GradSplat: Gradients Inside the Forward Pass for Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting

Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting predicts a scene from a few images, but our predictor is less accurate than its own Gaussians optimized per scene on those images. This gap lies mostly in the shape of the Gaussians, their scale and rotation, since optimizing the shape alone recovers almost all of it and opacity and color recover less. Gradient steps on the input views correct this shape, and the model holds these views at inference. Log-anisotropy correction changes the axis ratios of each Gaussian in log space at constant volume, and in-forward gradient refinement renders the Gaussians into the input views and applies the gradient of the photometric loss with a learned recurrent update, first to opacity and color and then to the shape. GradSplat is a feed-forward model that refines its own Gaussians by learned gradient steps inside its forward pass, with no target view. On both complete six-view RealEstate10K protocols, it has the best PSNR and SSIM among nine methods and keeps its accuracy from 6 to 42 input views. Without fine-tuning, it is the most accurate on DL3DV and has the best PSNR and SSIM on ScanNet++. The code will be released at https://github.com/Jingong-Chen/GradSplat/.