COLMAR: Cooperative View Policy Learning for Multi-Agent Active 3D Reconstruction
Authors: Phu Pham, Damon Conover, Aniket Bera
Organizations: Department of Computer Science, Purdue University · DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory
Abstract
Active 3D reconstruction requires selecting informative viewpoints under limited sensing budgets. In multi-agent settings, coordination inefficiencies such as redundant observations and spatial clustering can significantly reduce reconstruction quality. We present COLMAR, a cooperative view policy learning framework for multi-agent active 3D reconstruction. COLMAR formulates viewpoint allocation as a shared policy optimization over map-centric observations and introduces a reconstruction-aware objective that promotes overlap-aware coverage, team-level discovery, and collision-safe exploration. Dense feedback derived from incremental reconstruction updates aligns exploration behavior with downstream geometric quality. The policy is trained using parameter-sharing Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) with independent per-agent action selection at deployment, conditioned on a fused team map and without inter-agent message passing for decision making. Selected viewpoints are then reconstructed with 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) for high-fidelity photometric evaluation. Experiments on GLEAM and Replica demonstrate consistent improvements over heuristic and non-cooperative baselines, achieving up to 54% higher reconstruction accuracy and 49% greater coverage under matched sensing budgets.
Recent advancements have explored agentic zero-shot 3D understanding by reformulating it as video keyframe understanding with Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, existing methods face an intrinsic bottleneck due to the finite observation perspectives inherent in videos and the implicit perception of 3D scenes. In this paper, we propose a collaborative multi-agent framework that assigns a Planning Agent to handle high-level viewpoint planning and supplement novel perspectives, and a Perception Agent to explicitly summarize the 3D scene into a structured holistic cognitive map. Specifically, Planning Agent first analyzes this cognitive map to determine query-relevant viewpoints and supplements missing critical perspectives to ensure comprehensive observation. Subsequently, Perception Agent documents object-level attributes from these views by assigning consistent instance identifiers across viewpoints, thereby integrating fragmented observations into the holistic cognitive map. In parallel, it provides feedback to filter out mismatched candidate objects and guide subsequent viewpoint planning. Through this closed-loop iterative process, two agents collaboratively figure out candidates until Perception Agent determines that sufficient information has been captured to complete the task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on 6 benchmarks, with improvements of 11.1% Acc@0.5 on ScanRefer, 14.6 BLEU-1 on 3D-assisted dialog, and 2.1 EM on SQA3D.
Active 3D reconstruction relies on active view selection to maximize reconstruction fidelity under limited capture budgets. However, most existing methods rely on surrogate signals such as parameter uncertainty or geometric heuristics, but these signals are often misaligned with the ultimate goal: the fidelity of rendered predictions. We propose GO-PRE, a goal-oriented next-best-view selection framework that explicitly targets information gain in the prediction space. Specifically, we formulate the objective as maximizing the reduction of the average marginal predictive entropy over a user-specified target view manifold. GO-PRE supports interactive goal specification and yields an efficient acquisition rule that enables real-time computation of information gain. Extensive experiments across benchmarks demonstrate that GO-PRE consistently improves active reconstruction performance and provides more reliable uncertainty quantification compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Collaborative photorealistic 3D reconstruction from multiple agents enables rapid large-scale scene capture for virtual production and cooperative multi-robot exploration. While recent 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) SLAM algorithms can generate high-fidelity real-time mapping, most of the existing multi-agent Gaussian SLAM methods still rely on RGB-D sensors to obtain metric depth and simplify cross-agent alignment, which limits the deployment on lightweight, low-cost, or power-constrained robotic platforms. To address this challenge, we propose MAGS-SLAM, the first RGB-only multi-agent 3DGS SLAM framework for collaborative scene reconstruction. Each agent independently builds local monocular Gaussian submaps and transmits compact submap summaries rather than raw observations or dense maps. To facilitate robust collaboration in the presence of monocular scale ambiguity, our framework integrates compact submap communication, geometry- and appearance-aware loop verification, and occupancy-aware Gaussian fusion, enabling coherent global reconstruction without active depth sensors. We further introduce ReplicaMultiagent Plus benchmark for evaluating collaborative Gaussian SLAM. Intensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show that MAGS-SLAM achieves competitive tracking accuracy and comparable or superior rendering quality to state-of-the-art RGB-D collaborative Gaussian SLAM methods while relying only RGB images.