Papers for
3d graphics engineers
Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.
3D Gaussian splatting method cuts data size over 150 times
RacerGS: Residual-Autoregressive Context for 3D Gaussian Splatting Compression
Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a promising approach for fast, high-quality novel-view rendering. However, its large parameter size remains a bottleneck for storage and transmission. We propose RacerGS, a compact 3DGS compression framework that achieves scene reconstruction at significantly reduced storage sizes with preserved fidelity. To obtain compact and spatially coherent features, we design a hash projection model that projects the anchor hash encodings into compact context features. Additionally, we introduce a FiLM-modulated autoregressive GRU context model that utilizes causal dependencies among anchor feature groups and uses recurrent hidden states to refine entropy-model parameters, improving bitrate efficiency. Furthermore, we adaptively entropy-code quantized anchor-attribute residuals relative to their context-predicted means, leveraging spatial consistency to reduce symbol entropy. Overall, RacerGS achieves more than 150x compression over vanilla 3DGS and 28x over Scaffold-GS, while providing comparable rendering quality. Extensive experiments across five datasets demonstrate that RacerGS outperforms prior 3DGS compression methods in both storage reduction and rate-distortion performance.
New method improves 3D scene reconstruction under fixed budgets
Efficient Confidence-Aware Densification for 3DGS
Abstract: 3DGS-MCMC has replaced the gradient-driven density control of 3D Gaussian Splatting with opacity-based sampling and relocation, and is now the de facto standard for prior-free densification under a fixed primitive budget. Because opacity stays high where the scene is already well reconstructed, this sampling sends most new primitives to the foreground and leaves the background under-reconstructed. At low budgets, prior-based methods such as ConeGS and EDGS outperform it, at the cost of a pre-trained radiance field or dense image matches and a separate initialization stage. We argue for a comeback of error-driven densification within the fixed-budget MCMC framework. Our confidence-aware densification keeps the fixed budget and gradual growth of 3DGS-MCMC, but places primitives by the image error instead of the opacity. New primitives are drawn mostly where screen-space gradients are large. We favor primitives with a low learned confidence, which marks regions the reconstruction still explains poorly, and relocate the primitives that contribute least to the rendered images to these places. Averaged over 24 scenes, our method outperforms 3DGS-MCMC in PSNR, SSIM and LPIPS at every budget from 100k to 2M primitives. At 100k, without a prior or an initialization stage, it recovers 0.84dB of the 1.05dB PSNR by which ConeGS leads 3DGS-MCMC, and from 500k on, it has the highest PSNR and SSIM of all fixed-budget methods we compare with, including ConeGS and EDGS. While inherently prior-free, our densification can also exploit priors: from the ConeGS or EDGS initialization, it matches ConeGS in PSNR and SSIM at 100k and is best in all three metrics at 500k.
SPLATIFY turns 3D Gaussian Splatting papers into ready trainable code fast
SPLATIFY: Reproduce, Discover, Innovate! From Papers and Ideas to Trainable 3DGS Code
Abstract: The rapid growth of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) research demands significant effort to reimplement papers before building on them. We introduce SPLATIFY, a multi-agent framework that converts 3DGS papers into trainable gsplat-based implementations, where generic paper-to-code methods and frontier models fail. SPLATIFY achieves this through five innovations: (1) A context-free grammar for gsplat over a modular method template with extension points for losses, densification, rendering, and optimization, constraining synthesis so generated code satisfies gsplat's architectural invariants by construction. (2) Architectural elements for faithful reproduction: fork-aware citation recovery retrieving component-level code at function-level granularity, Graph-of-Thought synthesis in topological dependency order, RAG-guided in-context example selection from over 20 verified implementations, and visual feedback combining PSNR-guided regeneration, Gaussian-level structural checks, and VLM-driven patching. (3) Knowledge-driven compositional improvement that autonomously finds weaknesses and composes complementary regularizers, losses, and densification strategies to improve upon original results. (4) Interdisciplinary method discovery where agents retrieve physical priors from outside the 3DGS literature and compose them with rendering knowledge to produce methods for previously unaddressed scene types. (5) SPLATIFY-Bench, an evaluation framework across 30 diverse 3DGS papers. On papers without public code, SPLATIFY matches expert implementations while reducing development time from weeks to minutes, and through compositional discovery further improves PSNR by up to 2.4 dB. We additionally demonstrate novel methods for volumetric nebula rendering and other scientific domains, synthesized entirely by SPLATIFY.
Luminance drives better 3D shape learning than color in Gaussian splatting
What Builds the Scene? Luminance Dominates Geometry Formation in 3D Gaussian Splatting
Abstract: Standard 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) learns geometry and appearance jointly from RGB supervision, making it difficult to isolate how luminance and chroma contribute to the learned representation. We study this by training models under different channel supervision, freezing their non-appearance parameters (position, scale, rotation, and opacity), and re-estimating appearance with the same solver before comparing held-out reconstruction. Across eleven benchmark scenes with four independent runs each, geometry learned from luminance alone supports held-out reconstruction 0.085 dB below RGB-trained geometry on average. If chroma is deleted from a trained model, a sufficiently expressive solver can re-fit it on the frozen geometry to the original quality or slightly better. Higher-order spherical harmonics contribute much more reconstruction quality to luminance than to chroma, improving PSNR by 1.44 dB versus 0.19 dB on average, although on mirror-like surfaces hue does still change with viewpoint. The luminance advantage is even larger when geometry is being formed. Chroma-only supervision produces geometry 3.9-5.5 dB worse than luminance-only supervision after the same appearance solve; densification explains part of this gap. Overall, geometry formation in standard 3DGS is strongly luminance-dominated but not luminance-exclusive, and much of the chromatic appearance can be recovered after spatial support has formed.
