Efficient Encoder-Free Fourier-based 3D Large Multimodal Model

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable progress in integrating visual and linguistic understanding. Recent efforts have extended these capabilities to 3D understanding through encoder-based architectures that rely on pre-trained 3D encoders to extract geometric features. However, such approaches suffer from semantic misalignment between geometric and linguistic spaces, resolution sensitivity, and substantial computational overhead. In this work, we present SAGE, the first end-to-end 3D MLLM that directly processes raw point clouds without relying on a pre-trained 3D encoder. Our approach introduces a lightweight 3D tokenizer that combines geometric sampling and neighbourhood aggregation with vector quantization to convert point clouds into discrete tokens--treating 3D data as a foreign language that naturally extends the LLM's vocabulary. Furthermore, to enhance the model's reasoning capability on complex 3D tasks, we propose a preference optimization training strategy with a semantic alignment-based reward, specifically designed for open-ended 3D question answering where responses are descriptive. Extensive experiments across diverse 3D understanding benchmarks demonstrate that our end-to-end approach outperforms existing encoder-based methods while offering significant advantages in computational efficiency, generalization across LLM backbones, and robustness to input resolution variations. Code is available at: github.com/snehaputul/SAGE3D.

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have expanded reasoning capabilities into 3D domains, enabling fine-grained spatial understanding. However, the substantial size of 3D MLLMs and the high dimensionality of input features introduce considerable inference overhead, which limits practical deployment on resource constrained platforms. To overcome this limitation, this paper presents Efficient3D, a unified framework for visual token pruning that accelerates 3D MLLMs while maintaining competitive accuracy. The proposed framework introduces a Debiased Visual Token Importance Estimator (DVTIE) module, which considers the influence of shallow initial layers during attention aggregation, thereby producing more reliable importance predictions for visual tokens. In addition, an Adaptive Token Rebalancing (ATR) strategy is developed to dynamically adjust pruning strength based on scene complexity, preserving semantic completeness and maintaining balanced attention across layers. Together, they enable context-aware token reduction that maintains essential semantics with lower computation. Comprehensive experiments conducted on five representative 3D vision and language benchmarks, including ScanRefer, Multi3DRefer, Scan2Cap, ScanQA, and SQA3D, demonstrate that Efficient3D achieves superior performance compared with unpruned baselines, with a +2.57% CIDEr improvement on the Scan2Cap dataset. Therefore, Efficient3D provides a scalable and effective solution for efficient inference in 3D MLLMs. The code is released at: https://github.com/sol924/Efficient3D

Existing 3D large language models (LLMs) compromise on two fronts: they compress shapes into latent codebook indices or coordinate text, which removes spatial structure from what the model observes, and they acquire the 3D modality by fine-tuning the backbone, which overwrites its general language ability. We present OctLLM, which addresses both limitations. Geometry enters as an explicit 3D sequence of octree occupancy tokens. However, full octree sequences grow rapidly with depth; OctLLM therefore randomly empties penultimate-level nodes and omits descendants while preserving shape, yielding a shorter coordinate- and depth-anchored Sparse Octree (S-Octree) for position-aware mask-modeling generation and 3D understanding. On the other front, existing methods introduce a new modality with full fine-tuning or LoRA, but full fine-tuning is costly, LoRA limits 3D capacity, and both modify the language pathway. OctLLM instead adds 3D capacity in parameters separate from the pretrained ones: mesh tokens are routed through independent trainable branches in a subset of blocks while text and image tokens retain the frozen vision-language pathway, and the two streams interact through shared self-attention. It trains far fewer parameters than full fine-tuning, yet sets a new state of the art among unified multimodal LLMs, lowering image-to-3D FID by $17.4\%$ and raising render-grounded captioning by $28.7$ points over ShapeLLM-Omni, while matching the backbone on general language benchmarks.