# Unfolding 3D Gaussian Splatting via Iterative Gaussian Synopsis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.11685 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11685/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [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)
- [Estimating or Propagating Gradients Through Stochastic Neurons for Conditional Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.3432/) (2013)
- [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)
- [TensoRF: Tensorial Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09517/) (2022)
- [PlenOctrees for Real-time Rendering of Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14024/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Point-NeRF: Point-based Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08845/) (2022)
- [Baking Neural Radiance Fields for Real-Time View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14645/) (2021)
- [LightGaussian: Unbounded 3D Gaussian Compression with 15x Reduction and 200+ FPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17245/) (2023)
- [Neural Geometric Level of Detail: Real-time Rendering with Implicit 3D Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10994/) (2021)
- [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 Hierarchical 3D Gaussian Representation for Real-Time Rendering of Very Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12080/) (2024)
- [Mini-Splatting: Representing Scenes with a Constrained Number of Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14166/) (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)
- [CityGaussian: Real-time High-quality Large-Scale Scene Rendering with Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01133/) (2024)
- [Shape As Points: A Differentiable Poisson Solver](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03452/) (2021)
- [Multi-Scale 3D Gaussian Splatting for Anti-Aliased Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17089/) (2023)
- [VoxGRAF: Fast 3D-Aware Image Synthesis with Sparse Voxel Grids](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07695/) (2022)
- [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)
- [ContextGS: Compact 3D Gaussian Splatting with Anchor Level Context Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20721/) (2024)
- [End-to-End Rate-Distortion Optimized 3D Gaussian Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01597/) (2024)
- [HAC++: Towards 100X Compression of 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12255/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has become a state-of-the-art framework for real-time, high-fidelity novel view synthesis. However, its substantial storage requirements and inherently unstructured representation pose challenges for deployment in streaming and resource-constrained environments. Existing Level-of-Detail (LOD) strategies, particularly those based on bottom-up construction, often introduce redundancy or lead to fidelity degradation. To overcome these limitations, we propose Iterative Gaussian Synopsis, a novel framework for compact and progressive rendering through a top-down "unfolding" scheme. Our approach begins with a full-resolution 3DGS model and iteratively derives coarser LODs using an adaptive, learnable mask-based pruning mechanism. This process constructs a multi-level hierarchy that preserves visual quality while improving efficiency. We integrate hierarchical spatial grids, which capture the global scene structure, with a shared Anchor Codebook that models localized details. This combination produces a compact yet expressive feature representation, designed to minimize redundancy and support efficient, level-specific adaptation. The unfolding mechanism promotes inter-layer reusability and requires only minimal data overhead for progressive refinement. Experiments show that our method maintains high rendering quality across all LODs while achieving substantial storage reduction. These results demonstrate the practicality and scalability of our approach for real-time 3DGS rendering in bandwidth- and memory-constrained scenarios.