Abstract:Most recent advances in 3D generative modeling rely on diffusion or flow-matching formulations. We instead explore a fully autoregressive alternative and introduce GaussianGPT, a transformer-based model that directly generates 3D Gaussians via next-token prediction, thus facilitating full 3D scene generation. We first compress Gaussian primitives into a discrete latent grid using a sparse 3D convolutional autoencoder with vector quantization. The resulting tokens are serialized and modeled using a causal transformer with 3D rotary positional embedding, enabling sequential generation of spatial structure and appearance. Unlike diffusion-based methods that refine scenes holistically, our formulation constructs scenes step-by-step, naturally supporting completion, outpainting, controllable sampling via temperature, and flexible generation horizons. This formulation leverages the compositional inductive biases and scalability of autoregressive modeling while operating on explicit representations compatible with modern neural rendering pipelines, positioning autoregressive transformers as a complementary paradigm for controllable and context-aware 3D generation.




Abstract:Volumetric rendering has become central to modern novel view synthesis methods, which use differentiable rendering to optimize 3D scene representations directly from observed views. While many recent works build on NeRF or 3D Gaussians, we explore an alternative volumetric scene representation. More specifically, we introduce two new scene representations based on linear primitives-octahedra and tetrahedra-both of which define homogeneous volumes bounded by triangular faces. This formulation aligns naturally with standard mesh-based tools, minimizing overhead for downstream applications. To optimize these primitives, we present a differentiable rasterizer that runs efficiently on GPUs, allowing end-to-end gradient-based optimization while maintaining realtime rendering capabilities. Through experiments on real-world datasets, we demonstrate comparable performance to state-of-the-art volumetric methods while requiring fewer primitives to achieve similar reconstruction fidelity. Our findings provide insights into the geometry of volumetric rendering and suggest that adopting explicit polyhedra can expand the design space of scene representations.