Scaling has powered recent advances in vision foundation models, yet extending this paradigm to metric depth estimation remains challenging due to heterogeneous sensor noise, camera-dependent biases, and metric ambiguity in noisy cross-source 3D data. We introduce Metric Anything, a simple and scalable pretraining framework that learns metric depth from noisy, diverse 3D sources without manually engineered prompts, camera-specific modeling, or task-specific architectures. Central to our approach is the Sparse Metric Prompt, created by randomly masking depth maps, which serves as a universal interface that decouples spatial reasoning from sensor and camera biases. Using about 20M image-depth pairs spanning reconstructed, captured, and rendered 3D data across 10000 camera models, we demonstrate-for the first time-a clear scaling trend in the metric depth track. The pretrained model excels at prompt-driven tasks such as depth completion, super-resolution and Radar-camera fusion, while its distilled prompt-free student achieves state-of-the-art results on monocular depth estimation, camera intrinsics recovery, single/multi-view metric 3D reconstruction, and VLA planning. We also show that using pretrained ViT of Metric Anything as a visual encoder significantly boosts Multimodal Large Language Model capabilities in spatial intelligence. These results show that metric depth estimation can benefit from the same scaling laws that drive modern foundation models, establishing a new path toward scalable and efficient real-world metric perception. We open-source MetricAnything at http://metric-anything.github.io/metric-anything-io/ to support community research.
Recent geometric foundation models (e.g., Metric3D, Depth Anything and UniDepth) have substantially improved monocular depth estimation (MDE) in both cross-scene generalization and metric-scale prediction, yet these gains have not translated to tiny models. We bridge this gap with DepthART (Depth Anything Rethought for Tiny Models), which is a compact MDE model for on-device deployment across diverse scenes. We first identify two capacity-driven bottlenecks in tiny models: (i) overfitting to dataset-specific distribution bias and (ii) unstable metric adaptation under camera shift, where full fine-tuning easily damages transferable geometry. Accordingly, DepthART combines two simple but effective strategies: a bias-resistant data sampling scheme to reduce distribution bias under the same training budget, and a camera-conditioned fine-tuning protocol that freezes the distilled encoder and adjusts metric scale conditioned on intrinsics while better preserving cross-dataset generalization. Across datasets, DepthART consistently surpasses previous tiny baselines in both zero-shot generalization and metric accuracy (e.g., zero-shot δ1=0.964 for DepthART-S on NYUD v2), and in some cases approaches heavy models. We further provide a scalable model family, with DepthART-S reaching 347/245 FPS (strict FP32) on an RTX A6000 at 2242/4482, 102 FPS (TF32) on a Orin NX 8GB, and over 15 FPS (FP32) on a Jetson Nano 4GB.
Recent advances have markedly improved the cross-scene generalization of relative depth estimation, yet its practical applicability remains limited by the absence of metric scale, local inconsistencies, and low computational efficiency. To address these issues, we present \emph{\textbf{M}idas \textbf{T}ouch for \textbf{D}epth} (MTD), a mathematically interpretable approach that converts relative depth into metric depth using only extremely sparse 3D data. To eliminate local scale inconsistencies, it applies a segment-wise recovery strategy via sparse graph optimization, followed by a pixel-wise refinement strategy using a discontinuity-aware geodesic cost. MTD exhibits strong generalization and achieves substantial accuracy improvements over previous depth completion and depth estimation methods. Moreover, its lightweight, plug-and-play design facilitates deployment and integration on diverse downstream 3D tasks. Project page is available at https://mias.group/MTD.
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at 2D tasks such as grounding and captioning, yet remain limited in 3D understanding. A key limitation is their text-only supervision paradigm, which under-constrains fine-grained visual perception and prevents the recovery of dense geometry. Prior methods either distill geometry from external vision models, introducing error accumulation, or enable direct prediction with inefficient per-pixel query or coarse token-level outputs. In this paper, we propose DepthVLM, a simple yet effective framework that transforms a single VLM into a native dense geometry predictor while preserving its multimodal capability. By attaching a lightweight depth head to the LLM backbone and training under a unified vision-text supervision paradigm with a two-stage schedule, DepthVLM generates full-resolution depth maps alongside language outputs in a single forward pass. We further introduce a unified indoor-outdoor metric depth benchmark in a VLM-compatible format. Experiments show that DepthVLM significantly outperforms existing VLMs with higher inference efficiency, surpasses leading pure vision models, and improves complex 3D spatial reasoning, moving toward a truly unified multimodal foundation model. The project page is available at https://depthvlm.github.io/