Epipolar-Free 3D Gaussian Splatting for Generalizable Novel View Synthesis

Generalizable 3D Gaussian splitting (3DGS) can reconstruct new scenes from sparse-view observations in a feed-forward inference manner, eliminating the need for scene-specific retraining required in conventional 3DGS. However, existing methods rely heavily on epipolar priors, which can be unreliable in complex real-world scenes, particularly in non-overlapping and occluded regions. In this paper, we propose eFreeSplat, an efficient feed-forward 3DGS-based model for generalizable novel view synthesis that operates independently of epipolar line constraints. To enhance multiview feature extraction with 3D perception, we employ a self-supervised Vision Transformer (ViT) with cross-view completion pre-training on large-scale datasets. Additionally, we introduce an Iterative Cross-view Gaussians Alignment method to ensure consistent depth scales across different views.