VLRC: Vision-Language Reprojection Consistency as a scalable signal for better feed-forward 3D pretraining

Vision Language Models (VLMs) enable a unified model to solve various vision tasks through prompting. They have shown promising performance in semantic understanding. However, 3D understanding still largely relies on expert vision models with complex task-specific designs. The key argument this work wants to make is that VLMs are native 3D learners. Our in-depth large scale study shows that 1) focal length unification, 2) text-based pixel reference and 3) data mixture and scaling, are all you need for effective 3D learning. Model architecture changes, large models, heavy data augmentations, and complex losses including the regression formulation, many of which form the foundation of expert vision models, are actually not necessary conditions. As a result, we propose VLM3, a scalable method with the simplest design that enables standard VLMs to master diverse 3D tasks. VLM3 not only advances the VLM depth estimation accuracy by a large margin (0.84 -> 0.9), but also enables diverse 3D tasks such as pixel correspondence, camera pose estimation and object-level 3D understanding, matching expert vision model accuracy while maintaining standard architectures and text-based training. We believe VLM3 opens up a new paradigm for simple and scalable 3D learning.

We present LangFlash, a feed-forward framework for 3D Language Gaussian Splatting that reconstructs 3D scenes parameterized by Gaussian primitives enriched with language-aligned semantic features from sparse unposed multi-view images. Unlike optimization-based 3D methods, LangFlash directly predicts the geometry and semantics in a single forward pass, enabling low-latency 3D reconstruction and language-consistent scene understanding. To support large-scale training, we enriched the RealEstate10k dataset with coherent and dense semantic information for 3D semantic supervision. Furthermore, we propose a sparse semantic encoding scheme that combines a global semantic dictionary with locally varying per-primitive weights, preserving high-level linguistic information, while reducing representation complexity. Experimental results show that LangFlash achieves superior novel view synthesis and semantic consistency compared with previous methods. This study establishes a new paradigm for pose-free, language-grounded 3D scene reconstruction, advancing generalizable 3D vision and multimodal scene understanding. Demo is available at https://liylo.github.io/langflash.github.io/.

Learned image matching has experienced significant progress in recent years, culminating in robust and accurate matchers such as RoMa, whose robustness is often attributed to its use of frozen DINO features. In a parallel development, feed-forward reconstruction models, such as VGGT, have been trained on ever-growing datasets to accurately regress dense 3D point maps and camera poses. The distinction between matchers and feed-forward reconstruction models has become increasingly blurred with the introduction of matching losses in models such as MASt3R and VGGT-$Ω$. This raises a natural question: what do feed-forward 3D models know about image matching? In this work, we answer this question by analyzing three scenarios: (i) zero-shot matching of patch features, (ii) direct matching of 3D point predictions, and (iii) training a full matcher on top of the learned representations. We find that, despite performing poorly in zero-shot matching, especially in later layers, feed-forward reconstruction models provide strong representations for linear probing and full matching pipelines. We further show that, even without any training, their raw predictions alone enable competitive matching, albeit only under moderate viewpoint changes and modality gaps. Based on these insights, we retrain RoMa v2 by replacing its DINO backbone with VGGT-$Ω$. Our resulting model, \ours, outperforms state-of-the-art matchers on a wide range of benchmarks, e.g. +8.1 mAA compared to RoMa v2 on WxBS.