GaussTrace: Provenance Analysis of 3D Gaussian Splatting Models with Evidence-based LLM Reasoning

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) is becoming a practical representation for novel view synthesis, but its growing adoption, together with rapid advances in instruction-driven 3DGS editing, also exposes a dual copyright risk: once a 3DGS-based asset is released, it can be used without permission and manipulated through 3D editing. Existing protection methods address only one side of this problem. Watermarking can trace ownership after unauthorized use, but it cannot prevent malicious editing. Adversarial edit-deterrence methods can disrupt editing, but they do not provide evidence of ownership. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first unified protection framework for 3DGS that jointly optimizes ownership tracing and unauthorized editing deterrence. Our framework combines a scene-wide watermarking objective over all Gaussians with an adversarial objective for edit deterrence. The adversarial branch combines latent-anchor separation, denoising-trajectory diversion, and cross-attention diversion to divert the editing trajectory, while an update-saliency-motivated Gaussian selection strategy assigns stronger adversarial updates to mask-selected Gaussians, improving the balance among watermark recovery, edit deterrence, and rendering fidelity. Experiments on scenes from Mip-NeRF 360 and Instruct-NeRF2NeRF demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves a favorable balance among bit accuracy, edit deterrence, and rendering quality. These results suggest that practical copyright protection of 3DGS-based assets can be more effectively addressed by integrating ownership tracing and unauthorized editing deterrence into a single optimization framework.

While 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has advanced open vocabulary scene understanding, existing methods remain confined to explicit queries. They struggle to interpret implicit intents, complex spatial constraints, and commonsense reasoning required for practical embodied interactions. To address this gap, we introduce the task of reasoning 3D Gaussian segmentation and construct two benchmarks, Causal-LERF and Causal-ScanNet. These benchmarks systematically evaluate commonsense, spatial, affordance, and counterfactual reasoning. Evaluations reveal that current state of the art methods perform poorly on these reasoning challenges. Therefore, we propose CausalSplat, a framework that integrates vision-language models with 3D scene graphs to disentangle explicit structural perception from implicit logical inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CausalSplat achieves state of the art performance on our reasoning benchmarks while showing strong generalizability on standard referring and open vocabulary 3D segmentation tasks. Project Page: https://jiayuding031020.github.io/CausalSplat

While 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has established new standards for high-fidelity 3D scene modeling, interpreting massive, unstructured Gaussian primitives into meaningful geospatial entities remains a critical challenge for remote sensing and urban applications. Existing 2D-to-3D distillation methods suffer from projection ambiguities, geometric inconsistencies, and computational bottlenecks when applied to complex, large-scale topographies. Furthermore, current benchmarks lack natively aligned 2D-3D ground truth tailored for splatting-based representations. To address these limitations, we propose \textit{PointGauss}, a unified 3D-native framework for robust semantic parsing and instance segmentation. By treating Gaussian primitives as unstructured point sets, PointGauss leverages Point Transformer V3 (PTv3) to extract scale-invariant geometric features directly from Gaussian attributes, effectively resolving projection ambiguities. To ensure scalability in building-scale scenes, we introduce an adaptive region-of-interest cropping strategy and an instance-aware distance-constrained rasterization pipeline for pixel-level, view-consistent projection. Additionally, we present \textbf{SplatSeg-360}, the first rigorous cross-scale benchmark tailored for 3DGS, comprising 32 complex scenes with full 360$^\circ$ coverage and over 6,300 natively aligned 2D-3D masks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PointGauss operates in real-time and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Notably, it attains approximately 90% 3D-mIoU in large-scale building scenarios and roughly 80% 2D-mIoU in view-consistent 2D instance segmentation, outperforming baseline methods by 16%. (\href{https://github.com/hbycswt/pointgauss#}{Code})