# RefFusion: Reference Adapted Diffusion Models for 3D Scene Inpainting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.10765 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10765/

## Key facts

- Cited by 21 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 36 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Apr 2024.

## 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 36)

- [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)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [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)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14988/) (2022)
- [An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01618/) (2022)
- [RePaint: Inpainting using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09865/) (2022)
- [Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05826/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Point-E: A System for Generating 3D Point Clouds from Complex Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08751/) (2022)
- [Fantasia3D: Disentangling Geometry and Appearance for High-quality Text-to-3D Content Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13873/) (2023)
- [Which Training Methods for GANs do actually Converge?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04406/) (2018)
- [Free-Form Image Inpainting with Gated Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03589/) (2018)
- [Instruct-NeRF2NeRF: Editing 3D Scenes with Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12789/) (2023)
- [ReconFusion: 3D Reconstruction with Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02981/) (2023)
- [LucidDreamer: Towards High-Fidelity Text-to-3D Generation via Interval Score Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11284/) (2023)
- [SmartBrush: Text and Shape Guided Object Inpainting with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05034/) (2022)
- [Learning Object-Compositional Neural Radiance Field for Editable Scene Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01847/) (2021)
- [Large Scale Image Completion via Co-Modulated Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10428/) (2021)
- [MAT: Mask-Aware Transformer for Large Hole Image Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15270/) (2022)
- [DreamCraft3D: Hierarchical 3D Generation with Bootstrapped Diffusion Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16818/) (2023)
- [A Unified Approach for Text- and Image-guided 4D Scene Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16854/) (2023)
- [PD-GAN: Probabilistic Diverse GAN for Image Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02201/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [3D Gaussian Inpainting with Depth-Guided Cross-View Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11801/) (2025)
- [AuraFusion360: Augmented Unseen Region Alignment for Reference-based 360deg Unbounded Scene Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05176/) (2025)
- [A Survey on 3D Gaussian Splatting Applications: Segmentation, Editing, and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09977/) (2025)
- [Orchid: Image Latent Diffusion for Joint Appearance and Geometry Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13087/) (2025)
- [DecoupledGaussian: Object-Scene Decoupling for Physics-Based Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05484/) (2025)
- [TrAME: Trajectory-Anchored Multi-View Editing for Text-Guided 3D Gaussian Splatting Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02034/) (2024)
- [IMFine: 3D Inpainting via Geometry-guided Multi-view Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04501/) (2025)
- [InstaInpaint: Instant 3D-Scene Inpainting with Masked Large Reconstruction Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10980/) (2025)
- [CL-Splats: Continual Learning of Gaussian Splatting with Local Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21117/) (2025)
- [Inpaint360GS: Efficient Object-Aware 3D Inpainting via Gaussian Splatting for 360deg Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06457/) (2025)
- [Geometry-Aware Diffusion Models for Multiview Scene Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13335/) (2025)
- [GS-RoadPatching: Inpainting Gaussians via 3D Searching and Placing for Driving Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19937/) (2025)
- [OpenVoxel: Training-Free Grouping and Captioning Voxels for Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09575/) (2026)
- [3D StreetUnveiler with Semantic-aware 2DGS -- a simple baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18416/) (2024)
- [GaMO: Geometry-aware Multi-view Diffusion Outpainting for Sparse-View 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.25073/) (2025)
- [SplatFill: 3D Scene Inpainting via Depth-Guided Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.07809/) (2025)
- [Towards High-Fidelity 3D Portrait Generation with Rich Details by Cross-View Prior-Aware Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10369/) (2024)
- [ROODI: Reconstructing Occluded Objects with Denoising Inpainters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10256/) (2025)
- [Visibility-Uncertainty-guided 3D Gaussian Inpainting via Scene Conceptional Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17815/) (2025)
- [BEA-GS: BEyond RAdiance Supervision in 3DGS for Precise Object Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09662/) (2026)
- [ObjectSplat: Improving Mesh Fidelity and Interactivity for 3D Scenes via Object-Level Mesh Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.30423/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Neural reconstruction approaches are rapidly emerging as the preferred representation for 3D scenes, but their limited editability is still posing a challenge. In this work, we propose an approach for 3D scene inpainting -- the task of coherently replacing parts of the reconstructed scene with desired content. Scene inpainting is an inherently ill-posed task as there exist many solutions that plausibly replace the missing content. A good inpainting method should therefore not only enable high-quality synthesis but also a high degree of control. Based on this observation, we focus on enabling explicit control over the inpainted content and leverage a reference image as an efficient means to achieve this goal. Specifically, we introduce RefFusion, a novel 3D inpainting method based on a multi-scale personalization of an image inpainting diffusion model to the given reference view. The personalization effectively adapts the prior distribution to the target scene, resulting in a lower variance of score distillation objective and hence significantly sharper details. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art results for object removal while maintaining high controllability. We further demonstrate the generality of our formulation on other downstream tasks such as object insertion, scene outpainting, and sparse view reconstruction.