# Fast and Lightweight Novel View Synthesis with Differentiable Multiplane Image

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.02068 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.02068/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [Mip-NeRF: A Multiscale Representation for Anti-Aliasing Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13415/) (2021)
- [pixelNeRF: Neural Radiance Fields from One or Few Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02190/) (2020)
- [VGGT: Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11651/) (2025)
- [TensoRF: Tensorial Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09517/) (2022)
- [Improved Techniques for Training Score-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09011/) (2020)
- [MVSNeRF: Fast Generalizable Radiance Field Reconstruction from Multi-View Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15595/) (2021)
- [IBRNet: Learning Multi-View Image-Based Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.13090/) (2021)
- [pixelSplat: 3D Gaussian Splats from Image Pairs for Scalable Generalizable 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12337/) (2023)
- [Mip-Splatting: Alias-free 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16493/) (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)
- [π3: Permutation-Equivariant Visual Geometry Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13347/) (2025)
- [Single-View View Synthesis with Multiplane Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11364/) (2020)
- [DeepView: View Synthesis with Learned Gradient Descent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07316/) (2019)
- [AnySplat: Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting from Unconstrained Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23716/) (2025)
- [NeX: Real-time View Synthesis with Neural Basis Expansion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05606/) (2021)
- [VastGaussian: Vast 3D Gaussians for Large Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17427/) (2024)
- [3D Photography using Context-aware Layered Depth Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04727/) (2020)
- [Neural Rays for Occlusion-aware Image-based Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13421/) (2021)
- [CityGaussian: Real-time High-quality Large-Scale Scene Rendering with Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01133/) (2024)
- [Pushing the Boundaries of View Extrapolation with Multiplane Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00413/) (2019)
- [Stereo Radiance Fields (SRF): Learning View Synthesis for Sparse Views of Novel Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06935/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, novel view synthesis has witnessed remarkable progress, with mainstream methods such as Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) delivering impressive results. However, these approaches often struggle to balance rendering speed and model size, and their optimization-based training can be highly time-consuming. Furthermore, they typically rely on dense observations, often failing to produce satisfactory results under sparse-view conditions. Although feed-forward reconstruction significantly reduces the optimization time of 3DGS, its pixel-aligned formulation generates millions of Gaussians from a single image, severely limiting its practical deployment on mobile devices. To address these limitations, we revisit the Multiplane Image(MPI) representation, which represents scenes using a compact set of planar layers for efficient novel view synthesis. Leveraging recent advances in visual foundation models, we utilize predicted point maps for reliable geometric initialization, followed by differentiable optimization. To address the issues of holes and artifacts in sparsely initialized MPI, we introduce one-step diffusion, which participates in both the differentiable optimization of MPI and the postprocessing of rendering results. Compared with a representative GS-based method, our approach is 30.7% faster and uses only 14.8% of its model size, while achieving competitive synthesis quality on front-view scenarios