# 3D Scene Generation: A Survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.05474 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05474/

## Key facts

- Cited by 24 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 308 of its 484 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 May 2025.

## 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 308)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [DeepSDF: Learning Continuous Signed Distance Functions for Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05103/) (2019)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24164/) (2024)
- [Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00028/) (2017)
- [VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17982/) (2023)
- [Towards Robust Monocular Depth Estimation: Mixing Datasets for Zero-shot Cross-dataset Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01341/) (2019)
- [LIBERO: Benchmarking Knowledge Transfer for Lifelong Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03310/) (2023)
- [Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06158/) (2017)
- [Demystifying MMD GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01401/) (2018)
- [Depth Map Prediction from a Single Image using a Multi-Scale Deep Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2283/) (2014)
- [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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [3D and 4D World Modeling: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.07996/) (2025)
- [DynamicVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for Dynamic Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22153/) (2026)
- [Scaling Up Occupancy-centric Driving Scene Generation: Dataset and Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22973/) (2025)
- [WorldClaw: Agentic 3D Open-World Generation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05248/) (2026)
- [WonderFree: Enhancing Novel View Quality and Cross-View Consistency for 3D Scene Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20590/) (2025)
- [U4D: Uncertainty-Aware 4D World Modeling from LiDAR Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02982/) (2025)
- [MajutsuCity: Language-driven Aesthetic-adaptive City Generation with Controllable 3D Assets and Layouts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20415/) (2025)
- [SceneAssistant: A Visual Feedback Agent for Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12238/) (2026)
- [One Video, One World: Turning Monocular Video into Physical 4D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31388/) (2026)
- [Imagine a City: CityGenAgent for Procedural 3D City Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05362/) (2026)
- [MonoArt: Progressive Structural Reasoning for Monocular Articulated 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19231/) (2026)
- [Bridging Semantic and Kinematic Conditions with Diffusion-based Discrete Motion Tokenizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19227/) (2026)
- [UrbanWorld2.0: A Multimodal Agentic Framework for Reality-Aligned 3D World Generation at City-Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18005/) (2025)
- [Complex-Valued Holographic Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08350/) (2025)
- [SceneOrchestra: Efficient Agentic 3D Scene Synthesis via Full Tool-Call Trajectory Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19907/) (2026)
- [GTA: Advancing Image-to-3D World Generation via Geometry Then Appearance Video Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12957/) (2026)
- [NaLA: A 3D Native LLM Layout Agent for High-quality 3D Scene Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.29395/) (2026)
- [VibeWorlding: Can Multimodal Agents Construct 3D Open Worlds End-to-End?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15265/) (2026)
- [RecurGS: Interactive Scene Modeling via Discrete-State Recurrent Gaussian Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18386/) (2025)
- [3D Generation for Embodied AI and Robotic Simulation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.26509/) (2026)
- [Embody4D: A Generalist Data Engine for Embodied 4D World Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01799/) (2026)
- [From Virtual Environments to Real-World Trials: Emerging Trends in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17714/) (2026)
- [IBRSteG: Learning a Generalizable Steganography Framework for 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30024/) (2026)
- [IDEAL-Bench: Indoor Dataset and Evaluation suite for Analyzing 3D Layout reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03614/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D scene generation seeks to synthesize spatially structured, semantically meaningful, and photorealistic environments for applications such as immersive media, robotics, autonomous driving, and embodied AI. Early methods based on procedural rules offered scalability but limited diversity. Recent advances in deep generative models (e.g., GANs, diffusion models) and 3D representations (e.g., NeRF, 3D Gaussians) have enabled the learning of real-world scene distributions, improving fidelity, diversity, and view consistency. Recent advances like diffusion models bridge 3D scene synthesis and photorealism by reframing generation as image or video synthesis problems. This survey provides a systematic overview of state-of-the-art approaches, organizing them into four paradigms: procedural generation, neural 3D-based generation, image-based generation, and video-based generation. We analyze their technical foundations, trade-offs, and representative results, and review commonly used datasets, evaluation protocols, and downstream applications. We conclude by discussing key challenges in generation capacity, 3D representation, data and annotations, and evaluation, and outline promising directions including higher fidelity, physics-aware and interactive generation, and unified perception-generation models. This review organizes recent advances in 3D scene generation and highlights promising directions at the intersection of generative AI, 3D vision, and embodied intelligence. To track ongoing developments, we maintain an up-to-date project page: https://github.com/hzxie/Awesome-3D-Scene-Generation.