering visual quality that is similar to, or in some cases better than, that produced by state-of-the-art methods.

Temporal retiming, the ability to reconstruct and render dynamic scenes at arbitrary timestamps, is crucial for applications such as slow-motion playback, temporal editing, and post-production. However, most existing 4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS) methods overfit at discrete frame indices but struggle to represent continuous-time frames, leading to ghosting artifacts when interpolating between timestamps. We identify this limitation as a form of temporal aliasing and propose RetimeGS, a simple yet effective 4DGS representation that explicitly defines the temporal behavior of the 3D Gaussian and mitigates temporal aliasing. To achieve smooth and consistent interpolation, we incorporate optical flow-guided initialization and supervision, triple-rendering supervision, and other targeted strategies. Together, these components enable ghost-free, temporally coherent rendering even under large motions. Experiments on datasets featuring fast motion, non-rigid deformation, and severe occlusions demonstrate that RetimeGS achieves superior quality and coherence over state-of-the-art methods.

Ray-tracing-based 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) enjoys the generality of supporting non-pinhole camera models and relightable formulations. However, they are usually lacking in performance, partially due to the need for depth-based sorting of all intersecting Gaussians along the traced rays.In this paper, we introduce a sorting-free differentiable stochastic formulation for ray-traced 3DGS, enabling efficient reconstruction and rendering of both standard and relightable 3DGS scenes.For standard 3DGS, our method offers performance comparable to rasterization-based 3DGS and outperforms sorting-based ray tracing.For relightable 3DGS, our technique provides higher-quality reconstructions and renderings thanks to the accurate shadow and shading computation provided by fully ray-traced shadow and light rays.

Generalizable 3D Gaussian Splatting aims to directly predict Gaussian parameters using a feed-forward network for scene reconstruction. Among these parameters, Gaussian means are particularly difficult to predict, so depth is usually estimated first and then unprojected to obtain the Gaussian sphere centers. Existing methods typically rely solely on a single warp to estimate depth probability, which hinders their ability to fully leverage cross-view geometric cues, resulting in unreliable and coarse depth maps. To address this limitation, we propose IDESplat, which iteratively applies warp operations to boost depth probability estimation for accurate Gaussian mean prediction. First, to eliminate the inherent unreliability of a single warp, we introduce a Depth Probability Boosting Unit (DPBU) that integrates epipolar attention maps produced by cascading warp operations in a multiplicative manner. Next, we construct an iterative depth estimation process by stacking multiple DPBUs, progressively identifying potential depth candidates with high likelihood. As IDESplat iteratively boosts depth probability estimates and updates the depth candidates, the depth map is gradually refined, resulting in accurate Gaussian means. We conduct experiments on RealEstate10K, ACID and DL3DV. IDESplat achieves outstanding reconstruction quality and state-of-the-art performance with real-time efficiency. On RE10K, it outperforms DepthSplat by 0.33 dB in PSNR, using only 10.7% of the parameters and 70% of the memory. Additionally, our IDESplat improves PSNR by 2.95 dB over DepthSplat on the DTU dataset in cross-dataset experiments, demonstrating its strong generalization ability.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) represents scenes through primitives with coupled intrinsic properties: geometric attributes (position, covariance, opacity) and appearance attributes (view-dependent color). Faithful reconstruction requires intrinsic geometry-appearance consistency, where geometry accurately captures 3D structure while appearance reflects photometry. However, sparse observations lead to appearance overfitting and underconstrained geometry, causing severe novel-view artifacts. We present ICO-GS (Intrinsic Geometry-Appearance Consistency Optimization for 3DGS), a principled framework that enforces this consistency through tightly coupled geometric regularization and appearance learning. Our approach first regularizes geometry via feature-based multi-view photometric constraints by employing pixel-wise top-k selection to handle occlusions and edge-aware smoothness to preserve sharp structures. Then appearance is coupled with geometry through cycle-consistency depth filtering, which identifies reliable regions to synthesize virtual views that propagate geometric correctness into appearance optimization. Experiments on LLFF, DTU, and Blender show ICO-GS consistently outperforms existing sparse-view baselines, particularly in challenging weakly-textured regions.

