# How Far Can We Compress Instant-NGP-Based NeRF?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.04101 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04101/

## Key facts

- Cited by 30 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [Deep Compression: Compressing Deep Neural Networks with Pruning, Trained Quantization and Huffman Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.00149/) (2015)
- [Fourier Features Let Networks Learn High Frequency Functions in Low Dimensional Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10739/) (2020)
- [Estimating or Propagating Gradients Through Stochastic Neurons for Conditional Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.3432/) (2013)
- [Plenoxels: Radiance Fields without Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05131/) (2021)
- [Knowledge Distillation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05525/) (2020)
- [TensoRF: Tensorial Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09517/) (2022)
- [Direct Voxel Grid Optimization: Super-fast Convergence for Radiance Fields Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11215/) (2021)
- [Neural Sparse Voxel Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11571/) (2020)
- [PlenOctrees for Real-time Rendering of Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14024/) (2021)
- [K-Planes: Explicit Radiance Fields in Space, Time, and Appearance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10241/) (2023)
- [Block-NeRF: Scalable Large Scene Neural View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05263/) (2022)
- [Zip-NeRF: Anti-Aliased Grid-Based Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06706/) (2023)
- [To prune, or not to prune: exploring the efficacy of pruning for model compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.01878/) (2017)
- [Nerfstudio: A Modular Framework for Neural Radiance Field Development](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04264/) (2023)
- [Learned Image Compression with Discretized Gaussian Mixture Likelihoods and Attention Modules](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.01568/) (2020)
- [Neural Geometric Level of Detail: Real-time Rendering with Implicit 3D Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10994/) (2021)
- [DeepVoxels: Learning Persistent 3D Feature Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01024/) (2018)
- [FreeNeRF: Improving Few-shot Neural Rendering with Free Frequency Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07418/) (2023)
- [ELIC: Efficient Learned Image Compression with Unevenly Grouped Space-Channel Contextual Adaptive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10886/) (2022)
- [Model compression via distillation and quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05668/) (2018)
- [Speeding up Convolutional Neural Networks with Low Rank Expansions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.3866/) (2014)
- [BungeeNeRF: Progressive Neural Radiance Field for Extreme Multi-scale Scene Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05504/) (2021)
- [Deep Contextual Video Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.15047/) (2021)
- [Checkerboard Context Model for Efficient Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15306/) (2021)
- [MatrixCity: A Large-scale City Dataset for City-scale Neural Rendering and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16553/) (2023)
- [Hybrid Spatial-Temporal Entropy Modelling for Neural Video Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05894/) (2022)
- [Temporal Context Mining for Learned Video Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13850/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [3DGS.zip: A survey on 3D Gaussian Splatting Compression Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09510/) (2024)
- [HAC++: Towards 100X Compression of 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12255/) (2025)
- [Fast Feedforward 3D Gaussian Splatting Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08017/) (2024)
- [Compact 3D Gaussian Splatting for Static and Dynamic Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03822/) (2024)
- [Compression of 3D Gaussian Splatting with Optimized Feature Planes and Standard Video Codecs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03399/) (2025)
- [Implicit Gaussian Splatting with Efficient Multi-Level Tri-Plane Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10041/) (2024)
- [Optimized Minimal 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16924/) (2025)
- [Dynamic Scene Reconstruction: Recent Advance in Real-time Rendering and Streaming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08166/) (2025)
- [Light4GS: Lightweight Compact 4D Gaussian Splatting Generation via Context Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13948/) (2025)
- [Vision Pretraining for Dense Spatial Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.05247/) (2026)
- [L3GS: Layered 3D Gaussian Splats for Efficient 3D Scene Delivery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05517/) (2025)
- [A Unified Theory of Sinusoidal Activation Families for Implicit Neural Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00869/) (2025)
- [FlexGS: Train Once, Deploy Everywhere with Many-in-One Flexible 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04174/) (2025)
- [POTR: Post-Training 3DGS Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14821/) (2026)
- [SGI: Structured 2D Gaussians for Efficient and Compact Large Image Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07789/) (2026)
- [ECoNGS: Efficient Compressive Neural Gaussian Splats for Volume Visualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.18466/) (2026)
- [Fast 2DGS: Efficient Image Representation with Deep Gaussian Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12774/) (2025)
- [Dream4D: Lifting Camera-Controlled I2V towards Spatiotemporally Consistent 4D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07769/) (2025)
- [SL2A-INR: Single-Layer Learnable Activation for Implicit Neural Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10836/) (2024)
- [Weight Space Representation Learning on Diverse NeRF Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09623/) (2025)
- [Squeeze3D: Extreme Neural Compression with Latent Space Bridging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07932/) (2025)
- [Adaptive Time-step Training for Enhancing Spike-Based Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23033/) (2025)
- [SA-3DGS: A Self-Adaptive Compression Method for 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03017/) (2025)
- [Tiny-DroNeRF: Tiny Neural Radiance Fields aboard Federated Learning-enabled Nano-drones](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01850/) (2026)
- [ProGS: Towards Progressive Coding for 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09703/) (2026)
- [SAC-NeRF: Adaptive Ray Sampling for Neural Radiance Fields via Soft Actor-Critic Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15622/) (2025)
- [3DTurboQuant: Training-Free Near-Optimal Quantization for 3D Reconstruction Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05366/) (2026)
- [MesonGS++: Post-training Compression of 3D Gaussian Splatting with Hyperparameter Searching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.26799/) (2026)
- [CATRF: Codec-Adaptive TriPlane Radiance Fields for Volumetric Content Delivery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18054/) (2026)
- [CARA: Collision-Aware Resolution Adaptation for Multiresolution Hash Encoding Based Image Fitting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.18554/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In recent years, Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) has demonstrated remarkable capabilities in representing 3D scenes. To expedite the rendering process, learnable explicit representations have been introduced for combination with implicit NeRF representation, which however results in a large storage space requirement. In this paper, we introduce the Context-based NeRF Compression (CNC) framework, which leverages highly efficient context models to provide a storage-friendly NeRF representation. Specifically, we excavate both level-wise and dimension-wise context dependencies to enable probability prediction for information entropy reduction. Additionally, we exploit hash collision and occupancy grids as strong prior knowledge for better context modeling. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to construct and exploit context models for NeRF compression. We achieve a size reduction of 100× and 70× with improved fidelity against the baseline Instant-NGP on Synthesic-NeRF and Tanks and Temples datasets, respectively. Additionally, we attain 86.7% and 82.3% storage size reduction against the SOTA NeRF compression method BiRF. Our code is available here: https://github.com/YihangChen-ee/CNC.