# BalanceGS: Algorithm-System Co-design for Efficient 3D Gaussian Splatting Training on GPU

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14564 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14564/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [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)
- [Mip-NeRF: A Multiscale Representation for Anti-Aliasing Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13415/) (2021)
- [Scaffold-GS: Structured 3D Gaussians for View-Adaptive Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00109/) (2023)
- [LightGaussian: Unbounded 3D Gaussian Compression with 15x Reduction and 200+ FPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17245/) (2023)
- [Gaussian Splatting SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06741/) (2023)
- [SplaTAM: Splat, Track & Map 3D Gaussians for Dense RGB-D SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02126/) (2023)
- [Compact 3D Gaussian Representation for Radiance Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13681/) (2023)
- [DrivingGaussian: Composite Gaussian Splatting for Surrounding Dynamic Autonomous Driving Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07920/) (2023)
- [GS-SLAM: Dense Visual SLAM with 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11700/) (2023)
- [Street Gaussians: Modeling Dynamic Urban Scenes with Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01339/) (2024)
- [HAC: Hash-grid Assisted Context for 3D Gaussian Splatting Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14530/) (2024)
- [EAGLES: Efficient Accelerated 3D Gaussians with Lightweight EncodingS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04564/) (2023)
- [OmniRe: Omni Urban Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16760/) (2024)
- [HUGS: Holistic Urban 3D Scene Understanding via Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12722/) (2024)
- [Photo-SLAM: Real-time Simultaneous Localization and Photorealistic Mapping for Monocular, Stereo, and RGB-D Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16728/) (2023)
- [GES: Generalized Exponential Splatting for Efficient Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10128/) (2024)
- [3DGS.zip: A survey on 3D Gaussian Splatting Compression Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09510/) (2024)
- [DOGS: Distributed-Oriented Gaussian Splatting for Large-Scale 3D Reconstruction Via Gaussian Consensus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13943/) (2024)
- [On Scaling Up 3D Gaussian Splatting Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18533/) (2024)
- [HeadStudio: Text to Animatable Head Avatars with 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.06149/) (2024)
- [GVA: Reconstructing Vivid 3D Gaussian Avatars from Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16607/) (2024)
- [Rig3DGS: Creating Controllable Portraits from Casual Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03723/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [GHOST: Geometry-Hierarchical Online Streaming Token Eviction for Efficient 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15852/) (2026)
- [VASC: Value-Aware Sparse Attention with Cross-Layer Memory for Efficient 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.01013/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a promising 3D reconstruction technique. The traditional 3DGS training pipeline follows three sequential steps: Gaussian densification, Gaussian projection, and color splatting. Despite its promising reconstruction quality, this conventional approach suffers from three critical inefficiencies: (1) Skewed density allocation during Gaussian densification, (2) Imbalanced computation workload during Gaussian projection and (3) Fragmented memory access during color splatting. To tackle the above challenges, we introduce BalanceGS, the algorithm-system co-design for efficient training in 3DGS. (1) At the algorithm level, we propose heuristic workload-sensitive Gaussian density control to automatically balance point distributions - removing 80% redundant Gaussians in dense regions while filling gaps in sparse areas. (2) At the system level, we propose Similarity-based Gaussian sampling and merging, which replaces the static one-to-one thread-pixel mapping with adaptive workload distribution - threads now dynamically process variable numbers of Gaussians based on local cluster density. (3) At the mapping level, we propose reordering-based memory access mapping strategy that restructures RGB storage and enables batch loading in shared memory. Extensive experiments demonstrate that compared with 3DGS, our approach achieves a 1.44× training speedup on a NVIDIA A100 GPU with negligible quality degradation.