VEDAL: Variational Error-Driven Asynchronous Learning for 3D Gaussian Splatting Pruning

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.02346v1
• Date: Mon, 01 Jun 2026 14:56:50 GMT
• Title: VEDAL: Variational Error-Driven Asynchronous Learning for 3D Gaussian Splatting Pruning
• Abstract summary: 3D Splatting (3DGS) achieves remarkable novel view rendering quality with real-time synthesis, yet suffers from excessive memory consumption.<n>We propose VEDAL, a principled framework that formulates Gaussian pruning as variational free energy minimization.<n>Experiments on Mip-NeRF 360, Tanks&Temples, and Deep Blending demonstrate that VEDAL 5.2x compression with only 0.31 dB PSNR drop, outperforming PUP 3D-GS by +0.05 dB at a higher compression ratio and LightGaussian by +0.35 dB at comparable quality.
• Score: 5.881987656920194
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) achieves remarkable novel view synthesis quality with real-time rendering, yet suffers from excessive memory consumption due to millions of Gaussian primitives. Existing pruning methods rely on heuristic importance scores or synchronous batch updates, leading to suboptimal compression and training instability. We propose VEDAL, a principled framework that formulates Gaussian pruning as variational free energy minimization. Our approach introduces (1) a prediction-error gating mechanism that asynchronously activates pruning based on per-Gaussian reconstruction uncertainty, and (2) a variational uncertainty head that models pruning decisions as latent variables with learnable priors. The free energy objective naturally balances reconstruction fidelity against model complexity through an information-theoretic lens. Extensive experiments on Mip-NeRF 360, Tanks&Temples, and Deep Blending demonstrate that VEDAL achieves 5.2x compression with only 0.31 dB PSNR drop, outperforming PUP 3D-GS by +0.05 dB at a higher compression ratio and LightGaussian by +0.35 dB at comparable quality, while maintaining real-time rendering at 185 FPS.

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