Less Is More: Genetic Frame Selection for Efficient Novel View Synthesis
Feed-forward novel view synthesis reconstructs a scene from many input images in a single forward pass, yet more views do not necessarily improve performance: redundant or poorly chosen frames increase computational cost and may degrade reconstruction quality. We address the problem of selecting, from an already captured sequence, a fixed-size subset of input views that is most informative for reconstructing specified target viewpoints. We propose a render-free view selector that scores candidate frames based on three complementary criteria: target-view coverage, measured against observed frames that stand in for the targets, redundancy with previously selected views, and image sharpness. A lightweight scoring network then selects the most informative frames without rendering, reconstruction, or per-scene optimization at inference time. To train the selector, we distill an expensive offline search procedure in which a genetic algorithm identifies high-quality subsets by directly optimizing reconstruction performance on training scenes. The selector learns to reproduce these choices from geometric and image-level features alone. Across six datasets and multiple input budgets, our method consistently outperforms both geometric and reconstruction-aware view-selection baselines while incurring significantly lower selection costs than reconstruction-based alternatives. Moreover, carefully selected subsets can outperform feed-forward reconstruction from the full input sequence. The learned selector generalizes across diverse reconstruction paradigms (feed-forward, 3D Gaussian Splatting, and NeRF), to object-targeted reconstruction and to a cross-capture setting in which the target views come from a separate acquisition pass. More broadly, our results indicate that explicitly reasoning about target relevance and inter-view redundancy is a fundamental factor in efficient scene reconstruction.