Gallileo-4D: Frozen Backbone Ensemble for Dynamic 4D Reconstruction

Abstract

We describe our entry to the PhysAI Dynamic 4D Reconstruction Challenge, which placed third of 27 teams at 0.58356 APD on the final leaderboard, without a single gradient update. This was not the plan: of thirteen fine-tuning configurations of a pre-trained 4D backbone, twelve degraded the challenge score, and eleven of those twelve improved local validation at the same time. We trace this inversion to the structure of the benchmark: only 25% of the evaluation set belongs to the data variant released for training, so updates that fit the available data damage the pre-trained features the remaining 75% relies on. Our system therefore freezes the backbone and spends its budget at inference time, fusing three decoding configurations -- temporal stride-3, horizontal-flip test-time augmentation, and dense stride-1 -- under a convex weighting. The ensemble recovers +0.041 APD over the frozen baseline, more than any training run achieved, at zero training cost.