Thinking with Novel Views: A Systematic Analysis of Generative-Augmented Spatial Intelligence

Current Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) struggle with spatial reasoning tasks requiring viewpoint-dependent understanding, largely because they are confined to a single, static observation. We propose Thinking with Novel Views (TwNV), a paradigm that integrates generative novel-view synthesis into the reasoning loop: a Reasoner LMM identifies spatial ambiguity, instructs a Painter to synthesize an alternative viewpoint, and re-examines the scene with the additional evidence. Through systematic experiments we address three research questions. (1) Instruction format: numerical camera-pose specifications yield more reliable view control than free-form language. (2) Generation fidelity: synthesized view quality is tightly coupled with downstream spatial accuracy. (3) Inference-time visual scaling: iterative multi-turn view refinement further improves performance, echoing recent scaling trends in language reasoning. Across four spatial subtask categories and four LMM architectures (both closed- and open-source), TwNV consistently improves accuracy by +1.3 to +3.9 pp, with the largest gains on viewpoint-sensitive subtasks. These results establish novel-view generation as a practical lever for advancing spatial intelligence of LMMs.

DySurface: Consistent 4D Surface Reconstruction via Bridging Explicit Gaussians and Implicit Functions

While novel view synthesis (NVS) for dynamic scenes has seen significant progress, reconstructing temporally consistent geometric surfaces remains a challenge. Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) offer powerful dynamic scene rendering capabilities; however, relying solely on photometric optimization often leads to geometric ambiguities. This results in discontinuous surfaces, severe artifacts, and broken surfaces over time. To address these limitations, we present DySurface, a novel framework that bridges the effectiveness of explicit Gaussians with the geometric fidelity of implicit Signed Distance Functions (SDFs) in dynamic scenes. Our approach tackles the structural discrepancy between the forward deformation of 3DGS ($canonical \rightarrow dynamic$) and the backward deformation required for volumetric SDF rendering ($dynamic \rightarrow canonical$). Specifically, we propose the VoxGS-DSDF branch that leverages deformed Gaussians to construct a dynamic sparse voxel grid, providing explicit geometric guidance to the implicit SDF field. This explicit anchoring effectively regularizes the volumetric rendering process, significantly improving surface reconstruction quality, with watertight boundaries and detailed representations. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that DySurface significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in geometric accuracy metrics while maintaining competitive rendering performance.

3DReflecNet: A Large-Scale Dataset for 3D Reconstruction of Reflective, Transparent, and Low-Texture Objects

Accurate 3D reconstruction of objects with reflective, transparent, or low-texture surfaces still remains notoriously challenging. Such materials often violate key assumptions in multi-view reconstruction pipelines, such as photometric consistency and the availability on distinct geometric texture cues. Existing datasets primarily focus on diffuse, textured objects, and therefore provide limited insight into performance under real-world material complexities. We introduce 3DReflecNet, a large-scale hybrid dataset exceeding 22 TB that is specifically designed to benchmark and advance 3D vision methods for these challenging materials. 3DReflecNet combines two types of data: over 120,000 synthetic instances generated via physically-based rendering of more than 12,000 shapes, and over 1,000 real-world objects captured using consumer devices. Together, these data consist of more than 7 million multi-view frames. The dataset spans diverse materials, complex lighting conditions, and a wide range of geometric forms, including shapes generated from both real and LLM-synthesized 2D images using diffusion-based pipelines. To support robust evaluation, we design benchmarks for five core tasks: image matching, structure-from-motion, novel view synthesis, reflection removal, and relighting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that state-of-the-art methods struggle to maintain accuracy across these settings, highlighting the need for more resilient 3D vision models.

Low-Cost Neural Radiance Fields

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) achieve high-quality novel-view synthesis, but their long training times and reliance on dense input views limit accessibility. We present a comparative study of three accelerated NeRF variants - DS-NeRF, TensoRF, and HashNeRF and explore extensions targeted at the low-compute, low-data regime. First, we add a depth-supervision loss derived from COLMAP keypoints to TensoRF (TensoRF-DS) and evaluate it on the LLFF dataset under reduced view counts. Second, we ablate the feature-decoding MLP of TensoRF and study the effect of input downsampling on PSNR and runtime on the synthetic Lego scene. Third, we propose four architectural variants of the HashNeRF color and density networks, including residual and convolutional designs, and report PSNR/training-time tradeoffs under matched iteration budgets. Under iso-time evaluation, none of our extensions conclusively outperform the published baselines, but the experiments characterize which extensions transfer to constrained settings and surface design questions for future work.

ConFixGS: Learning to Fix Feedforward 3D Gaussian Splatting with Confidence-Aware Diffusion Priors in Driving Scenes

Feedforward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) often struggles in trajectory-based sparse-view driving scenes. Existing Gaussian repair methods mainly target optimization-based 3DGS, while diffusion-based repair is typically restricted to iterative refinement near observed viewpoints, leaving feedforward 3DGS repair underexplored. We propose ConFixGS, a plug-and-play method that learns to fix feedforward 3DGS with confidence-aware diffusion priors. Starting from a pretrained feedforward model, ConFixGS generates diffusion-enhanced local pseudo-targets and validates them through reprojection-based cross-checking against support views. The resulting dense confidence maps guide refinement, enhancing reliable details while suppressing hallucinated or inconsistent evidence. On Waymo, nuScenes, and KITTI, ConFixGS improves challenging novel view synthesis, with PSNR gains of up to 3.68 dB and FID reduced by nearly half. Our results highlight confidence-aware fusion of generative priors and support-view consistency as a key principle for robust feedforward 3D driving scene reconstruction.

