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Hexels replaced round Gaussian splats with hexagonal surface elements, gaining 4.5 to 7.4 dB over 2DGS at matched memory

AspireAI community · arXiv
Gaussian splats spend memory and compute on primitives that do not match the shape of the surfaces they represent. Hexels are planar hexagonal surface elements carrying a first-order spatial color field, so fewer, larger primitives cover locally planar regions while a local color field still captures appearance variation inside each one. Across 34 scenes the method improves PSNR over memory-matched 2DGS by 4.53 to 7.38 dB while needing less training VRAM, and per primitive it is up to 4.74 dB better at lower VRAM and 2.31x faster frame rate. On 3D surface reconstruction it cuts error by 28.9 percent against memory-matched 2DGS across 15 DTU scans, and on six Tanks and Temples surface scenes it reaches the highest mean F1 at 34.38 percent against 31.72 percent for 2DGS. As a general primitive it also improves 2D image representation over Image-GS. The comparison is deliberately memory-matched, so the gains are efficiency gains rather than a claim about the quality ceiling.
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One distance function matched sparse-autoencoder features across layers and compressed feature circuits into supernodes
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