Stochastic order-independent transparency enables efficient and elegant rendering of primitive-based radiance fields like 3D Gaussian Splatting models, but remains impractical due to the inherent visible noise in the output. We propose a principled approach to minimize high-frequency noise, addressing its sources at the representation and image synthesis level. During stochastic rendering, our history-based spatial resampling scheme drastically accelerates image convergence, while temporal importance resampling ensures coherence under camera movement. During training, a color regularizer implicitly reduces the variance along view rays in the 3DGS models. With these properties, our optimized, Vulkan-based renderer effectively mitigates output noise at low and high sample counts, achieving a substantial 13~dB PSNR increase in quality over previous stochastic methods at 1 sample per pixel and quickly converging to sorted 3DGS with an average L1 error of less than 10−4.
Figures & tables
Figure 1 : Through optimized training and inference, our stochastic OIT renderer achieves significantly better image quality than prior art with the same number of random samples. Our approach makes single-sample rendering a viable candidate for applications that demand high quality, as well as extremely high frame rates. Measurements were performed using each method’s original implementation.
Figure 2 : Illustration of deterministic and stochastic rendering of 3D Gaussians.
Figure 3 : By default, 3DGS optimization blends disparate colors to match the ground truth. With λvar>0 , the blended colors align to reduce color variance.
Figure 4 : Overview of spatial and temporal sample reuse.
Figure 5 : Average quality metrics on the Mip-NeRF 360 dataset for varying λvar with deterministic ( Fig. 5(a) ) and stochastic ( Fig. 5(b) ) blending.
PSNR (dB) ↑
Method
Avg. PSNR (dB) ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
tPSNR (dB) ↑
Indoor
Outdoor
StochasticSplats [ 13 ]
18.336
0.293
0.667
15.235
19.562
16.701
StochasticSplats + Temporal [ 13 ]
21.954
0.552
0.524
19.450
23.313
20.141
Ours
31.437
0.845
0.345
28.410
32.978
29.381
Ours + Temporal
35.085
0.937
0.209
32.449
37.161
32.318
Table 1: Quantitative comparison on the camera path benchmark (21 trajectories, 3,152 frames across 7 Mip-NeRF 360 scenes). We ablate progressive pipeline components against the 1-sample StochasticSplats baseline ( λvar=0 ), temporal reuse (CMA, τ=0.20 ), our variance loss ( λvar=1 ) with spatial reuse, and our full spatio-temporal model ( Ours + Temporal , δˉ=0.7 ). All variants are evaluated against sorted α -blending ground truth.
Figure 6 : Average residual of test quality metrics on the Mip-NeRF 360 dataset trained with λvar=1 , comparing static blur kernels against spatial reuse weights with varying K . Log-scale is used to visualize small differences.
Figure 7 : Average frame time for rendering all test views of the Mip-NeRF 360 dataset. We average the frame time for 200 frames per view.
Figure 8 : Excess Quality Factor on the test views of the Mip-NeRF 360 dataset for PSNR and SSIM quality metrics.
Figure 9 : Average residual of test PSNR on the Mip-NeRF 360 dataset trained with λvar=1 rendered with and without STBN compared against sorted rendering. Log-scale is used to visualize small differences.
Figure 10 : Visual Ablations.
Lvar
Spatial Reuse
Temporal Reuse
tPSNR (dB) ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
Avg. PSNR (dB) ↑
—
—
—
15.235
0.293
0.667
18.336
—
✓
—
21.720
0.586
0.498
24.774
—
—
✓
22.204
0.619
0.522
25.227
—
✓
✓
27.188
0.817
0.365
29.946
✓
—
—
22.423
0.613
0.525
25.561
✓
✓
—
28.410
0.845
0.345
31.437
Table 2: Component ablation on camera path benchmark. We ablate Lvar , Spatial Reuse, and Temporal Reuse combinations across 21 camera trajectories on the Mip-NeRF 360 dataset (3 per scene) against sorted rendering. For Spatial Reuse we set K=4 , and Temporal Reuse evaluates EMA filtering with our soft history rejection at fixed δˉ=0.70 . STBN was used for all evaluations.
Figure 11 : Log-scale histogram of primitive counts with respect to activated opacity over all Mip-NeRF 360 scenes trained with various values of λvar .
