HaloGS: Loose Coupling of Compact Geometry and Gaussian Splats for 3D Scenes

High fidelity 3D reconstruction and rendering hinge on capturing precise geometry while preserving photo realistic detail. Most existing methods either fuse these goals into a single cumbersome model or adopt hybrid schemes whose uniform primitives lead to a trade off between efficiency and fidelity. In this paper, we introduce HaloGS, a dual representation that loosely couples coarse triangles for geometry with Gaussian primitives for appearance, motivated by the lightweight classic geometry representations and their proven efficiency in real world applications. Our design yields a compact yet expressive model capable of photo realistic rendering across both indoor and outdoor environments, seamlessly adapting to varying levels of scene complexity. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method yields both compact, accurate geometry and high fidelity renderings, especially in challenging scenarios where robust geometric structure make a clear difference.