Probing the 3D Object-Level Understanding of Pre-Trained Detection Transformers

Metric 3D object detection is a core capability for embodied agents, yet most reliable systems lean on depth sensors, trading away cost, power, and integration simplicity. This motivates monocular 3D detection, which avoids additional constraints, yet it faces a major obstacle: from a single image, depth, and especially absolute scale, are underconstrained. As a result, the prevailing pattern of detecting in 2D and then predicting 3D attributes is often brittle, since modest range errors can dominate 3D localization, and the learned scale prior can fail when cameras, motion, or environments undergo domain shifts. To address this, we propose Map-Det3D, an online multi-view 3D object detection model that brings detection directly into a 3D space reconstructed from RGB. We map a short temporal window into multiple views and repurpose a feed-forward metric 3D reconstruction model as our geometric backbone while tuning its object-aware capabilities. Building on this representation, Map-Det3D directly predicts boxes in metric 3D space, without the widely used 2D-to-3D lifting. Experiments across different benchmarks show that this design supports strong online performance and robust transfer without adaptation, suggesting that training reconstruction priors for detection is a practical route to stable metric 3D detection from monocular video. Code and models are available at https://royyang0714.github.io/Map-Det3D.

Monocular 3D object detection spans two regimes: closed-set detectors operating within a fixed category vocabulary, and open-vocabulary detectors that localize arbitrary categories by leveraging depth foundation models for 3D geometry. We find that current depth foundation models, despite their strong zero-shot generalization, lack the object-level precision 3D detection demands: substituting a state-of-the-art depth foundation model for a strong detector's predicted depth degrades accuracy, even falling below the detector's own prediction. Rather than pushing detectors or depth models to be more accurate end-to-end, we treat object-level depth refinement as a stand-alone task and present RefineAny3D, a vision-language model that corrects depth without ever predicting a numerical value. Our key insight is that depth error has a direct visual signature in image space: when projected onto the image, a correctly placed box tightly encloses the object, while a too-far box projects too small and a too-close box projects too large. Depth refinement thus reduces to a visual alignment problem rather than a metric regression problem, which we instantiate by extending the VLM's vocabulary with action tokens that replace numerical depth output with categorical decisions, and by supervising the model on a large-scale chain-of-thought dataset that grounds each decision in explicit visual evidence. Applied as a single post-hoc step, RefineAny3D delivers consistent gains across closed-set detectors, open-vocabulary detectors, and 3D auto-labeling tools, and generalizes to novel categories, scenes, and cameras without retraining.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) enable strong multi-view 3D detection but are limited by high inference latency from dense token and query processing across multiple views and large 3D regions. Existing sparsity methods, designed mainly for 2D vision, prune or merge image tokens but do not extend to full-model sparsity or address 3D object queries. We introduce SToRe3D, a relevance-aligned sparsity framework that jointly selects 2D image tokens and 3D object queries while storing filtered features for reactivation. Mutual 2D-3D relevance heads allocate compute to driving-critical content and preserve other embeddings. Evaluated on nuScenes and our new nuScenes-Relevance benchmark, SToRe3D achieves up to 3x faster inference with marginal accuracy loss, establishing real-time large-scale ViT-based 3D detection while maintaining accuracy on planning-critical agents.