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.

Sun 25 OctComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionGraphics
The gist
3D Gaussian Splatting is a way to create 3D images quickly and clearly, but it needs a lot of storage space. The authors introduce RacerGS, a new method that compresses these 3D images to much smaller sizes without losing image quality. It uses smart features like hash projections and a special model that predicts and compresses data efficiently by understanding patterns in the 3D scene. Tests showed RacerGS can shrink data size by over 150 times compared to the original method while keeping images sharp and detailed.
Open → 2610.34263v1

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.

Fri 9 OctComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionGraphics
The gist
Creating detailed 3D models using limited resources is challenging because some methods focus too much on well-reconstructed parts and neglect others. The authors propose a way to add new 3D points based on where the image errors are largest and where the system is least confident about the reconstruction. This approach helps put more effort into improving less accurate areas, resulting in better overall 3D models. Their method works well without needing any prior information and improves quality across different resource levels.
Open → 2610.13541v1

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.

Tue 6 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Working with 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) research is hard because it takes a lot of time to recreate the code from papers before improving it. The researchers created SPLATIFY, a system that can read 3DGS papers and automatically produce working code implementations, saving weeks of effort. SPLATIFY also improves on original methods by combining ideas and pulls in knowledge from outside 3DGS to handle new kinds of scenes. It performs as well as experts and can create new methods for special uses like rendering nebula clouds.
Open → 2610.09116v1

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.

Wed 30 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionGraphics
The gist
Creating 3D scenes from images involves learning both shape and color. This paper shows that the brightness (luminance) of a scene plays a bigger role in accurately forming its 3D shape than the color information alone. The researchers tested this by separating brightness and color during training and found that shapes learned from brightness alone were almost as good as those learned from full color. When color data was removed, the appearance could still be restored well on the fixed shapes formed mostly by brightness information.
Open → 2610.00749v1

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.

Sat 26 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Large 3D point cloud models can be too big to handle easily on computers. This paper introduces a way to store these models more compactly by breaking down the shapes into simpler parts based on frequencies, like sound waves. The method keeps basic shapes clearly and adds details carefully so the model looks right after being compressed. The researchers showed their method works well on huge 3D scans with millions of points, shrinking the size more than older methods without losing important detail.
Open → 2609.32789v1

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.

Sat 19 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
3D Gaussian Splatting creates detailed 3D scenes but uses a lot of storage space because it stores many small pieces called Gaussian primitives. The authors propose a new way to shrink this data by better organizing these pieces based on their features, not just their positions, allowing some pieces to help describe others. They also gather and share common scene details globally, so each piece doesn’t have to store the same information repeatedly. Their approach reduces file size by about 30% while keeping the quality of the 3D images similar.
Open → 2609.23005v1

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.

Wed 9 SeptComputational Geometry
The gist
Measuring distances on curved surfaces called hyperbolic surfaces is a basic problem that was not solved efficiently before. The authors designed new algorithms that quickly find the shortest distance between two points on these surfaces, even when the surface is complex. They also created methods to answer many distance queries from one point and to approximate or exactly calculate the surface's diameter. Their work helps reveal important geometric features of these curved surfaces, which were hard to analyze before due to mathematical challenges.
Open → 2609.09549v1

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.

Mon 7 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
When creating new views of 3D scenes from digital models, errors and odd visual glitches can appear. Existing methods to check image quality compare each view directly to a reference image, which is hard when views come from different angles or positions. The paper introduces SCODA, a method that checks quality by understanding the overall scene instead of comparing individual images. It models the scene using multiple example views, then measures how much new views fit into this model and look realistic. Their tests show SCODA agrees well with human opinions and works across different 3D rendering techniques.
Open → 2609.07346v1