2Xplat: Decoupling Geometry and Appearance Modeling for Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting

Pose-free feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has opened a new frontier for rapid 3D modeling, enabling high-quality Gaussian representations to be generated from uncalibrated multi-view images in a single forward pass. The dominant approach adopts unified monolithic architectures, often built on geometry-centric 3D foundation models, to jointly estimate camera poses and synthesize 3DGS representations within a single network, entangling geometric reasoning and appearance modeling within a shared representation. In this work, we introduce 2Xplat, a pose-free feed-forward 3DGS framework based on a two-experts design that explicitly separates geometry estimation from Gaussian generation: a dedicated geometry expert first predicts camera poses, which are then passed to an appearance expert that synthesizes 3D Gaussians. Despite its conceptual simplicity, and being largely underexplored in prior works, our two-experts pipeline outperforms prior pose-free feed-forward 3DGS approaches in fewer than 5K training iterations, achieving performance on par with state-of-the-art posed methods. These results challenge the prevailing unified paradigm and suggest the potential advantages of modular design for complex 3D geometric estimation and appearance synthesis tasks.