cs.CVApr 17, 2026

Incoherent Deformation, Not Capacity: Diagnosing and Mitigating Overfitting in Dynamic Gaussian Splatting

Authors: Ahmad Droby

Organizations: Independent Researcher

Abstract

Dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting methods achieve strong training-view PSNR on monocular video but generalize poorly: on the D-NeRF benchmark we measure an average train-test PSNR gap of 6.18 dB, rising to 11 dB on individual scenes. We report two findings that together account for most of that gap. Finding 1 (the role of splitting). A systematic ablation of the Adaptive Density Control pipeline (split, clone, prune, frequency, threshold, schedule) shows that splitting is responsible for over 80% of the gap: disabling split collapses the cloud from 44K to 3K Gaussians and the gap from 6.18 dB to 1.15 dB. Across all threshold-varying ablations, gap is log-linear in count (r = 0.995, bootstrap 95% CI [0.99, 1.00]), which suggests a capacity-based explanation. Finding 2 (the role of deformation coherence). We show that the capacity explanation is incomplete. A local-smoothness penalty on the per-Gaussian deformation field -- Elastic Energy Regularization (EER) -- reduces the gap by 40.8% while growing the cloud by 85%. Measuring per-Gaussian strain directly on trained checkpoints, EER reduces mean strain by 99.72% (median 99.80%) across all 8 scenes; on 8/8 scenes the median Gaussian under EER is less strained than the 1st-percentile (best-behaved) Gaussian under baseline. Alongside EER, we evaluate two further regularizers: GAD, a loss-rate-aware densification threshold, and PTDrop, a jitter-weighted Gaussian dropout. GAD+EER reduces the gap by 48%; adding PTDrop and a soft growth cap reaches 57%. We confirm that coherence generalizes to (a) a different deformation architecture (Deformable-3DGS, +40.6% gap reduction at re-tuned lambda), and (b) real monocular video (4 HyperNeRF scenes, reducing the mean PSNR gap by 14.9% at the same lambda as D-NeRF, with near-zero quality cost). The overfitting in dynamic 3DGS is driven by incoherent deformation, not parameter count.

Explore similar work

Sep 1, 2026cs.CV

EvoGS: Modeling Deformation Evolution for Dynamic Gaussian Splatting

Recent extensions of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enable real-time novel view synthesis in dynamic scenes by learning time-conditioned Gaussian deformations. However, existing MLP-based methods typically estimate deformations independently at each timestamp, making them less robust to large or abrupt motions. To address this issue, we propose \textbf{EvoGS}, a 3DGS-based dynamic reconstruction framework that models Gaussian deformation as a temporal evolution process. EvoGS maintains persistent deformation states for each Gaussian, extrapolates future states from historical deformation states, and corrects the predictions with MLP-derived observations. The correction is adaptively weighted using a temporal residual memory and evolution statistics such as deformation velocity and trajectory deviation. To further improve reconstruction quality, EvoGS introduces deformation-aware densification. Clone and split operations are performed along corrected deformation directions, while an uncertainty-aware strategy suppresses densification for Gaussians with unstable deformation histories. Experiments show that EvoGS improves dynamic novel view synthesis quality and achieves competitive performance across benchmarks.
Wei Dong, Shahram Shirani, Jun Chen +1
Sep 3, 2026cs.CV

TruncGradGS: Improved 3D Gaussian Splatting via Truncated Gradient Updates

3D Gaussian Splatting has become a de facto scene representation for novel view synthesis, yet robustly learning 3D Gaussian primitives from visual input remains challenging. Standard optimization relies on gradient-based updates, but a common issue is the gradient vanishing phenomenon: a pixel far from a Gaussian primitive often has diminishing gradient magnitudes to influence primitive attributes, resulting in suboptimal scene reconstruction. In this paper, we propose a method to address gradient vanishing with a piecewise truncated gradient formulation that improves the optimization stability and robustness to initializations. We show that our method consistently improves 3D Gaussian Splatting with random and COLMAP initializations while being generalizable across static and dynamic Gaussian Splatting. As a by-product, we also examine the limitations of current benchmarks for dynamic scenes, and introduce a novel dataset for benchmarking dynamic Gaussian Splatting using synthetic 3D scenes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in both static and dynamic settings for the public benchmarks and our proposed dataset.
Theo Morales, Nhat-Quynh Le-Pham, Robin Atkins +1
May 7, 2026cs.CV

AdpSplit: Error-Driven Adaptive Splitting for Faster Geometry Discovery in 3D Gaussian Splatting

Adaptive density control in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) repeatedly grows the Gaussian population through fixed-cardinality random splitting to discover useful scene structure. However, in vanilla 3DGS, its binary split operator requires many densification rounds to expose fine details, making it a bottleneck for efficient training schedules with fewer iterations. We introduce AdpSplit, an error-driven adaptive split operator that determines the number of split children and initializes the child parameters from L1-pixel-error region statistics, enabling fewer densification iterations, thus reduced training time, while preserving the rendering quality of full-schedule training. Across the MipNeRF360, Deep-Blending, and Tanks&Temples datasets, AdpSplit reduces the training time of multiple accelerated 3DGS pipelines by 9.2%-22.3% as a simple drop-in replacement for the standard split operator. With FastGS, AdpSplit matches the full-schedule PSNR on MipNeRF360 while reducing training time by 16.4%, corresponding to a 12.6x acceleration over vanilla 3DGS.
Yongjae Lee, Jingxing Li, Abhay Kumar Yadav +2