TETRIS-4DGS: Efficient Post-Training Compression of 4D Gaussian Splatting

While Dynamic Gaussian Splatting enables high-fidelity 4D reconstruction, its deployment is severely hindered by a fundamental dilemma: unconstrained densification leads to excessive memory consumption incompatible with edge devices, whereas heuristic pruning fails to achieve optimal rendering quality under preset Gaussian budgets. In this work, we propose Constrained Dynamic Gaussian Splatting (CDGS), a novel framework that formulates dynamic scene reconstruction as a budget-constrained optimization problem to enforce a strict, user-defined Gaussian budget during training. Our key insight is to introduce a differentiable budget controller as the core optimization driver. Guided by a multi-modal unified importance score, this controller fuses geometric, motion, and perceptual cues for precise capacity regulation. To maximize the utility of this fixed budget, we further introduce an adaptive static-dynamic allocation strategy that separates the Gaussian representation into static and dynamic branches and distributes the shared global capacity between them according to motion complexity. Furthermore, we implement a three-phase training strategy to seamlessly integrate these constraints, ensuring precise adherence to the target count. After training, a dual-mode hybrid compression scheme further reduces storage overhead. CDGS therefore not only strictly adheres to the specified Gaussian-count budget (error<2%) but also achieves favorable rate-distortion performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CDGS delivers optimal rendering quality under varying capacity limits and favorable rate-distortion performance, achieving over 3x model compression compared with the state-of-the-art method Ex4DGS.

4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS) enables high-quality dynamic novel view synthesis, yet current models remain monolithic bitstreams that clients must download in full before any frame can be rendered, causing black-screen waits of tens to hundreds of seconds on mobile bandwidth and leaving 4DGS incompatible with modern adaptive-bitrate delivery. Progressive 3DGS compression alleviates this for static scenes, but it acts only on spatial anchors and cannot partition the temporal deformation networks that dominate dynamic-scene size. We present PD-4DGS, the first framework for progressive compression and on-demand transmission of 4DGS. Hierarchical Deformation Decomposition (HDD) externalises the coarse-to-fine motion hierarchy already latent in 4DGS into three independently transmittable layers -- a static scaffold, a global deformation, and a local refinement -- so that any prefix of the bitstream is already renderable, turning a single training run into a scalable, DASH/HLS-compatible bitstream. A Gaussian-entropy attribute rate-distortion loss together with a temporal mask consistency regulariser shrink the base layer while suppressing low-bitrate flicker; a capacity-weighted rollout schedule, gated online by a learnt activation rate rho, then prevents deformation-network under-training without any per-scene hyperparameter. On the Dycheck iPhone benchmark, PD-4DGS cuts the streamed bitstream by >60% at matched rendering fidelity and reduces first-frame latency from 73--930 s to ~1.7 s on a 2 Mbps link, uniquely enabling true on-demand progressive streaming for 4DGS.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a powerful explicit representation enabling real-time, high-fidelity 3D reconstruction and novel view synthesis. However, its practical use is hindered by the massive memory and computational demands required to store and render millions of Gaussians. These challenges become even more severe in 4D dynamic scenes. To address these issues, the field of Efficient Gaussian Splatting has rapidly evolved, proposing methods that reduce redundancy while preserving reconstruction quality. This survey provides the first unified overview of efficient 3D and 4D Gaussian Splatting techniques. For both 3D and 4D settings, we systematically categorize existing methods into two major directions, Parameter Compression and Restructuring Compression, and comprehensively summarize the core ideas and methodological trends within each category. We further cover widely used datasets, evaluation metrics, and representative benchmark comparisons. Finally, we discuss current limitations and outline promising research directions toward scalable, compact, and real-time Gaussian Splatting for both static and dynamic 3D scene representation.