The increasing demand for augmented reality and robotics is driving the need for articulated object reconstruction with high scalability. However, existing settings for reconstructing from discrete articulation states or casual monocular videos require non-trivial axis alignment or suffer from insufficient coverage, limiting their applicability. In this paper, we introduce FreeArtGS, a novel method for reconstructing articulated objects under free-moving scenario, a new setting with a simple setup and high scalability. FreeArtGS combines free-moving part segmentation with joint estimation and end-to-end optimization, taking only a monocular RGB-D video as input. By optimizing with the priors from off-the-shelf point-tracking and feature models, the free-moving part segmentation module identifies rigid parts from relative motion under unconstrained capture. The joint estimation module calibrates the unified object-to-camera poses and recovers joint type and axis robustly from part segmentation. Finally, 3DGS-based end-to-end optimization is implemented to jointly reconstruct visual textures, geometry, and joint angles of the articulated object. We conduct experiments on two benchmarks and real-world free-moving articulated objects. Experimental results demonstrate that FreeArtGS consistently excels in reconstructing free-moving articulated objects and remains highly competitive in previous reconstruction settings, proving itself a practical and effective solution for realistic asset generation. The project page is available at: https://freeartgs.github.io/.

Thermal infrared (TIR) 3D reconstruction provides geometry that is intrinsically coupled to the temperature field, even in low-light, nighttime, and smoke-obscured environments. TIR imaging measures self-emitted thermal radiation driven by object temperature and is largely independent of external illumination; therefore, simply carrying over visible-spectrum assumptions to TIR-based 3D reconstruction and novel view synthesis (NVS) often results in floating artifacts and blurred edges. In addition, radiometric inconsistency and low contrast in TIR weaken structure-from-motion (SfM) initialization, which in turn hinders subsequent 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) optimization. We present PhysIR-Splat, a 3DGS framework that follows infrared radiative transfer: we explicitly model temperature, emissivity, and environmental irradiance on Gaussian primitives and, during rendering, jointly account for thermal emission, the reflected component, and atmospheric transmittance to produce physically consistent thermal synthesis. We also introduce VGGT-IR, a Transformer-based feed-forward initializer that takes TIR input with optional RGB and directly regresses camera poses and initial geometry, providing a modality-aligned and stable starting point for PhysIR-Splat. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly surpasses existing approaches in thermal reconstruction quality and cross-view consistency, effectively suppressing floating artifacts and enhancing boundary sharpness. The source code will be publicly available at : https://github.com/JingyuanGao0919/physir-splat.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently emerged as a promising approach in novel view synthesis, combining photorealistic rendering with real-time efficiency. However, its success heavily relies on dense camera coverage; under sparse-view conditions, insufficient supervision leads to irregular Gaussian distributions--characterized by globally sparse coverage, blurred background, and distorted high-frequency areas.To address this, we propose HeroGS--Hierarchical Guidance for Robust 3D Gaussian Splatting--a unified framework that establishes hierarchical guidance across the image, feature, and parameter levels. At the image level, sparse supervision is converted into pseudo-dense guidance, globally regularizing the Gaussian distributions and forming a consistent foundation for subsequent optimization. Building upon this, Feature-Adaptive Densification and Pruning (FADP) at the feature level leverages low-level features to refine high-frequency details and adaptively densifies Gaussians in background regions.The optimized distributions then support Co-Pruned Geometry Consistency (CPG) at parameter level, which guides geometric consistency through parameter freezing and co-pruning, effectively removing inconsistent splats. The hierarchical guidance strategy effectively constrains and optimizes the overall Gaussian distributions, thereby enhancing both structural fidelity and rendering quality.Extensive experiments demonstrate that HeroGS achieves high-fidelity reconstructions and consistently surpasses state-of-the-art baselines under sparse-view conditions.

