3D VLMs

VLM: Vision-Language Model

Overview

Three-dimensional vision-language models (3D VLMs) study how to connect language with point clouds, RGB-D images, multi-view video, and volumetric scans so models can describe, locate, and reason about objects and scenes. Common approaches align 3D features with pretrained image and text models, then add geometric tokens, scene graphs, spatial maps, or active view selection for tasks such as grounding, question answering, captioning, and navigation. Systems are evaluated on benchmarks including ScanRefer, ScanQA, SQA3D, and VSI-Bench, with growing attention to robot interaction and medical imaging. A central challenge is ensuring models use genuine geometric and viewpoint evidence rather than relying on language or 2D visual shortcuts, while keeping inference efficient and performance reliable across scenes and domains.

Latest papers

214 papers24 papers in the last four weeks, up 20% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

Jul 29, 2025

Ov3R: Open-Vocabulary Semantic 3D Reconstruction from RGB Videos

We present Ov3R, a novel framework for open-vocabulary semantic 3D reconstruction from RGB video streams, designed to advance Spatial AI. The system features two key components: CLIP3R, a CLIP-informed 3D reconstruction module that predicts dense point maps from overlapping clips while embedding object-level semantics; and 2D-3D OVS, a 2D-3D open-vocabulary semantic module that lifts 2D features into 3D by learning fused descriptors integrating spatial, geometric, and semantic cues. Unlike prior methods, Ov3R incorporates CLIP semantics directly into the reconstruction process, enabling globally consistent geometry and fine-grained semantic alignment. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in both dense 3D reconstruction and open-vocabulary 3D segmentation, marking a step forward toward real-time, semantics-aware Spatial AI.
Jun 21, 2025

Scene-R1: Video-Grounded Large Language Models for 3D Scene Reasoning with Lightweight Annotations

Large language models are increasingly being applied to 3D scene understanding. However, existing 3D-aware LLMs largely operate as black boxes: they produce bounding boxes or textual responses without exposing the reasoning process, and they typically depend on pre-trained 3D detectors for object proposals. We present Scene-R1, a video-grounded framework for 3D scene reasoning that avoids both pre-trained 3D object detectors and dense point-cloud backbones. The framework combines reinforcement-learning-based reasoning with a two-stage grounding pipeline. In the first stage, Scene-R1 performs temporal grounding by identifying the video segments most relevant to an open-ended query. In the second stage, it grounds the target in image space by predicting a 2D bounding box. This prediction is then refined into a precise 3D localization using high-quality candidates from a zero-shot segmentation module, enabling fine-grained geometric reasoning without detector-based proposals. Scene-R1 can also be adapted to 3D visual question answering, generating free-form answers directly from RGB-D video. Our training pipeline uses lightweight 2D supervision projected from sparse scans, avoiding the computational overhead required to train 3D instance segmentation models. Across multiple datasets, Scene-R1 outperforms existing open-vocabulary baselines while also providing interpretable intermediate reasoning steps. These results suggest that reinforcement-learning-based reasoning over RGB-D video can support accurate 3D scene understanding with task-level supervision. The training, inference, and 3D refinement code is available at https://github.com/819346675/Scene-R1.
May 31, 2025

From Alignment to Synthesis: Contrastive Volumetric Grounding for Text-to-CT Generation

Generating semantically controllable 3D CT volumes from radiology reports requires more than a rich text encoder, it requires vision-language alignment grounded in volumetric space. Existing Text-to-CT approaches condition generation on encoders pretrained with language only or 2D vision-language objectives, providing conditioning signals that are linguistically expressive but volumetrically blind. We argue this is a structural limitation: the quality of 3D vision-language alignment, not the richness of the text encoder, is the primary bottleneck for semantic controllability in volumetric diffusion models. To address this, we propose a generation-oriented 3D-CLIP encoder trained with structured hard negatives that operate exclusively at the text level. This design increases contrastive difficulty without any additional 3D memory cost, overcoming the small-batch constraints inherent to volumetric encoders. The resulting encoder conditions a fully end-to-end latent diffusion model that operates directly in 3D latent space, eliminating the spatial artifacts and cross-slice inconsistencies introduced by super-resolution pipelines. Through systematic ablations, we establish a clear empirical link between grounding quality and downstream generative controllability. Evaluated on CT-RATE across 18 pathological conditions, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both image fidelity and factual correctness, while requiring less inference time and GPU memory than all competing methods. Code is at https://github.com/danielemolino/Text2CT.
Jan 28, 2025

3D-MoE: Towards Spatial Intelligence with Mixture-of-Experts for 3D Reasoning and Action Generation

Spatial intelligence, encompassing 3D perception and reasoning, is the essential next frontier of AI. Scaling current 3D vision-language models (VLMs) that rely on dense Transformers for spatial tasks incurs prohibitive computational costs. In this paper, we introduce 3D-MoE, a 3D VLM leveraging an efficient mixture-of-experts architecture with a modality- and spatial-context-aware probabilistic routing scheme, stably cultivated by a novel routing curriculum. To seamlessly extend 3D-MoE to embodied AI, we integrate a diffusion-based action head, Pose-DiT, transforming 3D-MoE into a 3D vision-language-action (VLA) model. By employing a rectified flow framework, Pose-DiT generates precise 6D pose actions in a single sampling step. Extensive experiments demonstrate that 3D-MoE achieves superior performance on diverse 3D vision-language benchmarks with drastically fewer activated parameters and yields higher success rates while enabling real-time inference for robot manipulation tasks.