# Accelerating Neural Field Training via Soft Mining

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.00075 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00075/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [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)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [DeepSDF: Learning Continuous Signed Distance Functions for Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05103/) (2019)
- [Implicit Neural Representations with Periodic Activation Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09661/) (2020)
- [Fourier Features Let Networks Learn High Frequency Functions in Low Dimensional Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10739/) (2020)
- [Plenoxels: Radiance Fields without Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05131/) (2021)
- [TensoRF: Tensorial Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09517/) (2022)
- [Efficient Geometry-aware 3D Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07945/) (2021)
- [Direct Voxel Grid Optimization: Super-fast Convergence for Radiance Fields Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11215/) (2021)
- [Neural Sparse Voxel Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11571/) (2020)
- [PlenOctrees for Real-time Rendering of Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14024/) (2021)
- [Scene Representation Networks: Continuous 3D-Structure-Aware Neural Scene Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01618/) (2019)
- [K-Planes: Explicit Radiance Fields in Space, Time, and Appearance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10241/) (2023)
- [KiloNeRF: Speeding up Neural Radiance Fields with Thousands of Tiny MLPs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13744/) (2021)
- [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)
- [HexPlane: A Fast Representation for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.09632/) (2023)
- [Training Region-based Object Detectors with Online Hard Example Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03540/) (2016)
- [Neural Fields in Visual Computing and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11426/) (2021)
- [FastNeRF: High-Fidelity Neural Rendering at 200FPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10380/) (2021)
- [Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) for fluid mechanics: A review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09506/) (2021)
- [Light Field Networks: Neural Scene Representations with Single-Evaluation Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02634/) (2021)
- [MobileNeRF: Exploiting the Polygon Rasterization Pipeline for Efficient Neural Field Rendering on Mobile Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00277/) (2022)
- [Scene Representation Transformer: Geometry-Free Novel View Synthesis Through Set-Latent Scene Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13152/) (2021)
- [BACON: Band-limited Coordinate Networks for Multiscale Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04645/) (2021)
- [Light Field Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09687/) (2021)
- [Bayes' Rays: Uncertainty Quantification for Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03185/) (2023)
- [NerfAcc: Efficient Sampling Accelerates NeRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04966/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [3D Gaussian Splatting as Markov Chain Monte Carlo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09591/) (2024)
- [Optimizing Rank for High-Fidelity Implicit Neural Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14366/) (2025)
- [EVOS: Efficient Implicit Neural Training via EVOlutionary Selector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10153/) (2024)
- [MedFuncta: A Unified Framework for Learning Efficient Medical Neural Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14401/) (2025)
- [Expansive Supervision for Neural Radiance Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08056/) (2024)
- [Sparse4DGS: 4D Gaussian Splatting for Sparse-Frame Dynamic Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07122/) (2025)
- [NTK-Guided Implicit Neural Teaching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15487/) (2025)
- [Multiple Instance Learning Framework with Masked Hard Instance Mining for Gigapixel Histopathology Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11526/) (2025)
- [TabINR: An Implicit Neural Representation Framework for Tabular Data Imputation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01136/) (2025)
- [MCBlock: Boosting Neural Radiance Field Training Speed by MCTS-based Dynamic-Resolution Ray Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09878/) (2025)
- [TurboGS: Accelerating 3D Gaussian Splatting via Error-Guided Sparse Pixel Sampling and Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15924/) (2026)
- [InceptionGS: Generative Bootstrapping for Large-Scale Gaussian Splatting under Unstructured View Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.02747/) (2026)
- [Resolution-Flexible Decoding for Hybrid Neural Video Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.23555/) (2026)
- [Efficient Neural Field Learning via Adaptive Coverage and Focused Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02410/) (2026)
- [Refined Grid Sampling for Efficient Implicit Neural Representations of Large-Scale Scientific Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14205/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present an approach to accelerate Neural Field training by efficiently selecting sampling locations. While Neural Fields have recently become popular, it is often trained by uniformly sampling the training domain, or through handcrafted heuristics. We show that improved convergence and final training quality can be achieved by a soft mining technique based on importance sampling: rather than either considering or ignoring a pixel completely, we weigh the corresponding loss by a scalar. To implement our idea we use Langevin Monte-Carlo sampling. We show that by doing so, regions with higher error are being selected more frequently, leading to more than 2x improvement in convergence speed. The code and related resources for this study are publicly available at https://ubc-vision.github.io/nf-soft-mining/.