DeformMaster: An Interactive Physics-Neural World Model for Deformable Objects from Videos

World models for deformable objects should recover not only geometry and appearance, but also underlying physical dynamics, interaction grounding, and material behavior. Learning such a model from real videos is challenging because deformable linear, planar, and volumetric objects evolve under high-dimensional deformation, noisy interactions, and complex material response. The model must therefore infer a physical state from visual observations, roll it forward under new interactions, and render the resulting dynamics with high visual fidelity. We present DeformMaster, a video-derived interactive physics--neural world model that turns real interaction videos into an online interactive model of deformable objects within a unified dynamics-and-appearance framework. DeformMaster preserves structured physical rollout while using a neural residual to compensate for unmodeled effects, grounds sparse hand motion as distributed compliant actuator for hand--continuum interaction, represents material response with spatially varying constitutive experts, and drives high-fidelity 4D appearance from the predicted physical evolution. Experiments on real-world deformable-object sequences demonstrate DeformMaster's ability to roll out future dynamics and render dynamic appearance, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines while supporting novel action rollout, material-parameter variation, and dynamic novel-view synthesis.

Generating Roadside LiDAR Datasets from Vehicle-Side Datasets via Novel View Synthesis

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) require reliable environmental perception to support safe and efficient transportation. With the rapid development of Vehicle-to-everything (V2X), roadside perception has become an effective means to extend sensing coverage and improve traffic safety. However, the scarcity of large-scale annotated roadside LiDAR datasets poses a major challenge for training high-performance roadside perception models. In this paper, we introduce Vehicle-to-Roadside LiDAR Synthesis (VRS), a data synthesis framework that generates labeled roadside LiDAR datasets from vehicle-side datasets via LiDAR novel view synthesis. To mitigate the vehicle-to-roadside domain gap, VRS employs vehicle point cloud completion to compensate for missing geometry in vehicle-side observations, and introduces an occupancy-based visibility constraint to handle large viewpoint changes during cross-view rendering. The proposed framework enables flexible multi-view rendering for scalable roadside data generation. Extensive experiments on roadside 3D object detection demonstrate that the synthesized data effectively complements real roadside data, mitigates the limitations of limited real-world roadside data, and improves generalization to unseen roadside viewpoints.

3DSS: 3D Surface Splatting for Inverse Rendering

We present 3D Surface Splatting (3DSS), the first differentiable surface splatting renderer for physically-based inverse rendering from multi-view images. Our central insight is that the surface separation problem at the heart of surface splatting admits a direct formulation in terms of the reconstruction kernels themselves. From this foundation we derive a coverage-based compositing model whose per-layer opacity arises directly from the accumulated Elliptical Weighted Average reconstruction weight, yielding anti-aliased silhouettes and informative visibility gradients at sparsely covered edges. Combined with forward microfacet shading under co-optimized HDR environment lighting and density-aware adaptive refinement, 3DSS jointly recovers shape, spatially-varying BRDF materials, and illumination. Because the optimized representation is a set of oriented surface samples, it bridges natively to mesh-based workflows via surface reconstruction from oriented point cloud methods. We evaluate 3DSS against mesh-based, implicit, and Gaussian-splatting baselines across geometry reconstruction, novel-view synthesis, and novel-illumination relighting.

QuadBox: Accelerating 3D Gaussian Splatting with Geometry-Aware Boxes

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as an advanced technique for real-time novel view synthesis by representing scene geometry and appearance using differentiable Gaussian primitives. However, efficiently computing precise Gaussian-tile intersections remains a critical task in the rasterization pipeline. To this end, we propose QuadBox, a method that leverages four axis-aligned bounding boxes to tightly encapsulate projected Gaussians in a discrete manner. First, we derive a geometry-aware stretching factor that enables the construction of a tile-aligned QuadBox, which covers the elliptical projection and largely excludes irrelevant tiles. Second, we introduce QPass, a single-pass tile traversal algorithm that exhaustively exploits the discrete nature of QuadBox, ensuring that the tile intersection check is performed with simple interval tests. Experiments on public datasets show that our method accelerates the rendering speed of 3DGS by 1.85$\times$. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/Powertony102/QuadBox}{https://github.com/Powertony102/QuadBox}.

RealCam: Real-Time Novel-View Video Generation with Interactive Camera Control

Camera-controlled video-to-video (V2V) generation enables dynamic viewpoint synthesis from monocular footage, holding immense potential for interactive filmmaking and live broadcasting. However, existing implicit synthesis methods fundamentally rely on non-causal, full-sequence processing and rigid prefix-style temporal concatenation. This architectural paradigm mandates bidirectional attention, resulting in prohibitive computational latency, quadratic complexity scaling, and inherent incompatibility with real-time streaming or variable-length inputs. To overcome these limitations, we introduce \texttt{RealCam}, a novel autoregressive framework for interactive, real-time camera-controlled V2V generation. We first design a high-fidelity teacher model grounded in a \textbf{Cross-frame In-context Learning} paradigm. By interleaving source and target frames into synchronized contextual pairs, our design inherently enables length-agnostic generalization and naturally facilitates causal adaptation, breaking the rigid prefix bottleneck. We then distill this teacher into a few-step causal student via Self-Forcing with Distribution Matching Distillation, enabling efficient, on-the-fly streaming synthesis. Furthermore, to mitigate severe loop inconsistency in closed-loop trajectories, we propose \textbf{Loop-Closed Data Augmentation (LoopAug)}, a novel paradigm that synthesizes globally consistent loop sequences from existing multiview datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \texttt{RealCam} achieves state-of-the-art visual fidelity and temporal consistency while enabling truly interactive camera control with orders-of-magnitude faster inference than existing paradigms. Our project page is at https://xyc-fly.github.io/RealCam/.