# PhysGS: Bayesian-Inferred Gaussian Splatting for Physical Property Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18570 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18570/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [Simple and Scalable Predictive Uncertainty Estimation using Deep Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01474/) (2016)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [What Uncertainties Do We Need in Bayesian Deep Learning for Computer Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04977/) (2017)
- [Multi-Task Learning Using Uncertainty to Weigh Losses for Scene Geometry and Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07115/) (2017)
- [The Dawn of LMMs: Preliminary Explorations with GPT-4V(ision)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17421/) (2023)
- [Nerfstudio: A Modular Framework for Neural Radiance Field Development](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04264/) (2023)
- [OpenScene: 3D Scene Understanding with Open Vocabularies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15654/) (2022)
- [LERF: Language Embedded Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09553/) (2023)
- [LangSplat: 3D Language Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16084/) (2023)
- [ABO: Dataset and Benchmarks for Real-World 3D Object Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06199/) (2021)
- [ConceptFusion: Open-set Multimodal 3D Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07241/) (2023)
- [Training Deep Networks with Synthetic Data: Bridging the Reality Gap by Domain Randomization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06516/) (2018)
- [RELLIS-3D Dataset: Data, Benchmarks and Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12954/) (2020)
- [Bayes' Rays: Uncertainty Quantification for Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03185/) (2023)
- [Semantic Gaussians: Open-Vocabulary Scene Understanding with 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15624/) (2024)
- [Splat-SLAM: Globally Optimized RGB-only SLAM with 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16544/) (2024)
- [CG-SLAM: Efficient Dense RGB-D SLAM in a Consistent Uncertainty-aware 3D Gaussian Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16095/) (2024)
- [Physical Property Understanding from Language-Embedded Feature Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04242/) (2024)
- [NEWTON: Are Large Language Models Capable of Physical Reasoning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07018/) (2023)
- [4D Gaussian Splatting in the Wild with Uncertainty-Aware Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.08879/) (2024)
- [STEP: Stochastic Traversability Evaluation and Planning for Risk-Aware Off-road Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02828/) (2021)
- [RoadRunner -- Learning Traversability Estimation for Autonomous Off-road Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19341/) (2024)
- [GrASPE: Graph based Multimodal Fusion for Robot Navigation in Unstructured Outdoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05722/) (2022)
- [PUGS: Zero-shot Physical Understanding with Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12231/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [SLAT-Phys: Fast Material Property Field Prediction from Structured 3D Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23973/) (2026)
- [EgoPhys: Learning Generalizable Physics Models of Deformable Objects from Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.16202/) (2026)
- [KnockGS:interaction-Grounded Calibrationof Physical Gaussian Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.27365/) (2026)
- [Analytic Dynamics: Learning Physics-Grounded Representation for Fast Intrinsic Dynamics Inference from Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.31025/) (2026)
- [PhysMAS: Physics-Grounded Multi-Agent Synthesis of Compositional 4D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.07174/) (2026)
- [PhysVGGT: Feed-Forward Dense Physical Property Estimation from A Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.18920/) (2026)
- [From Pixels to Executable Physics: Behavior-Grounded World Models for Embodied Action Consequence Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.17630/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Understanding physical properties such as friction, stiffness, hardness, and material composition is essential for enabling robots to interact safely and effectively with their surroundings. However, existing 3D reconstruction methods focus on geometry and appearance and cannot infer these underlying physical properties. We present PhysGS, a Bayesian-inferred extension of 3D Gaussian Splatting that estimates dense, per-point physical properties from visual cues and vision--language priors. We formulate property estimation as Bayesian inference over Gaussian splats, where material and property beliefs are iteratively refined as new observations arrive. PhysGS also models aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties, enabling uncertainty-aware object and scene interpretation. Across object-scale (ABO-500), indoor, and outdoor real-world datasets, PhysGS improves accuracy of the mass estimation by up to 22.8%, reduces Shore hardness error by up to 61.2%, and lowers kinetic friction error by up to 18.1% compared to deterministic baselines. Our results demonstrate that PhysGS unifies 3D reconstruction, uncertainty modeling, and physical reasoning in a single, spatially continuous framework for dense physical property estimation. Additional results are available at https://samchopra2003.github.io/physgs.