Papers for
game engine teams
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.
ParetoGS improves 3D Gaussian splatting quality across budgets
ParetoGS: High-Quality Continuous-Budget 3D Gaussian Splatting with Sparse Adapted Anchors
Abstract: Scalable 3D Gaussian Splatting allows one scene representation to serve different Gaussian-count budgets, yet its quality-budget curve may lag behind models optimized separately for each budget. Reducing the number of Gaussians changes both the selected members and the reconstruction tasks carried by the survivors; parameters inherited from a high-budget model may fit a low-budget representation poorly. We propose ParetoGS, which describes member changes and parameter evolution with a small set of adapted budget anchors and decodes intermediate budgets without separate optimization at every requested count. ParetoGS alternates pruning and fixed-member adaptation to build nested anchors with persistent identities, and encodes their parameter changes relative to the full model in a compact residual atlas. At decoding, it interpolates the states of shared members and gradually introduces the rendering contributions of new members, connecting sparse anchors into a continuous-budget representation. Across 13 scenes, ParetoGS attains better average PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS with fewer Gaussians than the compared prefix methods at 10% of each method's own full model. From a shared full model, it also outperforms FlexGS-imp at its trained 1%, 5%, and 10% budgets and NanoGS-imp at the 1% and 0.1% budgets. On Garden, its non-anchor quality approaches an empirical reference from independently optimized GNS models at higher retention ratios and exceeds it at some lower-budget points. Across 13 scenes, encoding reduces mean additional state from 390.0 to 85.7 MB with an average PSNR change of 0.01 dB. Project page: https://xiaobin2001.github.io/ParetoGS-Web/
Compact tokens capture 3d scenes from multi view images efficiently
CoTL: Compact Token Learning for 3D Scene Representation
Abstract: We present CoTL, a framework that learns a compact set of tokens that preserves scene geometry and appearance from unposed multi-view images. Our encoder compresses the input images into small per-view sets of latent tokens that aggregate information across views to form a view-consistent scene representation. Each additional view expands the representation with only a small, resolution-independent set of tokens, allowing its capacity to grow with the available observations. To force this compact bottleneck to retain sufficient scene information, a query-based Gaussian decoder uses scene-independent queries to attend to the learned tokens and recover an explicit, renderable set of 3D Gaussian primitives. Novel-view rendering supervision trains the compact representation end to end through the reconstructed Gaussian scene. Experiments on \retenk{} and ACID show that the resulting compact, unstructured token set supports competitive novel-view synthesis and can serve as the latent space of a generative model for 3D Gaussian scene generation. Together, these results show that 3D Gaussian reconstruction is an effective objective for compact scene representation learning and the learned token space provides a basis for broader downstream tasks in 3D vision.
4D Gaussian Splatting compression achieves over 40 times smaller files
TETRIS-4DGS: Efficient Post-Training Compression of 4D Gaussian Splatting
Abstract: 4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS) has emerged as a powerful dynamic scene representation, supporting real-time high quality rendering but suffers from prohibitive storage overhead. Existing methods typically attempt to solve this by treating compression as a per-scene optimization problem, limiting generalizability and applicability where low-latency compression is required. In this work, we leverage existing image and video codecs and propose a generalized post-training compression framework for 4DGS to address these issues. Specifically, we apply importance-based adaptive quantization to Gaussians according to their importance levels, effectively refining bitrate allocation while remaining fully compatible with existing codecs. To further improve compression efficiency, we utilize the statistical properties of 4DGS and propose motion- and importance-aware packing to reorganize attributes into codec-friendly 2D maps. Our approach can achieve over 40x compression rate in seconds while maintaining high quality, facilitating the practical deployment of 4DGS.
CompactSplat improves 3D scene reconstruction with fewer resources
CompactSplat: Spatially Adaptive Gaussian Distribution for Feedforward Scene Reconstruction
Abstract: Reconstructing 3D scenes from sparse views without per-scene optimization remains highly challenging, especially for recovering accurate geometry and fine textures. While recent feedforward approaches leverage generalizable 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) for scene generation, they typically assign one or multiple Gaussians to each pixel. Such uniform allocation not only produces highly redundant representations by wasting primitives in homogeneous areas, but also fails to exploit the inherent geometric priors of planar surfaces, often resulting in sub-optimal structural modeling. To address these limitations, we present CompactSplat, a novel feedforward framework that enables a content-aware allocation of 3D Gaussians. By integrating texture-guided spatial partitioning with hierarchical sampling, CompactSplat adaptively distributes primitives - concentrating dense Gaussians in complex regions while tiling flat areas with expanded, scale-modulated primitives. Moreover, our framework inherently supports dynamic sparsity control at inference time, enabling seamless trade-offs between rendering fidelity and memory footprint without requiring network retraining. Extensive experiments on RealEstate10K, DL3DV, and ScanNet demonstrate that CompactSplat consistently outperforms prior methods on both standard metrics and high-resolution rendering consistency, achieving high-fidelity reconstructions with significantly fewer primitives.
Spackle improves novel view synthesis from single images with adaptive gaussians
Spackle: Completing Large View Single Image NVS with Adaptive Gaussians
Abstract: Single-image novel view synthesis (NVS) enables photorealistic rendering of un- observed viewpoints from a single input. Practical NVS systems require two key capabilities: robust reconstruction of occluded regions and high inference effi- ciency. While hybrid decoupled frameworks combining feedforward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) and diffusion models show promise for large-view-deviation NVS, they suffer from capacity competition: a fixed number of Gaussians forces resource shifts from visible to newly disoccluded areas, degrading original scene fidelity when the target view deviates significantly from the input. To address this, we propose Spackle, a lightweight residual learning framework that mit- igates capacity competition without sacrificing efficiency. Spackle operates in three stages: predicting base 3DGS attributes from given views, automatically identifying poorly reconstructed regions, and learning a residual 3DGS optimized exclusively for these areas. At inference, we combine the baseline and aug- mented Gaussians for NVS. We conduct comprehensive experiments and show that Spackle achieves state-of-the-art performance on large-view-deviation cases.
Heat kernel textures improve 3D surface texturing without UV mapping
Heat Kernel Textures: the Geodesic Gaussians That Do Not Splat
Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting has recently revolutionised novel view synthesis as well as many other 3D vision methods and applications. Drawing inspiration from this representation, we now rethink textures to overcome the main issues of UV mapping while considerably lowering their memory footprint. Heat Kernel Textures (HKTex) eliminate UV unwrapping as well as their persistent issues of wasted UV space, seams, distortions, vertex-duplication, and varying resolution. Grounded in discrete Riemannian geometry and intrinsically defined on any manifold surface discretised as a triangular mesh, HKTex uses anisotropic heat kernels as geodesic equivalents to Gaussians. Like our kernels, also the optimisation of their position and the adaptive densification strategies were redefined to operate on the surface of the object to be textureised. Our novel representation is also fully integrated with a physically based renderer and can be optimised either from existing textures or multi-view images. Our project page and code are available at circle-group.github.io/research/HeatKernelTextures.