# WildSplatter: Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting with Appearance Control from Unconstrained Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.21182 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21182/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [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)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [GLU Variants Improve Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05202/) (2020)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Grounding Image Matching in 3D with MASt3R](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09756/) (2024)
- [Depth Anything 3: Recovering the Visual Space from Any Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10647/) (2025)
- [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)
- [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)
- [FLARE: Feed-forward Geometry, Appearance and Camera Estimation from Uncalibrated Sparse Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12138/) (2025)
- [Splatt3R: Zero-shot Gaussian Splatting from Uncalibrated Image Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13912/) (2024)
- [WildGaussians: 3D Gaussian Splatting in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08447/) (2024)
- [Hallucinated Neural Radiance Fields in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15246/) (2021)
- [Gaussian in the Wild: 3D Gaussian Splatting for Unconstrained Image Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15704/) (2024)
- [MVSplat360: Feed-Forward 360 Scene Synthesis from Sparse Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04924/) (2024)
- [NeRF for Outdoor Scene Relighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05140/) (2021)
- [PF3plat: Pose-Free Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22128/) (2024)
- [SWAG: Splatting in the Wild images with Appearance-conditioned Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10427/) (2024)
- [MegaScenes: Scene-Level View Synthesis at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11819/) (2024)
- [Wild-GS: Real-Time Novel View Synthesis from Unconstrained Photo Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10373/) (2024)
- [Cross-Ray Neural Radiance Fields for Novel-view Synthesis from Unconstrained Image Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08093/) (2023)
- [FreeSplatter: Pose-free Gaussian Splatting for Sparse-view 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09573/) (2024)
- [No Pose at All: Self-Supervised Pose-Free 3D Gaussian Splatting from Sparse Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01171/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose WildSplatter, a feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) model for unconstrained images with unknown camera parameters and varying lighting conditions. 3DGS is an effective scene representation that enables high-quality, real-time rendering; however, it typically requires iterative optimization and multi-view images captured under consistent lighting with known camera parameters. WildSplatter is trained on unconstrained photo collections and jointly learns 3D Gaussians and appearance embeddings conditioned on input images. This design enables flexible modulation of Gaussian colors to represent significant variations in lighting and appearance. Our method reconstructs 3D Gaussians from sparse input views in under one second, while also enabling appearance control under diverse lighting conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing pose-free 3DGS methods on challenging real-world datasets with varying illumination.