# Fast 3D Foundation Model Initialized Gaussian Splatting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.03209 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03209/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [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)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12077/) (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)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [Grounding Image Matching in 3D with MASt3R](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09756/) (2024)
- [gsplat: An Open-Source Library for Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06765/) (2024)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting as Markov Chain Monte Carlo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09591/) (2024)
- [RobustNeRF: Ignoring Distractors with Robust Losses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00833/) (2023)
- [Gaussian Splatting: 3D Reconstruction and Novel View Synthesis, a Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03417/) (2024)
- [Dense-SfM: Structure from Motion with Dense Consistent Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.14277/) (2025)
- [GAPrompt: Geometry-Aware Point Cloud Prompt for 3D Vision Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04119/) (2025)
- [3R-GS: Best Practice in Optimizing Camera Poses Along with 3DGS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04294/) (2025)
- [ZeroGS: Training 3D Gaussian Splatting from Unposed Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15779/) (2024)
- [VGGT-X: When VGGT Meets Dense Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25191/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper introduces a fast method for high-quality 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) reconstruction without traditional Structure-from-Motion (SfM). The proposed approach leverages 3D Foundation Models (3DFMs) for camera pose and point-cloud initialization, then jointly optimizes both camera poses and Gaussian primitives using a depth-guided loss function. This enables fast convergence even from rough initialization with as few as 50-60 input views. To further improve reconstruction quality in sparse-view scenarios, an MLP-based pose refinement module is introduced alongside depth-guided supervision from the foundation model. Extensive experiments on Mip-NeRF 360, Tanks and Temples, and RobustNeRF demonstrate that the proposed method achieves competitive reconstruction quality (23.61 dB PSNR, 0.19 LPIPS) while reducing training time to approximately three minutes per scene. The proposed method produces ready-to-use 3DGS models at a fraction of the time required by existing pipelines, making it suitable for near real-time applications in robotics, VR, and autonomous navigation.