# 2D Gaussian Splatting with Semantic Alignment for Image Inpainting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01964 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01964/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [Dynamic 3D Gaussians: Tracking by Persistent Dynamic View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09713/) (2023)
- [Free-Form Image Inpainting with Gated Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03589/) (2018)
- [Generative Image Inpainting with Contextual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07892/) (2018)
- [Learning Continuous Image Representation with Local Implicit Image Function](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09161/) (2020)
- [Image Inpainting for Irregular Holes Using Partial Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07723/) (2018)
- [SplaTAM: Splat, Track & Map 3D Gaussians for Dense RGB-D SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02126/) (2023)
- [SC-GS: Sparse-Controlled Gaussian Splatting for Editable Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14937/) (2023)
- [Text-to-3D using Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16585/) (2023)
- [SmartBrush: Text and Shape Guided Object Inpainting with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05034/) (2022)
- [Inpaint Anything: Segment Anything Meets Image Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06790/) (2023)
- [MAT: Mask-Aware Transformer for Large Hole Image Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15270/) (2022)
- [BrushNet: A Plug-and-Play Image Inpainting Model with Decomposed Dual-Branch Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06976/) (2024)
- [Pluralistic Image Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.04227/) (2019)
- [Image Inpainting via Conditional Texture and Structure Dual Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09760/) (2021)
- [UniToken: Harmonizing Multimodal Understanding and Generation through Unified Visual Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04423/) (2025)
- [Pixel to Gaussian: Ultra-Fast Continuous Super-Resolution with 2D Gaussian Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06617/) (2025)
- [Paint by Inpaint: Learning to Add Image Objects by Removing Them First](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18212/) (2024)
- [CoordFill: Efficient High-Resolution Image Inpainting via Parameterized Coordinate Querying](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08524/) (2023)
- [Generalized and Efficient 2D Gaussian Splatting for Arbitrary-scale Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06838/) (2025)
- [ADDP: Learning General Representations for Image Recognition and Generation with Alternating Denoising Diffusion Process](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05423/) (2023)
- [GaussianToken: An Effective Image Tokenizer with 2D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15619/) (2025)
- [Acquire and then Adapt: Squeezing out Text-to-Image Model for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15159/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Forecasting as Rendering: A 2D Gaussian Splatting Framework for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02220/) (2026)
- [MarkCleaner: High-Fidelity Watermark Removal via Imperceptible Micro-Geometric Perturbation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01513/) (2026)
- [Learning Video Dynamics with Predictive Differentiable Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31050/) (2026)
- [Gaussian Density Splatting Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.10396/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Gaussian Splatting (GS), a recent technique for converting discrete points into continuous spatial representations, has shown promising results in 3D scene modeling and 2D image super-resolution. In this paper, we explore its untapped potential for image inpainting, which demands both locally coherent pixel synthesis and globally consistent semantic restoration. We propose the first image inpainting framework based on 2D Gaussian Splatting, which encodes incomplete images into a continuous field of 2D Gaussian splat coefficients and reconstructs the final image via a differentiable rasterization process. The continuous rendering paradigm of GS inherently promotes pixel-level coherence in the inpainted results. To improve efficiency and scalability, we introduce a patch-wise rasterization strategy that reduces memory overhead and accelerates inference. For global semantic consistency, we incorporate features from a pretrained DINO model. We observe that DINO's global features are naturally robust to small missing regions and can be effectively adapted to guide semantic alignment in large-mask scenarios, ensuring that the inpainted content remains contextually consistent with the surrounding scene. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance in both quantitative metrics and perceptual quality, establishing a new direction for applying Gaussian Splatting to 2D image processing.