LVSM: A Large View Synthesis Model with Minimal 3D Inductive Bias

We propose the Large View Synthesis Model (LVSM), a novel transformer-based approach for scalable and generalizable novel view synthesis from sparse-view inputs. We introduce two architectures: (1) an encoder-decoder LVSM, which encodes input image tokens into a fixed number of 1D latent tokens, functioning as a fully learned scene representation, and decodes novel-view images from them; and (2) a decoder-only LVSM, which directly maps input images to novelview outputs, completely eliminating intermediate scene representations. Both models bypass the 3D inductive biases used in previous methods--from 3D representations (e.g., NeRF, 3DGS) to network designs (e.g., epipolar projections, plane sweeps)--addressing novel view synthesis with a fully data-driven approach. While the encoder-decoder model offers faster inference due to its independent latent representation, the decoder-only LVSM achieves superior quality, scalability, and zero-shot generalization, outperforming previous state-of-the-art methods by 1.5 to 3.5 dB PSNR. Comprehensive evaluations across multiple datasets demonstrate that both LVSM variants achieve state-of-the-art novel view synthesis quality. Notably, our models surpass all previous methods even with reduced computational resources (1-2 GPUs). Novel view synthesis is a long-standing challenge in vision and graphics. For decades, the community has generally relied on various 3D inductive biases, incorporating 3D priors and handcrafted structures to simplify the task and improve synthesis quality. Other methods have also built generalizable networks to estimate these representations or directly generate novel-view images in a feed-forward manner, often incorporating additional 3D inductive biases, such as projective epipolar lines or plane-sweep volumes, in their architecture designs (Wang et al., 2021a; Yu et al., 2021; Chen et al., 2021; Suhail et al., 2022b; Charatan et al., 2024; Chen et al., 2024). While effective, these 3D inductive biases inherently limit model flexibility, constraining their adaptability to more diverse and complex scenarios that do not align with predefined priors or handcrafted structures.