# Learn to Optimize Denoising Scores for 3D Generation: A Unified and Improved Diffusion Prior on NeRF and 3D Gaussian Splatting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.04820 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04820/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in 3D, point cloud and scene generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 42 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Dec 2023.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [3D, point cloud and scene generation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/3d-point-cloud-and-scene-generation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14988/) (2022)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01618/) (2022)
- [Zero-1-to-3: Zero-shot One Image to 3D Object](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11328/) (2023)
- [T2I-Adapter: Learning Adapters to Dig out More Controllable Ability for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08453/) (2023)
- [Magic3D: High-Resolution Text-to-3D Content Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10440/) (2022)
- [ProlificDreamer: High-Fidelity and Diverse Text-to-3D Generation with Variational Score Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16213/) (2023)
- [Null-text Inversion for Editing Real Images using Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09794/) (2022)
- [Imagic: Text-Based Real Image Editing with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09276/) (2022)
- [Cascaded Diffusion Models for High Fidelity Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15282/) (2021)
- [Improved Techniques for Training Score-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09011/) (2020)
- [MVDream: Multi-view Diffusion for 3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16512/) (2023)
- [Wonder3D: Single Image to 3D using Cross-Domain Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15008/) (2023)
- [Fantasia3D: Disentangling Geometry and Appearance for High-quality Text-to-3D Content Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13873/) (2023)
- [Score Jacobian Chaining: Lifting Pretrained 2D Diffusion Models for 3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00774/) (2022)
- [Zero123++: a Single Image to Consistent Multi-view Diffusion Base Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15110/) (2023)
- [Latent-NeRF for Shape-Guided Generation of 3D Shapes and Textures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07600/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [A Survey on 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03890/) (2024)
- [MeshAnything: Artist-Created Mesh Generation with Autoregressive Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10163/) (2024)
- [Recent Advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11134/) (2024)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting: Survey, Technologies, Challenges, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17418/) (2024)
- [Director3D: Real-world Camera Trajectory and 3D Scene Generation from Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17601/) (2024)
- [Gaussian Splatting: 3D Reconstruction and Novel View Synthesis, a Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03417/) (2024)
- [Text-to-Image Rectified Flow as Plug-and-Play Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03293/) (2024)
- [LLMs Meet Multimodal Generation and Editing: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19334/) (2024)
- [Sculpt3D: Multi-View Consistent Text-to-3D Generation with Sparse 3D Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09140/) (2024)
- [Atlas3D: Physically Constrained Self-Supporting Text-to-3D for Simulation and Fabrication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18515/) (2024)
- [Connecting Consistency Distillation to Score Distillation for Text-to-3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13584/) (2024)
- [SteerX: Creating Any Camera-Free 3D and 4D Scenes with Geometric Steering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12024/) (2025)
- [Semantic Score Distillation Sampling for Compositional Text-to-3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09009/) (2024)
- [OccFusion: Rendering Occluded Humans with Generative Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00316/) (2024)
- [DreamMapping: High-Fidelity Text-to-3D Generation via Variational Distribution Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05099/) (2024)
- [MicroDreamer: Efficient 3D Generation in ~20 Seconds by Score-based Iterative Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19525/) (2024)
- [Magic-Boost: Boost 3D Generation with Multi-View Conditioned Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06429/) (2024)
- [Advancing Text-to-3D Generation with Linearized Lookahead Variational Score Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09748/) (2025)
- [RouteBridge: Reliability-Routed Bidirectional Distillation Between Neural Radiance Fields and 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.09606/) (2026)
- [Is Gaussian Splatting Becoming Neural Again? A Taxonomy and Controlled Study of Learned Parameterization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.12395/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a unified framework aimed at enhancing the diffusion priors for 3D generation tasks. Despite the critical importance of these tasks, existing methodologies often struggle to generate high-caliber results. We begin by examining the inherent limitations in previous diffusion priors. We identify a divergence between the diffusion priors and the training procedures of diffusion models that substantially impairs the quality of 3D generation. To address this issue, we propose a novel, unified framework that iteratively optimizes both the 3D model and the diffusion prior. Leveraging the different learnable parameters of the diffusion prior, our approach offers multiple configurations, affording various trade-offs between performance and implementation complexity. Notably, our experimental results demonstrate that our method markedly surpasses existing techniques, establishing new state-of-the-art in the realm of text-to-3D generation. Furthermore, our approach exhibits impressive performance on both NeRF and the newly introduced 3D Gaussian Splatting backbones. Additionally, our framework yields insightful contributions to the understanding of recent score distillation methods, such as the VSD and DDS loss.