# Instant NuRec: Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Reconstruction for Driving Scene Simulation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14203 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.14203/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Generative simulation for driving, one of 9 directions in End-to-end autonomous driving.
- Builds on 69 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jul 2026.

## Placed in

- End-to-end autonomous driving / [Generative simulation for driving](https://mlsanity.com/driving/generative-simulation-for-driving/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 69)

- [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)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Zero-1-to-3: Zero-shot One Image to 3D Object](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11328/) (2023)
- [NeRF in the Wild: Neural Radiance Fields for Unconstrained Photo Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02268/) (2020)
- [MVDream: Multi-view Diffusion for 3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16512/) (2023)
- [Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03575/) (2025)
- [Structured 3D Latents for Scalable and Versatile 3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01506/) (2024)
- [LGM: Large Multi-View Gaussian Model for High-Resolution 3D Content Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05054/) (2024)
- [Block-NeRF: Scalable Large Scene Neural View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05263/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Mip-Splatting: Alias-free 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16493/) (2023)
- [GAIA-1: A Generative World Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17080/) (2023)
- [MVSplat: Efficient 3D Gaussian Splatting from Sparse Multi-View Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14627/) (2024)
- [DrivingGaussian: Composite Gaussian Splatting for Surrounding Dynamic Autonomous Driving Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07920/) (2023)
- [Hunyuan3D 2.0: Scaling Diffusion Models for High Resolution Textured 3D Assets Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12202/) (2025)
- [GS-LRM: Large Reconstruction Model for 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19702/) (2024)
- [Vista: A Generalizable Driving World Model with High Fidelity and Versatile Controllability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17398/) (2024)
- [Driving into the Future: Multiview Visual Forecasting and Planning with World Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17918/) (2023)
- [Neural Scene Graphs for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10379/) (2020)
- [DepthSplat: Connecting Gaussian Splatting and Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13862/) (2024)
- [Urban Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14643/) (2021)
- [DriveDreamer: Towards Real-world-driven World Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09777/) (2023)
- [ImageDream: Image-Prompt Multi-view Diffusion for 3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02201/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [NavSafe-∞: Benchmarking Closed-Loop Driving Safety in Photorealistic Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.26618/) (2026)
- [Vision-Language-Action Autonomous Driving Agent with Language-based Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38641/) (2026)
- [Into the LidarVerse: A Real-Time Unified LiDAR World Model Across Tasks and Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.19201/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D simulation platforms are critical for autonomous driving because they enable end-to-end policy evaluation, thereby reducing development costs and improving safety. In recent years, neural simulation has become predominant, with methods such as NuRec playing a central role; however, these methods remain relatively slow and typically require per-scene tuning. In this work, we present Instant NuRec, a feed-forward neural reconstruction model that turns a short multi-view driving log into a fully simulatable 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) world in a single forward pass. The model accepts multi-view input from a calibrated camera rig and emits a layered output consisting of static and dynamic 3DGS layers, a sky cubemap, and per-camera ISP corrections, while providing native support for non-pinhole camera models via 3DGUT. It reconstructs a 10-20-second multi-camera scene in roughly 1.5 seconds and achieves a PSNR on the Waymo Open Dataset that is 2.01 dB above the strongest evaluated baseline. Instant NuRec is deeply integrated into NuRec and is compatible with AlpaSim for closed-loop simulation.
