cs.CVMay 1, 2026

Beyond Heuristics: Learnable Density Control for 3D Gaussian Splatting

Authors: Zhenhua NingXin LiJun YuGuangming LuYaowei WangWenjie Pei

Abstract

While 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has demonstrated impressive real-time rendering performance, its efficacy remains constrained by a reliance on heuristic density control. Despite numerous refinements to these handcrafted rules, such methods inherently lack the flexibility to adapt to diverse scenes with complex geometries. In this paper, we propose a paradigm shift for density control from rigid heuristics to fully learnable policies. Specifically, we introduce \textbf{LeGS}, a framework that reformulates density control as a parameterized policy network optimized via Reinforcement Learning (RL). Central to our approach is the tailored effective reward function grounded in sensitivity analysis, which precisely quantifies the marginal contribution of individual Gaussians to reconstruction quality. To maintain computational tractability, we derive a closed-form solution that reduces the complexity of reward calculation from O(N2)O(N^2) to O(N)O(N). Extensive experiments on the Mip-NeRF 360, Tanks & Temples, and Deep Blending datasets demonstrate that \textbf{LeGS} significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, striking a superior balance between reconstruction quality and efficiency. The code will be released at https://github.com/AaronNZH/LeGS

Explore similar work

May 27, 2026cs.CV

Eulerian Gaussian Splatting using Hashed Probability Pyramids

We introduce a probabilistic splat-based radiance field framework that retains the fast rasterization and test-time efficiency of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) while replacing heuristic primitive manipulation with gradient-based optimization of a volumetric probability density. Rather than relocating, splitting, or culling Gaussians via hand-tuned densification (e.g., ADC), we treat primitive locations as samples drawn from a persistent, learnable density. We instantiate this density using a novel, memory-efficient multi-scale hierarchical grid that enables end-to-end gradient-based optimization. To stabilize the optimization, we derive an unbiased gradient estimator with control variates that markedly reduces variance. By allowing probability mass to flow to where the loss demands, our framework eliminates brittle priors and naturally explores the volume, achieving state-of-the-art reconstruction quality on mip-NeRF 360 while preserving 3DGS-level rendering speed.
Mia Gaia Polansky, George Kopanas, Stephan Garbin +2
May 13, 2026cs.GR

BlitzGS: City-Scale Gaussian Splatting at Lightning Speed

We present BlitzGS, a distributed 3DGS framework that reduces active Gaussian workload for fast city-scale reconstruction. BlitzGS manages this workload at three coupled levels. At the system level, the framework shards Gaussians across GPUs by index parity rather than spatial blocks. This approach mitigates the cross-block visibility redundancy inherent in spatial partitioning. Furthermore, it distributes each rendering step through a single cross-GPU exchange that routes projected Gaussians to their tile owners. At the model level, scheduled importance-scoring passes shrink the global Gaussian population. During these passes, the framework generates a per-Gaussian visibility weight to bias density-control updates toward contributing primitives and a per-view importance mask for the view-level renderer. At the view level, BlitzGS trims each camera's active set with a distance-based LOD gate to exclude excessively fine primitives for the current frustum and the importance-based culling mask to skip Gaussians with negligible cross-view contribution. On large-scale benchmarks, BlitzGS matches the rendering quality of recent large-scale baselines while delivering an order-of-magnitude speedup, training city-scale scenes in tens of minutes. Our code is available at https: //github.com/AkierRaee/BlitzGS.
Zhongtao Wang, Huishan Au, Yilong Li +6
Apr 23, 2026cs.CV

You Only Gaussian Once: Controllable 3D Gaussian Splatting for Ultra-Densely Sampled Scenes

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has revolutionized neural rendering, yet existing methods remain predominantly research prototypes ill-suited for production-level deployment. We identify a critical "Industry-Academia Gap" hindering real-world application: unpredictable resource consumption from heuristic Gaussian growth, the "sparsity shield" of current benchmarks that rewards hallucination over physical fidelity, and severe multi-sensor data pollution. To bridge this gap, we propose YOGO (You Only Gaussian Once), a system-level framework that reformulates the stochastic growth process into a deterministic, budget-aware equilibrium. YOGO integrates a novel budget controller for hardware-constrained resource allocation and an availability-registration protocol for robust multi-sensor fusion. To push the boundaries of reconstruction fidelity, we introduce Immersion v1.0, the first ultra-dense indoor dataset specifically designed to break the "sparsity shield." By providing saturated viewpoint coverage, Immersion v1.0 forces algorithms to focus on extreme physical fidelity rather than viewpoint interpolation, and enables the community to focus on the upper limits of high-fidelity reconstruction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that YOGO achieves state-of-the-art visual quality while maintaining a strictly deterministic profile, establishing a new standard for production-grade 3DGS. To facilitate reproducibility, part scenes of Immersion v1.0 dataset and source code of YOGO has been publicly released. The project link is https://jjrcn.github.io/yogo-project-home/.
Jinrang Jia, Zhenjia Li, Yifeng Shi