Hope this doesn't come as snarky, but does Google pressure researchers to do PR in their papers? This really is cool, but there is a lot of self-promotion in this paper and very little discussion of limitations (and the discussion of them is bookended by qualifications why they really aren't limitations).
It makes it harder for me to trust the paper if I feel like the paper is trying to persuade me of something rather than describe the complete findings.
I won't say too much about this, but the amount of buzz around articles these days is more of "research today" sort of thing. Top conferences like CVPR receives thousands of submissions each year, and there's a lot of upside to getting your work in front of as many eyeballs as possible.
By no means do I claim that SMERF is the be-all-end-all in real-time rendering, but I do believe it's a sold step in the right direction. There are all kinds of ways to improve this work and others in the field: smaller representation sizes, faster training, higher quality, and fewer input images would all make this technology more accessible.
Oh absolutely. I guess I just got the feeling reading this that there was more than the standard pride here and that there was professional PR going on. If no one else is getting that vibe I'm okay to accept it's just me.
It makes it harder for me to trust the paper if I feel like the paper is trying to persuade me of something rather than describe the complete findings.