# Selfi: Self Improving Reconstruction Engine via 3D Geometric Feature Alignment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08930 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08930/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 67 of its 79 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 67)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12077/) (2021)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (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)
- [DUSt3R: Geometric 3D Vision Made Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14132/) (2023)
- [VGGT: Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11651/) (2025)
- [SuperGlue: Learning Feature Matching with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11763/) (2019)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [SuperPoint: Self-Supervised Interest Point Detection and Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07629/) (2017)
- [Grounding Image Matching in 3D with MASt3R](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09756/) (2024)
- [Direct Voxel Grid Optimization: Super-fast Convergence for Radiance Fields Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11215/) (2021)
- [MVSNet: Depth Inference for Unstructured Multi-view Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02505/) (2018)
- [LGM: Large Multi-View Gaussian Model for High-Resolution 3D Content Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05054/) (2024)
- [pixelSplat: 3D Gaussian Splats from Image Pairs for Scalable Generalizable 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12337/) (2023)
- [MVSplat: Efficient 3D Gaussian Splatting from Sparse Multi-View Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14627/) (2024)
- [Continuous 3D Perception Model with Persistent State](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12387/) (2025)
- [DL3DV-10K: A Large-Scale Scene Dataset for Deep Learning-based 3D Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16256/) (2023)
- [CoTracker: It is Better to Track Together](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07635/) (2023)
- [Emergent Correspondence from Image Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03881/) (2023)
- [MonST3R: A Simple Approach for Estimating Geometry in the Presence of Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03825/) (2024)
- [Depth Pro: Sharp Monocular Metric Depth in Less Than a Second](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02073/) (2024)

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

- [Self-Improving 4D Perception via Self-Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08532/) (2026)
- [NoDrift3R: Raymap-Guided Coupling for Drift-Robust Unposed Feed-Forward 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.07168/) (2026)
- [Multi-View Unified Camera Fields: Geometry-Shaped Action-Facing Representations for RGB-Only Multi-Camera VLA Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01826/) (2026)
- [GeoCond: A Conditioning-Aware Reliability Adapter for Feed-Forward 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.18465/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Novel View Synthesis (NVS) has traditionally relied on models with explicit 3D inductive biases combined with known camera parameters from Structure-from-Motion (SfM) beforehand. Recent vision foundation models like VGGT take an orthogonal approach -- 3D knowledge is gained implicitly through training data and loss objectives, enabling feed-forward prediction of both camera parameters and 3D representations directly from a set of uncalibrated images. While flexible, VGGT features lack explicit multi-view geometric consistency, and we find that improving such 3D feature consistency benefits both NVS and pose estimation tasks. We introduce Selfi, a self-improving 3D reconstruction pipeline via feature alignment, transforming a VGGT backbone into a high-fidelity 3D reconstruction engine by leveraging its own outputs as pseudo-ground-truth. Specifically, we train a lightweight feature adapter using a reprojection-based consistency loss, which distills VGGT outputs into a new geometrically-aligned feature space that captures spatial proximity in 3D. This enables state-of-the-art performance in both NVS and camera pose estimation, demonstrating that feature alignment is a highly beneficial step for downstream 3D reasoning.