FreeTimeGS++: Secrets of Dynamic Gaussian Splatting and Their Principles

Recent progress in 4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS) has achieved impressive dynamic scene reconstruction results. While these methods demonstrate remarkable performance, the specific factors behind their gains remain underexplored, making a systematic understanding of the underlying principles challenging. In this paper, we perform a comprehensive analysis of these hidden factors to provide a clearer perspective on the 4DGS framework. We first establish a controlled baseline, FreeTimeGS_ours, by formalizing and reproducing the heuristics of the state-of-the-art FreeTimeGS. Using this framework, we examine 4DGS along its fundamental axes and identify practical secrets, including the emergent temporal partitioning driven by Gaussian durations and the decoupling between photometric fidelity and motion behavior. Based on these insights, we propose FreeTimeGS++, a principled method that employs gated marginalization, UFM-guided initialization, and color correction to improve stability and reproducibility. Our approach yields reproducible results with reduced run-to-run variance.