We present the first unified framework for rate-distortion-optimized compression and segmentation of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). While 3DGS has proven effective for both real-time rendering and semantic scene understanding, prior works have largely treated these tasks independently, leaving their joint consideration unexplored. Inspired by recent advances in rate-distortion-optimized 3DGS compression, this work integrates semantic learning into the compression pipeline to support decoder-side applications--such as scene editing and manipulation--that extend beyond traditional scene reconstruction and view synthesis. Our scheme features a lightweight implicit neural representation-based hyperprior, enabling efficient entropy coding of both color and semantic attributes while avoiding costly grid-based hyperprior as seen in many prior works. To facilitate compression and segmentation, we further develop compression-guided segmentation learning, consisting of quantization-aware training to enhance feature separability and a quality-aware weighting mechanism to suppress unreliable Gaussian primitives. Extensive experiments on the LERF and 3D-OVS datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces transmission cost while preserving high rendering quality and strong segmentation performance.
@article{arxiv.2601.12814,
title = {CSGaussian: Progressive Rate-Distortion Compression and Segmentation for 3D Gaussian Splatting},
author = {Yu-Jen Tseng and Chia-Hao Kao and Jing-Zhong Chen and Alessandro Gnutti and Shao-Yuan Lo and Yen-Yu Lin and Wen-Hsiao Peng},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.12814},
year = {2026}
}