# Improving Adaptive Density Control for 3D Gaussian Splatting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.14274 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14274/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Dynamic 3D Gaussians: Tracking by Persistent Dynamic View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09713/) (2023)
- [LightGaussian: Unbounded 3D Gaussian Compression with 15x Reduction and 200+ FPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17245/) (2023)
- [Mini-Splatting: Representing Scenes with a Constrained Number of Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14166/) (2024)
- [Revising Densification in Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06109/) (2024)
- [Pixel-GS: Density Control with Pixel-aware Gradient for 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15530/) (2024)
- [StyleGaussian: Instant 3D Style Transfer with Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07807/) (2024)
- [3DGS.zip: A survey on 3D Gaussian Splatting Compression Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09510/) (2024)
- [Gaussian Splatting Decoder for 3D-aware Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10625/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Faster-GS: Analyzing and Improving Gaussian Splatting Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09999/) (2026)
- [AD-GS: Alternating Densification for Sparse-Input 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11003/) (2025)
- [Opacity-Gradient Driven Density Control for Compact and Efficient Few-Shot 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10257/) (2025)
- [R3GW: Relightable 3D Gaussians for Outdoor Scenes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02801/) (2026)
- [F4Splat: Feed-Forward Predictive Densification for Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21304/) (2026)
- [Incoherent Deformation, Not Capacity: Diagnosing and Mitigating Overfitting in Dynamic Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.16747/) (2026)
- [Temporally Aware Densification for Dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23212/) (2026)
- [SPLATIFY: Reproduce, Discover, Innovate! From Papers and Ideas to Trainable 3DGS Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.09116/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has become one of the most influential works in the past year. Due to its efficient and high-quality novel view synthesis capabilities, it has been widely adopted in many research fields and applications. Nevertheless, 3DGS still faces challenges to properly manage the number of Gaussian primitives that are used during scene reconstruction. Following the adaptive density control (ADC) mechanism of 3D Gaussian Splatting, new Gaussians in under-reconstructed regions are created, while Gaussians that do not contribute to the rendering quality are pruned. We observe that those criteria for densifying and pruning Gaussians can sometimes lead to worse rendering by introducing artifacts. We especially observe under-reconstructed background or overfitted foreground regions. To encounter both problems, we propose three new improvements to the adaptive density control mechanism. Those include a correction for the scene extent calculation that does not only rely on camera positions, an exponentially ascending gradient threshold to improve training convergence, and significance-aware pruning strategy to avoid background artifacts. With these adaptions, we show that the rendering quality improves while using the same number of Gaussians primitives. Furthermore, with our improvements, the training converges considerably faster, allowing for more than twice as fast training times while yielding better quality than 3DGS. Finally, our contributions are easily compatible with most existing derivative works of 3DGS making them relevant for future works.