# NVGS: Neural Visibility for Occlusion Culling in 3D Gaussian Splatting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19202 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19202/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Fourier Features Let Networks Learn High Frequency Functions in Low Dimensional Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10739/) (2020)
- [Scaffold-GS: Structured 3D Gaussians for View-Adaptive Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00109/) (2023)
- [Mip-Splatting: Alias-free 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16493/) (2023)
- [LightGaussian: Unbounded 3D Gaussian Compression with 15x Reduction and 200+ FPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17245/) (2023)
- [gsplat: An Open-Source Library for Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06765/) (2024)
- [Octree-GS: Towards Consistent Real-time Rendering with LOD-Structured 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17898/) (2024)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting as Markov Chain Monte Carlo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09591/) (2024)
- [A Hierarchical 3D Gaussian Representation for Real-Time Rendering of Very Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12080/) (2024)
- [EAGLES: Efficient Accelerated 3D Gaussians with Lightweight EncodingS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04564/) (2023)
- [Compact 3D Scene Representation via Self-Organizing Gaussian Grids](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13299/) (2023)
- [Reducing the Memory Footprint of 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17074/) (2024)
- [CompGS: Smaller and Faster Gaussian Splatting with Vector Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18159/) (2023)
- [Revising Densification in Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06109/) (2024)
- [RadSplat: Radiance Field-Informed Gaussian Splatting for Robust Real-Time Rendering with 900+ FPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13806/) (2024)
- [StopThePop: Sorted Gaussian Splatting for View-Consistent Real-time Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00525/) (2024)
- [LP-3DGS: Learning to Prune 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18784/) (2024)
- [MVHumanNet: A Large-scale Dataset of Multi-view Daily Dressing Human Captures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02963/) (2023)
- [MaskGaussian: Adaptive 3D Gaussian Representation from Probabilistic Masks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20522/) (2024)
- [RTMV: A Ray-Traced Multi-View Synthetic Dataset for Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07058/) (2022)
- [FLoD: Integrating Flexible Level of Detail into 3D Gaussian Splatting for Customizable Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12894/) (2024)
- [LODGE: Level-of-Detail Large-Scale Gaussian Splatting with Efficient Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23158/) (2025)
- [PRoGS: Progressive Rendering of Gaussian Splats](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01761/) (2024)
- [OccluGaussian: Occlusion-Aware Gaussian Splatting for Large Scene Reconstruction and Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16177/) (2025)
- [Virtualized 3D Gaussians: Flexible Cluster-based Level-of-Detail System for Real-Time Rendering of Composed Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06523/) (2025)

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

- [Speeding Up the Learning of 3D Gaussians with Much Shorter Gaussian Lists](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09277/) (2026)
- [Local-GS: Accelerating 3D Gaussian Splatting via Tile-Local Warp Coherence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.16566/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D Gaussian Splatting can exploit frustum culling and level-of-detail strategies to accelerate rendering of scenes containing a large number of primitives. However, the semi-transparent nature of Gaussians prevents the application of another highly effective technique: occlusion culling. We address this limitation by proposing a novel method to learn the viewpoint-dependent visibility function of all Gaussians in a trained model using a small, shared MLP across instances of an asset in a scene. By querying it for Gaussians within the viewing frustum prior to rasterization, our method can discard occluded primitives during rendering. Leveraging Tensor Cores for efficient computation, we integrate these neural queries directly into a novel instanced software rasterizer. Our approach outperforms the current state of the art for composed scenes in terms of VRAM usage and image quality, utilizing a combination of our instanced rasterizer and occlusion culling MLP, and exhibits complementary properties to existing LoD techniques.