# Dropping Anchor and Spherical Harmonics for Sparse-view Gaussian Splatting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20933 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20933/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [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)
- [DeepSDF: Learning Continuous Signed Distance Functions for Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05103/) (2019)
- [Occupancy Networks: Learning 3D Reconstruction in Function Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03828/) (2018)
- [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)
- [NeRF in the Wild: Neural Radiance Fields for Unconstrained Photo Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02268/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Convolutional Occupancy Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04618/) (2020)
- [Scaffold-GS: Structured 3D Gaussians for View-Adaptive Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00109/) (2023)
- [KiloNeRF: Speeding up Neural Radiance Fields with Thousands of Tiny MLPs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13744/) (2021)
- [Mip-Splatting: Alias-free 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16493/) (2023)
- [RegNeRF: Regularizing Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis from Sparse Inputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00724/) (2021)
- [MVSplat: Efficient 3D Gaussian Splatting from Sparse Multi-View Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14627/) (2024)
- [FastNeRF: High-Fidelity Neural Rendering at 200FPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10380/) (2021)
- [Point-NeRF: Point-based Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08845/) (2022)
- [Putting NeRF on a Diet: Semantically Consistent Few-Shot View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00677/) (2021)
- [Gaussian Splatting SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06741/) (2023)
- [Compact 3D Gaussian Representation for Radiance Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13681/) (2023)
- [FreeNeRF: Improving Few-shot Neural Rendering with Free Frequency Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07418/) (2023)
- [FSGS: Real-Time Few-shot View Synthesis using Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00451/) (2023)
- [DNGaussian: Optimizing Sparse-View 3D Gaussian Radiance Fields with Global-Local Depth Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06912/) (2024)
- [GaussianShader: 3D Gaussian Splatting with Shading Functions for Reflective Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17977/) (2023)
- [SparseNeRF: Distilling Depth Ranking for Few-shot Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16196/) (2023)
- [A Survey on 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03890/) (2024)
- [Texture Fields: Learning Texture Representations in Function Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07259/) (2019)
- [HAC: Hash-grid Assisted Context for 3D Gaussian Splatting Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14530/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Chat-Edit-3D++: Interactive 3D and 4D Scene Editing via Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29137/) (2026)
- [PairDropGS: Paired Dropout-Induced Consistency Regularization for Sparse-View Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12072/) (2026)
- [RouteBridge: Reliability-Routed Bidirectional Distillation Between Neural Radiance Fields and 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.09606/) (2026)
- [Is Gaussian Splatting Becoming Neural Again? A Taxonomy and Controlled Study of Learned Parameterization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.12395/) (2026)
- [Only What Was Seen: Observation-Gram Compaction of View-Dependent Appearance in 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.28997/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) Dropout methods address overfitting under sparse-view conditions by randomly nullifying Gaussian opacities. However, we identify a neighbor compensation effect in these approaches: dropped Gaussians are often compensated by their neighbors, weakening the intended regularization. Moreover, these methods overlook the contribution of high-degree spherical harmonic coefficients (SH) to overfitting. To address these issues, we propose DropAnSH-GS, a novel anchor-based Dropout strategy. Rather than dropping Gaussians independently, our method randomly selects certain Gaussians as anchors and simultaneously removes their spatial neighbors. This effectively disrupts local redundancies near anchors and encourages the model to learn more robust, globally informed representations. Furthermore, we extend the Dropout to color attributes by randomly dropping higher-degree SH to concentrate appearance information in lower-degree SH. This strategy further mitigates overfitting and enables flexible post-training model compression via SH truncation. Experimental results demonstrate that DropAnSH-GS substantially outperforms existing Dropout methods with negligible computational overhead, and can be readily integrated into various 3DGS variants to enhance their performances. Project Website: https://sk-fun.fun/DropAnSH-GS