# SpectralSplat: Appearance-Disentangled Feed-Forward Gaussian Splatting for Driving Scenes

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.03462 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03462/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Apr 2026.

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

- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12077/) (2021)
- [NeuS: Learning Neural Implicit Surfaces by Volume Rendering for Multi-view Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10689/) (2021)
- [VGGT: Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11651/) (2025)
- [NeRF in the Wild: Neural Radiance Fields for Unconstrained Photo Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02268/) (2020)
- [2D Gaussian Splatting for Geometrically Accurate Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17888/) (2024)
- [Block-NeRF: Scalable Large Scene Neural View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05263/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Splatter Image: Ultra-Fast Single-View 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13150/) (2023)
- [UniSim: A Neural Closed-Loop Sensor Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01898/) (2023)
- [DepthSplat: Connecting Gaussian Splatting and Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13862/) (2024)
- [3D Reconstruction with Spatial Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16061/) (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)
- [Splatt3R: Zero-shot Gaussian Splatting from Uncalibrated Image Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13912/) (2024)
- [Single Image Portrait Relighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00824/) (2019)
- [WildGaussians: 3D Gaussian Splatting in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08447/) (2024)
- [ARF: Artistic Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06360/) (2022)
- [StyleRF: Zero-shot 3D Style Transfer of Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10598/) (2023)
- [SWAG: Splatting in the Wild images with Appearance-conditioned Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10427/) (2024)
- [Omni-Scene: Omni-Gaussian Representation for Ego-Centric Sparse-View Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06273/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting methods have achieved impressive reconstruction quality for autonomous driving scenes, yet they entangle scene geometry with transient appearance properties such as lighting, weather, and time of day. This coupling prevents relighting, appearance transfer, and consistent rendering across multi-traversal data captured under varying environmental conditions. We present SpectralSplat, a method that disentangles appearance from geometry within a feed-forward Gaussian Splatting framework. Our key insight is to factor color prediction into an appearance-agnostic base stream and and appearance-conditioned adapted stream, both produced by a shared MLP conditioned on a global appearance embedding derived from DINOv2 features. To enforce disentanglement, we train with paired observations generated by a hybrid relighting pipeline that combines physics-based intrinsic decomposition with diffusion based generative refinement, and supervise with complementary consistency, reconstruction, cross-appearance, and base color losses. We further introduce an appearance-adaptable temporal history that stores appearance-agnostic features, enabling accumulated Gaussians to be re-rendered under arbitrary target appearances. Experiments demonstrate that SpectralSplat preserves the reconstruction quality of the underlying backbone while enabling controllable appearance transfer and temporally consistent relighting across driving sequences.