Anchor3DGS: Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting with Compact Anchor-Based Representation

Recent feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) methods have enabled effective multi-view 3D reconstruction by predicting Gaussian primitives in a single forward pass. However, existing approaches predominantly adopt a pixel-aligned paradigm that predicts one Gaussian per input pixel, coupling the Gaussian count to the input resolution and number of views. This also leads to redundant primitives in textureless regions and insufficient coverage in geometrically complex areas. We present Anchor3DGS, a pose-free feed-forward 3DGS framework that replaces pixel-aligned prediction with a compact anchor-based representation. Guided by information entropy, our method places a set of 3D anchors in the scene, concentrating them in regions of higher visual complexity while maintaining broad spatial coverage. Each anchor performs occlusion-aware aggregation of multi-view image features, exchanges information with other anchors, and is decoded into a set of local Gaussians. A lightweight feature enhancement module further refines the coarse RGB output from Gaussian splatting and improves rendering fidelity. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmark datasets demonstrate that our Anchor3DGS achieves state-of-the-art novel view synthesis quality while only using an order of magnitude fewer Gaussian primitives.