Frame-Consistent Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting from Sparse Unposed Images

Abstract

Feed-forward Gaussian models have made novel view synthesis almost instantaneous. Feed-forward methods predict Gaussians directly, either in two stages or in a single merged pass. Using two separately trained models is attractive because each can specialize in its own objective: one for accurate pose estimation and the other for high-quality reconstruction, rather than forcing a single jointly trained network to compromise between the two. A natural instantiation pairs a frozen pose estimator, VGGT, with a frozen reconstruction backbone, TokenGS. Prior work, such as VGGT-X and 3R-GS, also adopts a two-stage design, but attributes the resulting quality degradation to noisy pose estimates and introduces learned refinement. We show that this is not the primary source of the problem. Through per-camera analysis across 107 scenes from two datasets, DL3DV and MipNeRF360, using COLMAP poses as the reference, we find that the rotation error after alignment is small (median 1.6 degrees), whereas the translation scale is offset by a large, dataset-consistent factor. Controlled ablations over 140 DL3DV scenes show that the primary obstacles are two integration failures rather than pose error: a coordinate-frame inconsistency and a translation-scale mismatch, both of which can be corrected deterministically. With these fixes, a frozen VGGT driving a frozen TokenGS achieves 22.47 PSNR, within 0.51 dB of the COLMAP reference, with no additional training, when poses are estimated from all scene views. In the sparse setting, where reconstruction uses only four context images under the standard pose-free protocol, the same pipeline matches this all-view quality, yielding a fully COLMAP-free pipeline without any refinement step.