# G2ARD-GS: Geometry-Guided Anchor-Regularized Gaussian Splatting Distillation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05704 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05704/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Aug 2026.

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

- [Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12077/) (2021)
- [2D Gaussian Splatting for Geometrically Accurate Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17888/) (2024)
- [Grounding Image Matching in 3D with MASt3R](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09756/) (2024)
- [SuGaR: Surface-Aligned Gaussian Splatting for Efficient 3D Mesh Reconstruction and High-Quality Mesh Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12775/) (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)
- [DrivingGaussian: Composite Gaussian Splatting for Surrounding Dynamic Autonomous Driving Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07920/) (2023)
- [Compressed 3D Gaussian Splatting for Accelerated Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02436/) (2023)
- [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)
- [MatrixCity: A Large-scale City Dataset for City-scale Neural Rendering and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16553/) (2023)
- [CompGS: Smaller and Faster Gaussian Splatting with Vector Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18159/) (2023)
- [ActiveNeRF: Learning where to See with Uncertainty Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08546/) (2022)
- [Accelerated Coordinate Encoding: Learning to Relocalize in Minutes using RGB and Poses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14059/) (2023)
- [Toronto-3D: A Large-scale Mobile LiDAR Dataset for Semantic Segmentation of Urban Roadways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08284/) (2020)
- [SplatAD: Real-Time Lidar and Camera Rendering with 3D Gaussian Splatting for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16816/) (2024)
- [GS-CPR: Efficient Camera Pose Refinement via 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11085/) (2024)
- [Effective Rank Analysis and Regularization for Enhanced 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11672/) (2024)
- [VEGS: View Extrapolation of Urban Scenes in 3D Gaussian Splatting using Learned Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02945/) (2024)
- [LI-GS: Gaussian Splatting with LiDAR Incorporated for Accurate Large-Scale Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12899/) (2024)
- [FewViewGS: Gaussian Splatting with Few View Matching and Multi-stage Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02229/) (2024)
- [3DGS-ReLoc: 3D Gaussian Splatting for Map Representation and Visual ReLocalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11367/) (2024)
- [ECLAIR: A High-Fidelity Aerial LiDAR Dataset for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10699/) (2024)
- [NanoGS: Training-Free Gaussian Splat Simplification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16103/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Dense colored LiDAR maps provide accurate city-scale geometry, but lifting them into 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) retains millions of primitives, making the resulting models costly to store, transmit, render, and adapt. Aggressive primitive reduction alleviates this burden, but can remove the local surface support needed for stable novel-view synthesis and downstream geometric use. We introduce G2ARD-GS, a geometry-guided distillation method that converts a dense Gaussian prior instantiated either as a training-free point-cloud lift or a trained GS model into a compact, reusable representation. G2ARD-GS progressively consolidates the prior into surface-aware representatives, then recovers appearance on the resulting fixed topology under construction-time anchor constraints, with no primitives added or removed during recovery. Under limited supervision, geometry-aware view selection allocates the available view budget. On MatrixCity, G2ARD-GS achieves the best PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS across matched 5×--30× compression budgets, outperforming PUP by 3.2--6.8,dB in PSNR. When reused as frozen geometry, the compact model improves off-trajectory appearance adaptation by 3.7--4.9,dB over PUP 3D-GS and preserves image-to-model registration accuracy on Cambridge KingsCollege at 30× compression. Project page: https://patrick1159.github.io/gardGS-page/.