# DropGaussian: Structural Regularization for Sparse-view Gaussian Splatting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.00773 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00773/

## Key facts

- Cited by 65 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14988/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Plenoxels: Radiance Fields without Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05131/) (2021)
- [pixelNeRF: Neural Radiance Fields from One or Few Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02190/) (2020)
- [NeRF in the Wild: Neural Radiance Fields for Unconstrained Photo Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02268/) (2020)
- [4D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Dynamic Scene Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08528/) (2023)
- [The Replica Dataset: A Digital Replica of Indoor Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05797/) (2019)
- [pixelSplat: 3D Gaussian Splats from Image Pairs for Scalable Generalizable 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12337/) (2023)
- [Local Light Field Fusion: Practical View Synthesis with Prescriptive Sampling Guidelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00889/) (2019)
- [Mip-Splatting: Alias-free 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16493/) (2023)
- [RegNeRF: Regularizing Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis from Sparse Inputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00724/) (2021)
- [Ref-NeRF: Structured View-Dependent Appearance for Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03907/) (2021)
- [MVSplat: Efficient 3D Gaussian Splatting from Sparse Multi-View Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14627/) (2024)
- [Putting NeRF on a Diet: Semantically Consistent Few-Shot View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00677/) (2021)
- [Compact 3D Gaussian Representation for Radiance Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13681/) (2023)
- [FreeNeRF: Improving Few-shot Neural Rendering with Free Frequency Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07418/) (2023)
- [FSGS: Real-Time Few-shot View Synthesis using Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00451/) (2023)
- [DNGaussian: Optimizing Sparse-View 3D Gaussian Radiance Fields with Global-Local Depth Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06912/) (2024)
- [SparseNeRF: Distilling Depth Ranking for Few-shot Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16196/) (2023)
- [Compressed 3D Gaussian Splatting for Accelerated Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02436/) (2023)
- [Depth-Regularized Optimization for 3D Gaussian Splatting in Few-Shot Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13398/) (2023)
- [SparseGS: Sparse View Synthesis using 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00206/) (2023)
- [CoR-GS: Sparse-View 3D Gaussian Splatting via Co-Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12110/) (2024)
- [FlowFormer++: Masked Cost Volume Autoencoding for Pretraining Optical Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01237/) (2023)
- [FreeSplat: Generalizable 3D Gaussian Splatting Towards Free-View Synthesis of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17958/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 65)

- [FastGS: Training 3D Gaussian Splatting in 100 Seconds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04283/) (2025)
- [Quantifying and Alleviating Co-Adaptation in Sparse-View 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12720/) (2025)
- [D2GS: Depth-and-Density Guided Gaussian Splatting for Stable and Accurate Sparse-View Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08566/) (2025)
- [AD-GS: Alternating Densification for Sparse-Input 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11003/) (2025)
- [From Coarse to Fine: Learnable Discrete Wavelet Transforms for Efficient 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23042/) (2025)
- [DWTGS: Rethinking Frequency Regularization for Sparse-view 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15690/) (2025)
- [Duplex-GS: Proxy-Guided Weighted Blending for Real-Time Order-Independent Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03180/) (2025)
- [OracleGS: Grounding Generative Priors for Sparse-View Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23258/) (2025)
- [Dropping Anchor and Spherical Harmonics for Sparse-view Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20933/) (2026)
- [ArtifactWorld: Scaling 3D Gaussian Splatting Artifact Restoration via Video Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12251/) (2026)
- [ProSplat: Improved Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting for Wide-Baseline Sparse Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07670/) (2025)
- [Sparse-View 3D Reconstruction: Recent Advances and Open Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16406/) (2025)
- [GaMO: Geometry-aware Multi-view Diffusion Outpainting for Sparse-View 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.25073/) (2025)
- [UGOD: Uncertainty-Guided Differentiable Opacity and Soft Dropout for Enhanced Sparse-View 3DGS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04968/) (2025)
- [FixingGS: Enhancing 3D Gaussian Splatting via Training-Free Score Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18759/) (2025)
- [Intrinsic Geometry-Appearance Consistency Optimization for Sparse-View Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02893/) (2026)
- [Splannequin: Freezing Monocular Mannequin-Challenge Footage with Dual-Detection Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05113/) (2025)
- [SA-ResGS: Self-Augmented Residual 3D Gaussian Splatting for Next Best View Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03024/) (2026)
- [LoD-Structured 3D Gaussian Splatting for Streaming Video Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18475/) (2026)
- [Distilled-3DGS:Distilled 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14037/) (2025)
- [Initialize to Generalize: A Stronger Initialization Pipeline for Sparse-View 3DGS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17479/) (2025)
- [FrontierGS: Progressive View-Space Frontier Expansion for Sparse 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16030/) (2025)
- [Do Flat Minima Improve Sparse Novel View Synthesis?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17918/) (2025)
- [Pseudo-View Enhancement via Confidence Fusion for Unposed Sparse-View Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21535/) (2026)
- [LiDAR-EVS: Enhance Extrapolated View Synthesis for 3D Gaussian Splatting with Pseudo-LiDAR Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14763/) (2026)
- [NavCrafter: Exploring 3D Scenes from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02828/) (2026)
- [GeoQuery: Geometry-Query Diffusion for Sparse-View Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12399/) (2026)
- [MAC-Splat: Multi-Attribute Consistency for High-Fidelity Sparse-View Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.10792/) (2026)
- [GaussVid: Sparse-View Gaussian Splatting with 3D-Aware Video Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.21849/) (2026)
- [Gesplat: Robust Pose-Free 3D Reconstruction via Geometry-Guided Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10097/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) has gained considerable attentions in the field of novel view synthesis due to its fast performance while yielding the excellent image quality. However, 3DGS in sparse-view settings (e.g., three-view inputs) often faces with the problem of overfitting to training views, which significantly drops the visual quality of novel view images. Many existing approaches have tackled this issue by using strong priors, such as 2D generative contextual information and external depth signals. In contrast, this paper introduces a prior-free method, so-called DropGaussian, with simple changes in 3D Gaussian splatting. Specifically, we randomly remove Gaussians during the training process in a similar way of dropout, which allows non-excluded Gaussians to have larger gradients while improving their visibility. This makes the remaining Gaussians to contribute more to the optimization process for rendering with sparse input views. Such simple operation effectively alleviates the overfitting problem and enhances the quality of novel view synthesis. By simply applying DropGaussian to the original 3DGS framework, we can achieve the competitive performance with existing prior-based 3DGS methods in sparse-view settings of benchmark datasets without any additional complexity. The code and model are publicly available at: https://github.com/DCVL-3D/DropGaussian release.