PocketGS: High-Fidelity On-Device Training for 3D Gaussian Splatting

Training 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) at billion-primitive scale is fundamentally memory-bound: each Gaussian primitive carries a large attribute vector, and the aggregate parameter table quickly exceeds GPU capacity, limiting prior systems to tens of millions of Gaussians on commodity single-GPU hardware. We observe that 3DGS training is inherently sparse and trajectory-conditioned: each iteration activates only the Gaussians visible from the current camera batch, so GPU memory can serve as a working-set cache rather than a persistent parameter store. Building on this insight, we introduce TideGS, an out-of-core training framework that manages parameters across an SSD-CPU-GPU hierarchy via three synergistic techniques: block-virtualized geometry for SSD-aligned spatial locality, a hierarchical asynchronous pipeline to overlap I/O with computation, and trajectory-adaptive differential streaming that transfers only incremental working-set deltas between iterations. Experiments show that TideGS enables training with over one billion Gaussians on a single 24 GB GPU while achieving the best reconstruction quality among evaluated single-GPU baselines on large-scale scenes, scaling beyond prior out-of-core baselines (e.g., approximately 100M Gaussians) and standard in-memory training (e.g., approximately 11M Gaussians).

Mobile Gaussian reconstruction must satisfy two requirements: the reconstruction model must execute within a device resource envelope, and the resulting Gaussian asset must expose a representation size suited to downstream mobile use. Existing feed-forward Gaussian reconstructors commonly decode dense, image-aligned candidates whose final cardinality is implicitly determined by the input resolution and number of views. We present PocketSplat, a feed-forward framework for budgeted mobile Gaussian asset construction. Given a prescribed output budget, PocketSplat organizes dense geometry-aware latent candidates in predicted world space, allocates exact integer capacity across local latent cells, and decodes complete Gaussian attributes only for retained candidates. Cell-conditioned latent fusion aggregates repeated multi-view evidence before decoding, while spatial responsibility decoding adapts Gaussian support after local sparsification. Experiments on DL3DV and out-of-distribution benchmarks establish a strong quality--budget trade-off against feed-forward Gaussian reconstruction baselines. On Mip-NeRF 360, PocketSplat executes directly on a target iPhone and constructs compact, higher-quality Gaussian assets substantially faster than a deployable streamed MVSplat variant; native MVSplat and DepthSplat exceed the device memory budget.

High-resolution 3D Gaussian Splatting training increases pixel and Gaussian-tile intersection counts, expanding rasterization caches that coexist with projection and gradient state at peak memory. A complete-view update aggregates gradients across the view; each region's forward and backward caches can be released after its contribution is collected. BoundedGS separates rasterization and projection backward passes and bounds the active local rasterization working set according to its measured load. Candidate-indexed projection and compact gradient storage address the view-level peaks exposed by this change, while CPU-assisted structure rebuilding and bounded image supply manage resources outside rendering. In a resolution sweep at a fixed count of about 6M Gaussians, the measured rendering working set stays within 1.073-1.077 GiB from 1K to 16K; at 11K, a warm pass takes 19.79 seconds versus 21.76 for full-frame execution. Across five native 5K outdoor scenes, full training reduces the mean rendering working set from 9.97 to 1.76 GiB (82.3%), retains similar reconstruction quality, and shortens training time from 36.7 to 33.9 minutes. Project page: https://xiaobin2001.github.io/BoundedGS-Web/