# Does it matter which Gaussians you pick in 4D Gaussian streaming?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.17227 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17227/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [D-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13961/) (2020)
- [Nerfies: Deformable Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12948/) (2020)
- [4D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Dynamic Scene Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08528/) (2023)
- [Deformable 3D Gaussians for High-Fidelity Monocular Dynamic Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13101/) (2023)
- [Neural Scene Flow Fields for Space-Time View Synthesis of Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13084/) (2020)
- [K-Planes: Explicit Radiance Fields in Space, Time, and Appearance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10241/) (2023)
- [Neural Body: Implicit Neural Representations with Structured Latent Codes for Novel View Synthesis of Dynamic Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15838/) (2020)
- [HexPlane: A Fast Representation for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.09632/) (2023)
- [AMC: AutoML for Model Compression and Acceleration on Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03494/) (2018)
- [Spacetime Gaussian Feature Splatting for Real-Time Dynamic View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16812/) (2023)
- [SkipNet: Learning Dynamic Routing in Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09485/) (2017)
- [Octree-GS: Towards Consistent Real-time Rendering with LOD-Structured 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17898/) (2024)
- [HyperNeRF: A Higher-Dimensional Representation for Topologically Varying Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13228/) (2021)
- [NeRSemble: Multi-view Radiance Field Reconstruction of Human Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03027/) (2023)
- [BlockDrop: Dynamic Inference Paths in Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08393/) (2017)
- [4D-Rotor Gaussian Splatting: Towards Efficient Novel View Synthesis for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03307/) (2024)
- [3DGStream: On-the-Fly Training of 3D Gaussians for Efficient Streaming of Photo-Realistic Free-Viewpoint Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01444/) (2024)
- [Consistent4D: Consistent 360deg Dynamic Object Generation from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02848/) (2023)
- [Streaming Radiance Fields for 3D Video Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14831/) (2022)
- [PUP 3D-GS: Principled Uncertainty Pruning for 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10219/) (2024)
- [Neural Residual Radiance Fields for Streamably Free-Viewpoint Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04452/) (2023)
- [SampleNet: Differentiable Point Cloud Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03663/) (2019)
- [FreeTimeGS: Free Gaussian Primitives at Anytime and Anywhere for Dynamic Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05348/) (2025)
- [Reconstructing 3D Human Pose by Watching Humans in the Mirror](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00340/) (2021)
- [Instant Gaussian Stream: Fast and Generalizable Streaming of Dynamic Scene Reconstruction via Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16979/) (2025)
- [GIFStream: 4D Gaussian-based Immersive Video with Feature Stream](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07539/) (2025)
- [MTGS: Multi-Traversal Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12552/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Anchor-driven 4D Gaussian streaming methods such as Instant Gaussian Stream (IGS) update a dynamic scene each frame from a compact set of Gaussian anchors, chosen by default with Farthest Point Sampling (FPS) at a fixed budget of 8,192. Because these anchors act as control points that drive the whole scene through linear blend skinning, the rule used to choose them ought to affect reconstruction quality. We test this by holding the IGS pipeline fixed and changing only the sampler, comparing FPS, random, uniform, an opacity-scale heuristic, and a learned policy across budgets and refinement settings on N3DV and MeetingRoom. At deployment budgets the sampler has no measurable effect: a cheap random or uniform sampler at 4,096 anchors matches FPS@8192 within measurement error, the default budget is over-provisioned, and the result holds on a second backbone (3DGStream). The learned policy is mixed rather than consistently better: it can improve the N3DV validation set at tight budgets, but does not give a stable cross-dataset rule, and selection is never the bottleneck because refinement dominates runtime. We will release our full sweep and evaluation protocol as a sampler benchmark.