# ProGS: Towards Progressive Coding for 3D Gaussian Splatting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09703 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09703/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12077/) (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)
- [Compact 3D Gaussian Representation for Radiance Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13681/) (2023)
- [Compressed 3D Gaussian Splatting for Accelerated Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02436/) (2023)
- [Octree-GS: Towards Consistent Real-time Rendering with LOD-Structured 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17898/) (2024)
- [BungeeNeRF: Progressive Neural Radiance Field for Extreme Multi-scale Scene Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05504/) (2021)
- [A Survey on 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03890/) (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)
- [Full Resolution Image Compression with Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.05148/) (2016)
- [Variable Rate Image Compression with Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06085/) (2015)
- [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)
- [3D Gaussian as a New Era: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07181/) (2024)
- [ContextGS: Compact 3D Gaussian Splatting with Anchor Level Context Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20721/) (2024)
- [Improved Lossy Image Compression with Priming and Spatially Adaptive Bit Rates for Recurrent Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10114/) (2017)
- [CompGS: Efficient 3D Scene Representation via Compressed Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09458/) (2024)
- [End-to-End Rate-Distortion Optimized 3D Gaussian Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01597/) (2024)
- [Info3D: Representation Learning on 3D Objects using Mutual Information Maximization and Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.02598/) (2020)
- [Scalable Image Coding for Humans and Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08373/) (2021)
- [HAC++: Towards 100X Compression of 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12255/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Progressive transmission of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) requires each completed transmission stage to be decodable from received data and directly renderable. This work presents ProGS, a progressive codec that organizes anchor-based 3DGS as parent-closed octree prefixes. ProGS combines parent-causal entropy coding, level-balanced anchor growth, bounded multi-prefix training, and lightweight parent-anchor refinement to improve early-prefix quality without altering the complete-model rendering path. One fixed-λ training run yields five deployable rate--quality points from a single bitstream. Experiments on 17 scenes from three datasets evaluate rate--distortion performance, rendering speed, and transmission efficiency against progressive and single-rate baselines. On one representative scene per dataset, ProGS reaches a common quality target with 30.7 ~ 60.7% fewer bytes than HAC-Rand and 22.6 ~ 53.4% fewer bytes than HAC++-Rand. Across the three dataset averages, ProGS-LR uses 4.7 ~ 6.1% fewer bytes than HAC-high while improving SSIM by 0.002 ~ 0.041 and reducing LPIPS by 4.8 ~ 51.2%. The parent-closed syntax makes every prefix causally decodable and directly renderable without future topology. ProGS-HR also yields higher endpoint SSIM and lower LPIPS than PCGS across all three dataset averages, and all five prefixes render in real time. Code is available at https://github.com/ZhiyeTang/ProGS-Official