# ShapeSplat: A Large-scale Dataset of Gaussian Splats and Their Self-Supervised Pretraining

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.10906 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10906/

## Key facts

- Cited by 21 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 62 of its 75 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 62)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Objaverse: A Universe of Annotated 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08051/) (2022)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [2D Gaussian Splatting for Geometrically Accurate Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17888/) (2024)
- [A Point Set Generation Network for 3D Object Reconstruction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00603/) (2016)
- [DreamGaussian: Generative Gaussian Splatting for Efficient 3D Content Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16653/) (2023)
- [Objaverse-XL: A Universe of 10M+ 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05663/) (2023)
- [PointCNN: Convolution On X-Transformed Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07791/) (2018)
- [Deformable 3D Gaussians for High-Fidelity Monocular Dynamic Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13101/) (2023)
- [LGM: Large Multi-View Gaussian Model for High-Resolution 3D Content Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05054/) (2024)
- [Dynamic 3D Gaussians: Tracking by Persistent Dynamic View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09713/) (2023)
- [Scaffold-GS: Structured 3D Gaussians for View-Adaptive Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00109/) (2023)
- [Point-BERT: Pre-training 3D Point Cloud Transformers with Masked Point Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14819/) (2021)
- [SuGaR: Surface-Aligned Gaussian Splatting for Efficient 3D Mesh Reconstruction and High-Quality Mesh Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12775/) (2023)
- [Google Scanned Objects: A High-Quality Dataset of 3D Scanned Household Items](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11918/) (2022)
- [Revisiting Point Cloud Classification: A New Benchmark Dataset and Classification Model on Real-World Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04616/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders for Point Cloud Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06604/) (2022)
- [LightGaussian: Unbounded 3D Gaussian Compression with 15x Reduction and 200+ FPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17245/) (2023)
- [LangSplat: 3D Language Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16084/) (2023)
- [Gaussian Grouping: Segment and Edit Anything in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00732/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [You See it, You Got it: Learning 3D Creation on Pose-Free Videos at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06699/) (2024)
- [SceneSplat: Gaussian Splatting-based Scene Understanding with Vision-Language Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18052/) (2025)
- [SplatLoc: 3D Gaussian Splatting-based Visual Localization for Augmented Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14067/) (2024)
- [The Tenth NTIRE 2025 Efficient Super-Resolution Challenge Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10686/) (2025)
- [The Eleventh NTIRE 2026 Efficient Super-Resolution Challenge Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03198/) (2026)
- [Positional Prompt Tuning for Efficient 3D Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11567/) (2024)
- [SceneSplat++: A Large Dataset and Comprehensive Benchmark for Language Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08710/) (2025)
- [UVGS: Reimagining Unstructured 3D Gaussian Splatting using UV Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01846/) (2025)
- [Repurposing 2D Diffusion Models with Gaussian Atlas for 3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15877/) (2025)
- [A Survey on 3D Reconstruction Techniques in Plant Phenotyping: From Classical Methods to Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00737/) (2025)
- [Can3Tok: Canonical 3D Tokenization and Latent Modeling of Scene-Level 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01464/) (2025)
- [Visual Generation in the New Era: An Evolution from Atomic Mapping to Agentic World Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.28185/) (2026)
- [CityLoc: 6DoF Pose Distributional Localization for Text Descriptions in Large-Scale Scenes with Gaussian Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08982/) (2025)
- [DiffWind: Physics-Informed Differentiable Modeling of Wind-Driven Object Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09668/) (2026)
- [Masked Clustering Prediction for Unsupervised Point Cloud Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08910/) (2025)
- [Free-Range Gaussians: Non-Grid-Aligned Generative 3D Gaussian Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04874/) (2026)
- [RoboPearls: Editable Video Simulation for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.22756/) (2025)
- [InStyle: Instant Appearance Stylization of 3D Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03683/) (2025)
- [XSPLAIN: XAI-enabling Splat-based Prototype Learning for Attribute-aware INterpretability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.10239/) (2026)
- [E3DGS: Unified Geometric-Photometric Equivariance for 3D Gaussian Splatting via Color-as-Geometry Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.15536/) (2026)
- [Beyond Similarity Matching: Structured Reasoning for Open-Vocabulary Referring Segmentation in 3DGS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.16103/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has become the de facto method of 3D representation in many vision tasks. This calls for the 3D understanding directly in this representation space. To facilitate the research in this direction, we first build ShapeSplat, a large-scale dataset of 3DGS using the commonly used ShapeNet, ModelNet and Objaverse datasets. Our dataset ShapeSplat consists of 206K objects spanning over 87 unique categories, whose labels are in accordance with the respective datasets. The creation of this dataset utilized the compute equivalent of 3.8 GPU years on a TITAN XP GPU. We utilize our dataset for unsupervised pretraining and supervised finetuning for classification and segmentation tasks. To this end, we introduce Gaussian-MAE, which highlights the unique benefits of representation learning from Gaussian parameters. Through exhaustive experiments, we provide several valuable insights. In particular, we show that (1) the distribution of the optimized GS centroids significantly differs from the uniformly sampled point cloud (used for initialization) counterpart; (2) this change in distribution results in degradation in classification but improvement in segmentation tasks when using only the centroids; (3) to leverage additional Gaussian parameters, we propose Gaussian feature grouping in a normalized feature space, along with splats pooling layer, offering a tailored solution to effectively group and embed similar Gaussians, which leads to notable improvement in finetuning tasks.