# NeuRAD: Neural Rendering for Autonomous Driving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.15260 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15260/

## Key facts

- Cited by 150 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in End-to-end system architecture, one of 9 directions in End-to-end autonomous driving.
- Builds on 41 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Nov 2023.

## Placed in

- End-to-end autonomous driving / [End-to-end system architecture](https://mlsanity.com/driving/end-to-end-system-architecture/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [Occupancy Networks: Learning 3D Reconstruction in Function Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03828/) (2018)
- [Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12077/) (2021)
- [Mip-NeRF: A Multiscale Representation for Anti-Aliasing Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13415/) (2021)
- [NeuS: Learning Neural Implicit Surfaces by Volume Rendering for Multi-view Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10689/) (2021)
- [Plenoxels: Radiance Fields without Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05131/) (2021)
- [TensoRF: Tensorial Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09517/) (2022)
- [NeRF in the Wild: Neural Radiance Fields for Unconstrained Photo Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02268/) (2020)
- [On the Continuity of Rotation Representations in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07035/) (2018)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis and Semantic Manipulation with Conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11585/) (2017)
- [Block-NeRF: Scalable Large Scene Neural View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05263/) (2022)
- [Argoverse 2: Next Generation Datasets for Self-Driving Perception and Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00493/) (2023)
- [Local Light Field Fusion: Practical View Synthesis with Prescriptive Sampling Guidelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00889/) (2019)
- [Zip-NeRF: Anti-Aliased Grid-Based Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06706/) (2023)
- [UNISURF: Unifying Neural Implicit Surfaces and Radiance Fields for Multi-View Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10078/) (2021)
- [Nerfstudio: A Modular Framework for Neural Radiance Field Development](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04264/) (2023)
- [AirSim: High-Fidelity Visual and Physical Simulation for Autonomous Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.05065/) (2017)
- [Instruct-NeRF2NeRF: Editing 3D Scenes with Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12789/) (2023)
- [Neuralangelo: High-Fidelity Neural Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03092/) (2023)
- [NeuS2: Fast Learning of Neural Implicit Surfaces for Multi-view Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05231/) (2022)
- [Neural Scene Graphs for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10379/) (2020)
- [UniSim: A Neural Closed-Loop Sensor Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01898/) (2023)
- [Urban Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14643/) (2021)
- [Panoptic Neural Fields: A Semantic Object-Aware Neural Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04334/) (2022)
- [PandaSet: Advanced Sensor Suite Dataset for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12610/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 150)

- [NAVSIM: Data-Driven Non-Reactive Autonomous Vehicle Simulation and Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15349/) (2024)
- [Street Gaussians: Modeling Dynamic Urban Scenes with Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01339/) (2024)
- [OmniRe: Omni Urban Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16760/) (2024)
- [Pseudo-Simulation for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04218/) (2025)
- [DriveDreamer4D: World Models Are Effective Data Machines for 4D Driving Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13571/) (2024)
- [textitS3Gaussian: Self-Supervised Street Gaussians for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20323/) (2024)
- [Hydra-MDP++: Advancing End-to-End Driving via Expert-Guided Hydra-Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12820/) (2025)
- [HUGSIM: A Real-Time, Photo-Realistic and Closed-Loop Simulator for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01718/) (2024)
- [ReconDreamer: Crafting World Models for Driving Scene Reconstruction via Online Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19548/) (2024)
- [RAD: Training an End-to-End Driving Policy via Large-Scale 3DGS-based Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13144/) (2025)
- [SplatAD: Real-Time Lidar and Camera Rendering with 3D Gaussian Splatting for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16816/) (2024)
- [NeuroNCAP: Photorealistic Closed-loop Safety Testing for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07762/) (2024)
- [InfiniCube: Unbounded and Controllable Dynamic 3D Driving Scene Generation with World-Guided Video Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03934/) (2024)
- [STORM: Spatio-Temporal Reconstruction Model for Large-Scale Outdoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00602/) (2024)
- [FreeVS: Generative View Synthesis on Free Driving Trajectory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18079/) (2024)
- [StreetCrafter: Street View Synthesis with Controllable Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13188/) (2024)
- [SGD: Street View Synthesis with Gaussian Splatting and Diffusion Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20079/) (2024)
- [ReconDreamer++: Harmonizing Generative and Reconstructive Models for Driving Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18438/) (2025)
- [Dynamic 3D Gaussian Fields for Urban Areas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03175/) (2024)
- [G3R: Gradient Guided Generalizable Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19405/) (2024)
- [FreeSim: Toward Free-viewpoint Camera Simulation in Driving Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03566/) (2024)
- [Towards Knowledge-driven Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04316/) (2023)
- [S-NeRF++: Autonomous Driving Simulation via Neural Reconstruction and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02112/) (2024)
- [Scenario Dreamer: Vectorized Latent Diffusion for Generating Driving Simulation Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22496/) (2025)
- [CoDa-4DGS: Dynamic Gaussian Splatting with Context and Deformation Awareness for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06744/) (2025)
- [Viser: Imperative, Web-based 3D Visualization in Python](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22885/) (2025)
- [PreSight: Enhancing Autonomous Vehicle Perception with City-Scale NeRF Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09079/) (2024)
- [Are NeRFs ready for autonomous driving? Towards closing the real-to-simulation gap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16092/) (2024)
- [SplatFlow: Self-Supervised Dynamic Gaussian Splatting in Neural Motion Flow Field for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15482/) (2024)
- [Neural Radiance Field in Autonomous Driving: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13816/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Neural radiance fields (NeRFs) have gained popularity in the autonomous driving (AD) community. Recent methods show NeRFs' potential for closed-loop simulation, enabling testing of AD systems, and as an advanced training data augmentation technique. However, existing methods often require long training times, dense semantic supervision, or lack generalizability. This, in turn, hinders the application of NeRFs for AD at scale. In this paper, we propose NeuRAD, a robust novel view synthesis method tailored to dynamic AD data. Our method features simple network design, extensive sensor modeling for both camera and lidar -- including rolling shutter, beam divergence and ray dropping -- and is applicable to multiple datasets out of the box. We verify its performance on five popular AD datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance across the board. To encourage further development, we will openly release the NeuRAD source code. See https://github.com/georghess/NeuRAD .