A Comprehensive Survey of 4D Gaussian Splatting for Dynamic Scene Reconstruction

4D Gaussian splatting (4DGS) has rapidly become a prominent approach to dynamic scene reconstruction and free-viewpoint rendering, inheriting the explicit primitives and real-time rasterization of 3D Gaussian splatting while adding a temporal axis. Although 4DGS is a nascent area of research, the number of methods has grown explosively, making it difficult to navigate. In this paper, we survey recent progress in 4DGS. Specifically, we cover three major themes: (i) representations, organized into deformation-based, native 4D-primitive, hybrid/decomposition, anchor/stream- ing, and feed-forward/generalizable families; (ii) compression and storage efficiency, the defining practical bottleneck of 4DGS; (iii) applications, including autonomous driving, 4D content generation, editing and semantics, event and constrained capture, and avatars/robotics/medicine. We also present comparative results on widely used benchmarks, together with observations and future research directions. A taxonomy and chronological overview of representative methods are provided throughout this survey to help readers situate individual works.