# MutualNeRF: Improve the Performance of NeRF under Limited Samples with Mutual Information Theory

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.11386 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11386/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [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)
- [D-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13961/) (2020)
- [NeRF in the Wild: Neural Radiance Fields for Unconstrained Photo Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02268/) (2020)
- [Nerfies: Deformable Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12948/) (2020)
- [PlenOctrees for Real-time Rendering of Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14024/) (2021)
- [NeRF++: Analyzing and Improving Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07492/) (2020)
- [Block-NeRF: Scalable Large Scene Neural View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05263/) (2022)
- [Data-Efficient Image Recognition with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09272/) (2019)
- [Local Light Field Fusion: Practical View Synthesis with Prescriptive Sampling Guidelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00889/) (2019)
- [Common Objects in 3D: Large-Scale Learning and Evaluation of Real-life 3D Category Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00512/) (2021)
- [RegNeRF: Regularizing Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis from Sparse Inputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00724/) (2021)
- [Baking Neural Radiance Fields for Real-Time View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14645/) (2021)
- [Putting NeRF on a Diet: Semantically Consistent Few-Shot View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00677/) (2021)
- [Neural Geometric Level of Detail: Real-time Rendering with Implicit 3D Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10994/) (2021)
- [ReconFusion: 3D Reconstruction with Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02981/) (2023)
- [On Mutual Information Maximization for Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.13625/) (2019)
- [FreeNeRF: Improving Few-shot Neural Rendering with Free Frequency Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07418/) (2023)
- [SparseNeRF: Distilling Depth Ranking for Few-shot Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16196/) (2023)
- [SparseFusion: Distilling View-conditioned Diffusion for 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00792/) (2022)
- [InfoNeRF: Ray Entropy Minimization for Few-Shot Neural Volume Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.15399/) (2021)
- [NeRDi: Single-View NeRF Synthesis with Language-Guided Diffusion as General Image Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03267/) (2022)
- [GNeRF: GAN-based Neural Radiance Field without Posed Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15606/) (2021)
- [ActiveNeRF: Learning where to See with Uncertainty Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08546/) (2022)
- [Temporal Coherence for Active Learning in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.11757/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper introduces MutualNeRF, a framework enhancing Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) performance under limited samples using Mutual Information Theory. While NeRF excels in 3D scene synthesis, challenges arise with limited data and existing methods that aim to introduce prior knowledge lack theoretical support in a unified framework. We introduce a simple but theoretically robust concept, Mutual Information, as a metric to uniformly measure the correlation between images, considering both macro (semantic) and micro (pixel) levels. For sparse view sampling, we strategically select additional viewpoints containing more non-overlapping scene information by minimizing mutual information without knowing ground truth images beforehand. Our framework employs a greedy algorithm, offering a near-optimal solution. For few-shot view synthesis, we maximize the mutual information between inferred images and ground truth, expecting inferred images to gain more relevant information from known images. This is achieved by incorporating efficient, plug-and-play regularization terms. Experiments under limited samples show consistent improvement over state-of-the-art baselines in different settings, affirming the efficacy of our framework.