Hierarchical frequency method compresses large point clouds efficiently
Hierarchical Frequency-Domain Compression of Implicit Geometric Representations for Large-Scale Point Clouds
Abstract: Large-scale point cloud representations of complex geome tries incur prohibitive computational and memory costs, necessitating compressed implicit representations. To ad dress this, we propose a unified framework comprising im plicit geometric field representation, hierarchical frequency domain compression, and conditional high-frequency predic tion. Specifically, an unordered point cloud is mapped to an implicit field defined within its physical bounding box. A smooth Fourier pyramid is then constructed, where com pact low-frequency components capture the global geometry. Inter-scale high-frequency residuals are encoded to preserve the spatial information required for reconstructing fine geo metric details. To restore the high-frequency information lost during compression, we develop a hierarchical 3D neural net work. The reconstructed implicit field is converted back into a point cloud through isosurface extraction. Experiments on a complex-boundary point cloud with more than eight mil lion points demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a higher compression ratio than existing point cloud compres sion methods while maintaining comparable reconstruction quality.
Compression method cuts 3D gaussian splatting data size by 30 percent
Compressing 3D Gaussian Splatting via Cross-Representation Priors
Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables high-quality novel view synthesis but incurs high storage and transmission costs due to dense Gaussian primitives. Recent anchor-based compression reduces per-primitive redundancy, yet redundancy across anchors remains largely unexploited. We propose CRP-GS (Cross-Representation Priors for Gaussian Splatting), a rate-distortion optimized compression framework that leverages cross-representation priors to improve anchor-level entropy modeling. First, a Correspondence-Oriented Hierarchical Structure (COHS) organizes anchors by feature correspondence rather than spatial proximity, constructing root-leaf dependencies so that selected anchors can act as informative priors to conditionally encode others, yielding more accurate likelihood prediction and lower conditional entropy. Second, Shared Feature Aggregation (SFA) extracts globally shared features from a contextual hash grid and injects them into anchor representations, factoring out scene-consistent low-frequency information that would otherwise be redundantly embedded in individual anchors. Both modules are trained under a unified rate-distortion objective to balance bitrate reduction and rendering fidelity. Experiments across multiple benchmarks show that CRP-GS achieves a favorable overall rate-distortion trade-off, yielding around 30% average bitrate reduction compared to anchor-based baselines while maintaining comparable rendering quality.
Efficient algorithms compute distances and diameter on hyperbolic surfaces
The Hyperbolic Surface Distance, Diameter, and Dirichlet Problems
Abstract: Despite the prominence of hyperbolic surfaces in mathematics, basic algorithmic questions about them, even computing the distance between two points, have remained open, leaving many features of these surfaces inaccessible. The classical machinery assumes a polyhedral structure absent on a smooth surface. We remove these obstacles. We begin with an efficient $O(g^2)$ algorithm for the distance between two points, where $g$ is the genus of the surface. Building on it, we obtain an $O(g^2 \log g)$ method for answering distance queries from a fixed source and, as a consequence, for recentering a Dirichlet domain around an arbitrary point. This understanding of distances on the surface then lets us approximate the diameter to within any $\eps$ in time $O(g^3 \log g / \eps^2)$. We further show that the diameter, a single real number encoding a great deal about the surface, is exactly computable. Its hyperbolic cosine is an algebraic number over the field encoding the coefficients of the hyperbolic isometries defining the surface.
Scene manifold modeling improves quality scores for 3D view rendering
From Explicit References to Scene Manifolds: Distributional Fidelity and Realism for Radiance Field Quality Assessment
Abstract: Radiance field representations such as 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enable high-quality novel view synthesis but can introduce complex, view-dependent artifacts from reconstruction, rendering, and compression. Reliable perceptual quality assessment (QA) is thus essential for evaluating rendered views and guiding the design of perceptually faithful scene representations. Existing full-reference QA metrics require an aligned reference image, while recent cross-reference metrics relax this requirement by comparing a test view with non-aligned references. However, under wide-baseline radiance field settings, selecting a reliable nearby reference can be difficult, particularly when evaluating views along arbitrary trajectories and poses. We propose SCODA, a lightweight scene-conditioned objective QA method that shifts QA from explicit image-to-image comparison to scene-manifold modeling. High-quality observations of each scene are represented as a multivariate Gaussian distribution in deep feature space, producing a semantic fidelity score that measures deviation from the scene distribution. A weakly-supervised distortion-aware patch discriminator provides a complementary realism signal, and both cues are combined through an unsupervised bounded fusion strategy. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show strong agreement with human judgments and robust generalization across GS- and NeRF-generated views and trajectories. Code is publicly available at https://gitlab.com/saeedmp/scoda.