# From Rays to Projections: Better Inputs for Feed-Forward View Synthesis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05116 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05116/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Objaverse: A Universe of Annotated 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08051/) (2022)
- [VGGT: Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11651/) (2025)
- [pixelSplat: 3D Gaussian Splats from Image Pairs for Scalable Generalizable 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12337/) (2023)
- [Zip-NeRF: Anti-Aliased Grid-Based Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06706/) (2023)
- [MVSplat: Efficient 3D Gaussian Splatting from Sparse Multi-View Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14627/) (2024)
- [DL3DV-10K: A Large-Scale Scene Dataset for Deep Learning-based 3D Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16256/) (2023)
- [ViewCrafter: Taming Video Diffusion Models for High-fidelity Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02048/) (2024)
- [GEN3C: 3D-Informed World-Consistent Video Generation with Precise Camera Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03751/) (2025)
- [MapAnything: Universal Feed-Forward Metric 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13414/) (2025)
- [Diffusion Transformers with Representation Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11690/) (2025)
- [gsplat: An Open-Source Library for Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06765/) (2024)
- [No Pose, No Problem: Surprisingly Simple 3D Gaussian Splats from Sparse Unposed Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24207/) (2024)
- [AnySplat: Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting from Unconstrained Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23716/) (2025)
- [LVSM: A Large View Synthesis Model with Minimal 3D Inductive Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17242/) (2024)
- [Diffusion as Shader: 3D-aware Video Diffusion for Versatile Video Generation Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03847/) (2025)
- [Splatt3R: Zero-shot Gaussian Splatting from Uncalibrated Image Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13912/) (2024)
- [RichDreamer: A Generalizable Normal-Depth Diffusion Model for Detail Richness in Text-to-3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16918/) (2023)
- [CroCo: Self-Supervised Pre-training for 3D Vision Tasks by Cross-View Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10716/) (2022)
- [Cameras as Relative Positional Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10496/) (2025)
- [GaussianGrasper: 3D Language Gaussian Splatting for Open-vocabulary Robotic Grasping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09637/) (2024)
- [RayZer: A Self-supervised Large View Synthesis Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00702/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [TTT-Parkour: Rapid Test-Time Training for Perceptive Robot Parkour](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02331/) (2026)
- [Resolving Representation Ambiguity in Feedforward Novel View Synthesis Transformer via Semantic-Spatial Decoupling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18599/) (2026)
- [WarpHammer: Densifying Scene Warps with 3D Object Priors for Extreme View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31258/) (2026)
- [GenRec: Knowing Where to Reconstruct and Where to Generate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.17832/) (2026)
- [VGGT-Diff: Visual Geometry Meets Diffusion for Sparse-View Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33253/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Feed-forward view synthesis models predict a novel view in a single pass with minimal 3D inductive bias. Existing works encode cameras as Pl"ucker ray maps, which tie predictions to the arbitrary world coordinate gauge and make them sensitive to small camera transformations, thereby undermining geometric consistency. In this paper, we ask what inputs best condition a model for robust and consistent view synthesis. We propose projective conditioning, which replaces raw camera parameters with a target-view projective cue that provides a stable 2D input. This reframes the task from a brittle geometric regression problem in ray space to a well-conditioned target-view image-to-image translation problem. Additionally, we introduce a masked autoencoding pretraining strategy tailored to this cue, enabling the use of large-scale uncalibrated data for pretraining. Our method shows improved fidelity and stronger cross-view consistency compared to ray-conditioned baselines on our view-consistency benchmark. It also achieves state-of-the-art quality on standard novel view synthesis benchmarks.