Does it matter which Gaussians you pick in 4D Gaussian streaming?
About
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.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Novel View Synthesis | Neural 3D Video Dataset (Flame Salmon scene) | PSNR26.985 | 19 | |
| 4D Gaussian Splatting refinement | N3DV HQ | PSNR32.736 | 6 | |
| 4D Gaussian Streaming | MeetingRoom Discussion | PSNR19.289 | 6 | |
| 4D Gaussian Streaming | MeetingRoom Trimming | PSNR18.394 | 6 | |
| 4D Novel View Synthesis | N3DV Sear Steak scene (unseen) | PSNR27.654 | 6 | |
| 4D Novel View Synthesis | N3DV Cut Roasted Beef scene (unseen) | PSNR22.392 | 6 | |
| Novel View Synthesis | N3DV Coffee Martini (val) | PSNR26.283 | 6 | |
| Novel View Synthesis | N3DV Cook Spinach (val) | PSNR24.085 | 6 | |
| Novel View Synthesis | N3DV Flame Steak (val) | PSNR27.24 | 6 | |
| 4D Gaussian Splatting refinement | MeetingRoom HQ (dataset average) | PSNR28.943 | 6 |