Realistic digital avatars require expressive and dynamic hair motion; however, most existing head avatar methods assume rigid hair movement. These methods often fail to disentangle hair from the head, representing it as a simple outer shell and failing to capture its natural volumetric behavior. In this paper, we address these limitations by introducing PhysHead, a hybrid representation for animatable head avatars with realistic hair dynamics learned from multiview video. At the core is a 3D Gaussian-based layered representation of the head. Our approach combines a 3D parametric mesh for the head with strand-based hair, which can be directly simulated using physics engines. For the appearance model, we employ Gaussian primitives attached to both the head mesh and hair segments. This representation enables the creation of photorealistic head avatars with dynamic hair behavior, such as wind-blown motion, overcoming the constraints of rigid hair in existing methods. However, these animation capabilities also require new training schemes. In particular, we propose the use of VLM-based models to generate appearance of regions that are occluded in the dynamic training sequences. In quantitative and qualitative studies, we demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed model and compare it with existing baselines. We show that our method can synthesize physically plausible hair motion besides expression and camera control. For additional results and code, please refer to https://physhead.github.io

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently emerged as a powerful scene representation and is increasingly used for visual localization and pose refinement. However, despite its high-quality differentiable rendering, the robustness of 3DGS-based pose refinement remains highly sensitive to both the initial camera pose and the reconstructed geometry. In this work, we take a closer look at these limitations and identify two major sources of uncertainty: (i) pose prior uncertainty, which often arises from regression or retrieval models that output a single deterministic estimate, and (ii) geometric uncertainty, caused by imperfections in the 3DGS reconstruction that propagate errors into PnP solvers. Such uncertainties can distort reprojection geometry and destabilize optimization, even when the rendered appearance still looks plausible.To address these uncertainties, we introduce a relocalization framework that combines Monte Carlo pose sampling with Fisher Information-based PnP optimization. Our method explicitly accounts for both pose and geometric uncertainty and requires no retraining or additional supervision. Across diverse indoor and outdoor benchmarks, our approach consistently improves localization accuracy and significantly increases stability under pose and depth noise.

Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables efficient one-pass scene reconstruction, providing 3D representations for novel view synthesis without per-scene optimization. However, existing methods typically predict pixel-aligned primitives per-view, producing an excessive number of primitives in dense-view settings and offering no explicit control over the number of predicted Gaussians. To address this, we propose EcoSplat, the first efficiency-controllable feed-forward 3DGS framework that adaptively predicts the 3D representation for any given target primitive count at inference time. EcoSplat adopts a two-stage optimization process. The first stage is Pixel-aligned Gaussian Training (PGT) where our model learns initial primitive prediction. The second stage is Importance-aware Gaussian Finetuning (IGF) stage where our model learns rank primitives and adaptively adjust their parameters based on the target primitive count. Extensive experiments across multiple dense-view settings show that EcoSplat is robust and outperforms state-of-the-art methods under strict primitive-count constraints, making it well-suited for flexible downstream rendering tasks. Code and project page will be released.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has enabled efficient 3D scene reconstruction from everyday images with real-time, high-fidelity rendering, greatly advancing VR/AR applications. Fisheye cameras, with their wider field of view (FOV), promise high-quality reconstructions from fewer inputs and have recently attracted much attention. However, since 3DGS relies on rasterization, most subsequent works involving fisheye camera inputs first undistort images before training, which introduces two problems: 1) Black borders at image edges cause information loss and negate the fisheye's large FOV advantage; 2) Undistortion's stretch-and-interpolate resampling spreads each pixel's value over a larger area, diluting detail density-- causes 3DGS overfitting these low-frequency zones, producing blur and floating artifacts. In this work, we integrate fisheye camera model into the original 3DGS framework, enabling native fisheye image input for training without preprocessing. Despite correct modeling, we observed that the reconstructed scenes still exhibit floaters at image edges: Distortion increases toward the periphery, and 3DGS's original per-iteration random-selecting-view optimization ignores the cross-view correlations of a Gaussian, leading to extreme shapes (e.g., oversized or elongated) that degrade reconstruction quality. To address this, we introduce a feature-overlap-driven cross-view joint optimization strategy that establishes consistent geometric and photometric constraints across views--a technique equally applicable to existing pinhole-camera-based pipelines. Our DirectFisheye-GS matches or surpasses state-of-the-art performance on public datasets.