Rendering-Aware Bayesian 3D Gaussian Splatting with Native Uncertainty and Adaptive Complexity Control
About
3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) is a strong representation for real-time novel-view synthesis, but its standard training pipeline relies on point estimates and hand-tuned heuristics, providing no native uncertainty or principled complexity control. This is most limiting under sparse views or fixed acquisition budgets, where a model must identify weakly supported geometry and select informative views. We introduce a rendering-aware Bayesian 3DGS framework that tracks Gaussian geometry with a Normal-Inverse-Wishart posterior over means and covariances using renderer-derived surrogate summaries. An optional Dirichlet-process extension adds a probabilistic component-usage signal, and the training schedule makes the closed-form versus approximate inference boundary explicit. Re-rendering posterior geometry samples yields native predictive uncertainty for interval calibration and active view selection. In a fixed-budget 16-to-32 active-view task, native NIW acquisition improves PSNR by +0.453 dB and LPIPS by -0.0146 over a scoring-only 3-member standard-ensemble baseline, winning 29/39 scene-seed pairs and 10/13 scene means; it also improves over PPU-style (+0.355 dB) and NIW-proxy (+0.401 dB) acquisition. NIW native intervals reduce 95% coverage error by about 17x relative to a shared proxy (0.046 vs. 0.796) and are about 10x closer to nominal coverage than a 3-member deep ensemble (0.047 vs. 0.454) at roughly one-third the training cost. As a reconstruction compatibility check, paired NIW-vs-standard analysis over 39 scene-seed runs yields +0.030 dB PSNR with 1.6% additional training time. These results position Bayesian 3DGS as a practical probabilistic scene representation for decision-facing tasks such as active view selection.