Beyond Heuristics: Learnable Density Control for 3D Gaussian Splatting

arXiv cs.CV / 5/4/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper argues that 3D Gaussian Splatting’s performance is limited by heuristic (handcrafted) density control rules that struggle to adapt to diverse, complex scenes.
  • It introduces LeGS, a framework that turns density control into a learnable, parameterized policy network trained with reinforcement learning rather than fixed heuristics.
  • LeGS uses a reward function based on sensitivity analysis to measure how much each Gaussian contributes to reconstruction quality.
  • To keep reward computation efficient, the authors derive a closed-form method that reduces complexity from O(N^2) to O(N).
  • Experiments on Mip-NeRF 360, Tanks & Temples, and Deep Blending show LeGS outperforms prior methods while improving the trade-off between reconstruction quality and efficiency, and the authors plan to release the code.

Abstract

While 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has demonstrated impressive real-time rendering performance, its efficacy remains constrained by a reliance on heuristic density control. Despite numerous refinements to these handcrafted rules, such methods inherently lack the flexibility to adapt to diverse scenes with complex geometries. In this paper, we propose a paradigm shift for density control from rigid heuristics to fully learnable policies. Specifically, we introduce \textbf{LeGS}, a framework that reformulates density control as a parameterized policy network optimized via Reinforcement Learning (RL). Central to our approach is the tailored effective reward function grounded in sensitivity analysis, which precisely quantifies the marginal contribution of individual Gaussians to reconstruction quality. To maintain computational tractability, we derive a closed-form solution that reduces the complexity of reward calculation from O(N^2) to O(N). Extensive experiments on the Mip-NeRF 360, Tanks \& Temples, and Deep Blending datasets demonstrate that \textbf{LeGS} significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, striking a superior balance between reconstruction quality and efficiency. The code will be released at https://github.com/AaronNZH/LeGS