Figure 12 : Histogram of primitive counts with respect to Gaussian size (log-scale) over all Mip-NeRF 360 scenes trained with various values of λvar .
Figure 13 : Test view of the bicycle scene, rendered deterministically with models trained with varying λvar .
Figure 14 : Increasing λvar also reduces variance in stochastically rendered depth. Images were rendered at 1 sample per pixel.
Figure 15 : Distribution of primitive base colors in RGB space for scenes of Mip-NeRF 360 trained with and without variance loss.
Figure 16 : Effect of Lvar on alpha-blending.
Figure 17 : Comparison of quality metrics and variance for trained models with varying λvar on scenes from the Mip-NeRF 360 dataset.
Figure 18 : Average residual of L1 score and values for LPIPS on the Mip-NeRF 360 dataset trained with λvar=1 , comparing static blur kernels against spatial reuse weights with varying K . Log-scale is used for L1 to visualize small differences.
Figure 19 : Excess Quality Factor on the test views of the Mip-NeRF 360 dataset for the L1 quality metric.
Figure 20 : Heatmaps of quality metrics over sample counts and buffer sizes on Mip-NeRF 360.
Figure 21 : Pareto-optimal combinations of sample count and K for L1, PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS. Stoch denotes stochastic rendering without spatial reuse and blur denotes stochastic rendering with a Gaussian cross-blur kernel.
Figure 22 : Average residual of test quality metrics on the Mip-NeRF 360 dataset trained with λvar=1 , comparing spatial reuse of 4- and 8-neighborhood kernels with varying K . Log-scale is used to visualize small differences.
Figure 23 : Average quality comparison of StochasticSplats and Gaussian Point Splatting with and without spatial reuse on the Mip-NeRF 360 dataset. Models were trained with λvar=1 .
Figure 24 : Comparison of uniform random noise sampling (PCG32) against per-primitive spatio-temporal blue noise sampling.
Conventional 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) requires depth sorting and ordered alpha blending to correctly render overlapping Gaussian primitives. Stochastic transparency enables sorting-free rendering by replacing fractional alpha contributions with discrete stochastic visibility samples, but produces substantial spatial and temporal noise at low sample counts. We refer to this conversion from continuous Gaussian splats to discrete visibility samples as \textit{Gaussian Stippling}. Based on this, we present an efficient order-independent rendering and reconstruction framework that operates directly on unmodified 3DGS assets. Our method adaptively integrates primitive-based and fragment-based stippling, leveraging their complementary strengths across different rendering regimes to significantly improve rendering throughput. To recover high-quality images from sparse stochastic samples, we further introduce a lightweight Gaussian-aware spatiotemporal reconstruction network. By exploiting the Gaussian attributes retained by each stipple, the network aggregates structured stochastic clues across both space and time, effectively suppressing stippling noise. Experiments show that our hybrid Gaussian stippling method, coupled with a spatiotemporal reconstruction network trained on diverse scenes, generalizes to unseen scenes and enables interactive, temporally stable, and visually plausible rendering on mobile devices without retraining or preprocessing. With scene-specific training and appropriately scaled sampling and network capacity, our method further outperforms the baselines in visual quality, offering a high-fidelity configuration for quality-prioritized applications.
Zijian Huang, Suiliang Mai, Chuankun Zheng +2
State Key Laboratory of CAD&CG, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China
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
Generalizable 3D Gaussian Splatting has recently emerged as an efficient approach for novel-view synthesis, enabling feed-forward synthesis from only a few input views. However, existing pixel-wise feed-forward methods suffer from over-bright renderings when the number of input views varies during inference, as well as insufficient supervision for accurate Gaussian scale estimation, which leads to hole artifacts, particularly in high-resolution renderings. To address these issues, we identify that the over-brightness is caused by the varying number of overlapping Gaussians and propose a simple alpha normalization strategy to maintain brightness consistency across different number of input views. In addition, we introduce an auxiliary 3D sampling-based regularizer to improve Gaussian scale estimation, thereby mitigating hole artifacts in high-resolution rendering. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method significantly improves baseline models under varying input-view and high-resolution rendering settings.
Hoang Chuong Nguyen, Renjie Wu, Jose M. Alvarez +1