NeRF-GAN Distillation for Efficient 3D-Aware Generation with Convolutions
This work addresses the computational bottleneck in 3D-aware generation for applications like graphics and vision, offering an incremental improvement by combining existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of inefficient 3D-aware image generation from single-view datasets by distilling 3D knowledge from NeRF-GANs into pose-conditioned convolutional networks, achieving results comparable to volumetric rendering in quality and 3D consistency while leveraging the computational efficiency of convolutions.
Pose-conditioned convolutional generative models struggle with high-quality 3D-consistent image generation from single-view datasets, due to their lack of sufficient 3D priors. Recently, the integration of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) and generative models, such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), has transformed 3D-aware generation from single-view images. NeRF-GANs exploit the strong inductive bias of neural 3D representations and volumetric rendering at the cost of higher computational complexity. This study aims at revisiting pose-conditioned 2D GANs for efficient 3D-aware generation at inference time by distilling 3D knowledge from pretrained NeRF-GANs. We propose a simple and effective method, based on re-using the well-disentangled latent space of a pre-trained NeRF-GAN in a pose-conditioned convolutional network to directly generate 3D-consistent images corresponding to the underlying 3D representations. Experiments on several datasets demonstrate that the proposed method obtains results comparable with volumetric rendering in terms of quality and 3D consistency while benefiting from the computational advantage of convolutional networks. The code will be available at: https://github.com/mshahbazi72/NeRF-GAN-Distillation