CoTL: Compact Token Learning for 3D Scene Representation

We present CoTL, a framework that learns a compact set of tokens that preserves scene geometry and appearance from unposed multi-view images. Our encoder compresses the input images into small per-view sets of latent tokens that aggregate information across views to form a view-consistent scene representation. Each additional view expands the representation with only a small, resolution-independent set of tokens, allowing its capacity to grow with the available observations. To force this compact bottleneck to retain sufficient scene information, a query-based Gaussian decoder uses scene-independent queries to attend to the learned tokens and recover an explicit, renderable set of 3D Gaussian primitives. Novel-view rendering supervision trains the compact representation end to end through the reconstructed Gaussian scene. Experiments on RealEstate10K and ACID show that the resulting compact, unstructured token set supports competitive novel-view synthesis and can serve as the latent space of a generative model for 3D Gaussian scene generation. Together, these results show that 3D Gaussian reconstruction is an effective objective for compact scene representation learning and the learned token space provides a basis for broader downstream tasks in 3D vision.