GrainGS: Gradient-Decoupled Gaussian Splatting for Efficient Dynamic Novel View Synthesis
Authors: Jiahao He, Yihua Shao, Zhengkai Zhao, Pan Gao, Fei Ma, Jingcai Guo, Hao Tang, Nicu Sebe, +1 more
Organizations: College of Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China · Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China · Department of Computing, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China · Guangdong Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Economy, Shenzhen, China · School of Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing, China · Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, University of Trento, Trento, Italy · Huawei Consumer Business Group, Huawei, Shenzhen, China
Dynamic scene reconstruction with 3D Gaussian Splatting requires a balance between fine-grained motion modeling, structural stability, and compact representation. Existing per-primitive methods provide flexible local deformation but often suffer from redundant primitive growth, while anchor-based methods improve spatial regularity at the cost of suppressing locally varying motion. To address these issues, we present GrainGS, a dynamic Gaussian framework that combines a hierarchical anchor scaffold with per-Gaussian deformation. A static warm-up stage first establishes a time-invariant canonical representation from observations across all timestamps. During joint training, a stop-gradient operation blocks the deformation-mediated gradient pathway to the canonical positions while preserving their direct refinement through the reconstruction objective. Each Gaussian then predicts independent temporal offsets for position, rotation, and scale, enabling detailed local motion within a structurally constrained scaffold. A canonical-residual appearance decomposition further models frame-dependent photometric changes without forcing them into geometric deformation. Experiments on synthetic monocular and real-world multiview benchmarks show that GrainGS achieves high reconstruction quality, real-time novel view synthesis, and compact storage. Under the synthetic benchmark setting, it reaches an average peak signal-to-noise ratio of 36.98 decibels, renders at 435.6 frames per second, and requires 4.67 megabytes of storage.
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.
Dynamic scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis are fundamental to next-generation visual intelligence applications such as virtual reality, robotics, and digital twins. However, high-fidelity reconstruction of complex, time-varying scenes from arbitrary viewpoints remains a significant challenge. Existing dynamic 3DGS methods suffer from computational inefficiency, since they model all Gaussians as dynamic components. While recent decomposition-based approaches address this issue, they still struggle with degraded reconstruction quality and prolonged training time. To mitigate these limitations, we propose a novel dynamic reconstruction framework built upon an efficient static-dynamic decomposition strategy using a Feed-Forward Gaussian Splatting encoder and an optical flow model. By eliminating redundant computations on static regions, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing baselines across rendering quality, training and rendering speed, and storage efficiency. Notably, on the Neural 3D dataset, our framework requires only 10 minutes for training and achieves a rendering speed of over 700 FPS on a single NVIDIA RTX 5090 GPU at resolution of 1352x1014. Furthermore, our decomposition strategy eliminates the need for COLMAP preprocessing and enables deterministic initialization, thereby enhancing both efficiency and reproducibility.
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.