3D scene reconstruction, modeling, and rendering are highly relevant for numerous tasks, and 3D Gaussian splatting has become a standard choice in this context. Its feed-forward variants provide fast reconstruction from sparse input views but often produce per-pixel primitives, leading to highly redundant and thus inefficient representations. We present a structure-aware merging pipeline that takes per-pixel primitives from any feed-forward method and consolidates them into a compact, content-adaptive Gaussian set while largely retaining visual quality at just $\frac{1}{20}^\text{th}$ of the Gaussians of a per-pixel method. We group spatially coherent Gaussians of similar appearance into variable-size clusters via adaptive superpixel segmentation guided by a saliency map, which allocates fine segments to textured regions and coarse segments to homogeneous areas. We compress each cluster into a compact latent representation through a learned encoder, then match and consolidate representations across views based on geometric overlap and feature similarity via a learned merger. A level-of-detail decoder then produces the final Gaussians at a controllable resolution, enabling a flexible quality-efficiency trade-off at inference. As a post-processing module, the pipeline is backbone-agnostic, leveraging the strengths of existing feed-forward methods. This leads to better and more robust quality than achieved by previous approaches that target a reduction in primitive count, while providing a highly compact representation, that can be rendered efficiently.
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) achieves high-quality real-time rendering by representing a scene with a large collection of anisotropic Gaussian primitives. However, complex scenes often require millions of Gaussians, resulting in substantial storage and rendering costs. Existing compression methods mainly reduce redundancy through primitive-wise pruning, attribute quantization, clustering, or neural coding, while redundancy caused by strongly overlapping and non-orthogonal Gaussian basis functions remains largely unexplored. We present QIRF, a quantum-inspired non-orthogonal function-space compression method for 3D Gaussian Splatting. QIRF models neighboring Gaussian primitives as a local non-orthogonal basis and formulates primitive reduction as a subspace-aware selection problem. Specifically, an analytic Gaussian overlap matrix and a radiance-response density matrix are constructed to characterize functional redundancy and rendering relevance. Generalized eigendecomposition is then used to identify the dominant local subspace and select representative Gaussian primitives. An RRDM-based response model and detail-aware safeguarding further preserve visually important high-frequency structures under aggressive pruning. Experiments on 13 scenes from Mip-NeRF 360, Tanks and Temples, and Deep Blending show that QIRF reduces the Gaussian count and raw PLY storage by 71.7 percent on average, corresponding to approximately 3.54 times compression, while maintaining reconstruction quality comparable to 3DGS and achieving a marginal average PSNR improvement of 0.10 dB. QIRF also improves the average rendering speed over 3DGS by 34.3 percent. These results suggest that non-orthogonal function-space redundancy is an important yet underexplored source of representational redundancy in explicit Gaussian radiance fields.