# 4D Gaussian Splatting: Modeling Dynamic Scenes with Native 4D Primitives

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.20720 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20720/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 99 of its 112 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 99)

- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14988/) (2022)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12077/) (2021)
- [Mip-NeRF: A Multiscale Representation for Anti-Aliasing Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13415/) (2021)
- [Plenoxels: Radiance Fields without Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05131/) (2021)
- [Zero-1-to-3: Zero-shot One Image to 3D Object](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11328/) (2023)
- [D-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13961/) (2020)
- [Magic3D: High-Resolution Text-to-3D Content Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10440/) (2022)
- [TensoRF: Tensorial Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09517/) (2022)
- [4D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Dynamic Scene Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08528/) (2023)
- [2D Gaussian Splatting for Geometrically Accurate Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17888/) (2024)
- [Direct Voxel Grid Optimization: Super-fast Convergence for Radiance Fields Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11215/) (2021)
- [NeRF++: Analyzing and Improving Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07492/) (2020)
- [XNOR-Net: ImageNet Classification Using Binary Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.05279/) (2016)
- [DreamGaussian: Generative Gaussian Splatting for Efficient 3D Content Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16653/) (2023)
- [SoundStream: An End-to-End Neural Audio Codec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03312/) (2021)
- [Deformable 3D Gaussians for High-Fidelity Monocular Dynamic Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13101/) (2023)
- [Neural Scene Flow Fields for Space-Time View Synthesis of Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13084/) (2020)
- [K-Planes: Explicit Radiance Fields in Space, Time, and Appearance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10241/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Local Light Field Fusion: Practical View Synthesis with Prescriptive Sampling Guidelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00889/) (2019)
- [Zip-NeRF: Anti-Aliased Grid-Based Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06706/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Instant4D: 4D Gaussian Splatting in Minutes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01119/) (2025)
- [PerpetualWonder: Long-Horizon Action-Conditioned 4D Scene Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04876/) (2026)
- [E-4DGS: High-Fidelity Dynamic Reconstruction from the Multi-view Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09912/) (2025)
- [BEAM: Bridging Physically-based Rendering and Gaussian Modeling for Relightable Volumetric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08297/) (2025)
- [Advances in 4D Representation: Geometry, Motion, and Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19255/) (2025)
- [Sparse4DGS: 4D Gaussian Splatting for Sparse-Frame Dynamic Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07122/) (2025)
- [MotionPhysics: Learnable Motion Distillation for Text-Guided Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.00504/) (2026)
- [Grow with the Flow: 4D Reconstruction of Growing Plants with Gaussian Flow Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08958/) (2026)
- [On the Design of Mixture-of-Experts for Dynamic Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.08250/) (2026)
- [Dynamic Novel View Synthesis in High Dynamic Range](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21853/) (2025)
- [Bringing a Personal Point of View: Evaluating Dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting for Egocentric Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.23803/) (2026)
- [4D Reconstruction from Sparse Dynamic Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.04593/) (2026)
- [NewtonGS: Physics-Structured Object-Level Neural Newtonian Dynamics for Gaussian Scene Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.07598/) (2026)
- [DispFlow-GS: Displacement Flow Supervision with Motion Disentangling for Monocular Deformable 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36940/) (2026)
- [GenIA: Generative Reconstruction with Test-Time Input Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.12388/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Dynamic 3D scene representation and novel view synthesis are crucial for enabling immersive experiences required by AR/VR and metaverse applications. It is a challenging task due to the complexity of unconstrained real-world scenes and their temporal dynamics. In this paper, we reformulate the reconstruction of a time-varying 3D scene as approximating its underlying spatiotemporal 4D volume by optimizing a collection of native 4D primitives, i.e., 4D Gaussians, with explicit geometry and appearance modeling. Equipped with a tailored rendering pipeline, our representation can be end-to-end optimized using only photometric supervision while free viewpoint viewing at interactive frame rate, making it suitable for representing real world scene with complex dynamic. This approach has been the first solution to achieve real-time rendering of high-resolution, photorealistic novel views for complex dynamic scenes. To facilitate real-world applications, we derive several compact variants that effectively reduce the memory footprint to address its storage bottleneck. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of 4DGS in terms of visual quality and efficiency across a range of dynamic scene-related tasks (e.g., novel view synthesis, 4D generation, scene understanding) and scenarios (e.g., single object, indoor scenes, driving environments, synthetic and real data).