SplatQ: Interaction-Aware Pruning of 3D Gaussian Splatting via Quadratic Selection

Existing 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) pruning methods primarily rely on global Top-K selection based on independent importance scores, lacking regional budget control and ignoring joint deletion effects. Consequently, they cannot ensure balanced reconstruction quality across a scene. We propose SplatQ, a combinatorial pruning algorithm that coordinates regional budget allocation and joint Gaussian selection under a fixed budget. SplatQ partitions Gaussians by spatial proximity and appearance similarity into size-limited blocks, decomposing global selection into subproblems of a specific size. It then smooths importance-based block retention quotas to prevent excessive budget concentration. Finally, it constructs a quadratic approximation of joint deletion effects using the responses of representative pixel colors to changes in Gaussian opacity. Individual responses, pairwise interactions, and quota penalties are incorporated into a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) objective, solved using simulated annealing (SA) or a coherent Ising machine (CIM) to jointly select Gaussians. Experiments on 5 benchmarks demonstrate that SplatQ outperforms state-of-the-art pruning methods in aggregate reconstruction quality, spatial quality balance, and rendering speed. Ablations confirm that budget smoothing improves local detail reconstruction, while interaction modeling improves Gaussian selection quality under a fixed budget.