Gumbel-NeRF: Representing Unseen Objects as Part-Compositional Neural Radiance Fields

We propose Gumbel-NeRF, a mixture-of-expert (MoE) neural radiance fields (NeRF) model with a hindsight expert selection mechanism for synthesizing novel views of unseen objects. Previous studies have shown that the MoE structure provides high-quality representations of a given large-scale scene consisting of many objects. However, we observe that such a MoE NeRF model often produces low-quality representations in the vicinity of experts’ boundaries when applied to the task of novel view synthesis of an unseen object from one/few-shot input. We find that this deterioration is primarily caused by the foresight expert selection mechanism, which may leave an unnatural discontinuity in the object shape near the experts’ boundaries. Gumbel-NeRF adopts a hindsight expert selection mechanism, which guarantees continuity in the density field even near the experts’ boundaries. Experiments using the SRN cars dataset demonstrate the superiority of Gumbel-NeRF over the baselines in terms of various image quality metrics. The code will be available upon acceptance.