InstantHDR: Single-forward Gaussian Splatting Initialization for HDR 3D Reconstruction
High dynamic range (HDR) novel view synthesis (NVS) aims to reconstruct HDR scenes from multi-exposure low dynamic range (LDR) images. Existing HDR pipelines heavily rely on known camera poses, well-initialized dense point clouds, and time-consuming per-scene optimization. Current feed-forward alternatives overlook the HDR problem by assuming exposure-invariant appearance. To bridge this gap, we propose InstantHDR, a feed-forward network that initializes 3D HDR scenes from uncalibrated multi-exposure LDR collections in a fast single forward pass. Specifically, we design a geometry-guided appearance modeling for multi-exposure fusion, and a meta-network for generalizable scene-specific tone mapping. Due to the lack of HDR scene data, we build a pre-training dataset, called HDR-Pretrain, for generalizable feed-forward HDR models, featuring 168 Blender-rendered scenes, diverse lighting types, and multiple camera response functions. Comprehensive experiments show that our InstantHDR delivers a single-forward HDR initialization at approximately 700 times the speed of SoTA optimization-based methods, and reaches comparable quality in real settings after lightweight post-optimization while remaining approximately 20 times faster. All code, models, and datasets: https://github.com/Bugjudger/InstantHDR.