# OpenScene: 3D Scene Understanding with Open Vocabularies

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.15654 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15654/

## Key facts

- Cited by 559 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 57 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 57)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06158/) (2017)
- [4D Spatio-Temporal ConvNets: Minkowski Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08755/) (2019)
- [Open-vocabulary Object Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13921/) (2021)
- [Language-driven Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03546/) (2022)
- [DETR3D: 3D Object Detection from Multi-view Images via 3D-to-2D Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06922/) (2021)
- [Extract Free Dense Labels from CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01071/) (2021)
- [KITTI-360: A Novel Dataset and Benchmarks for Urban Scene Understanding in 2D and 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13410/) (2021)
- [Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation with Mask-adapted CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04150/) (2022)
- [DenseCLIP: Language-Guided Dense Prediction with Context-Aware Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01518/) (2021)
- [GroupViT: Semantic Segmentation Emerges from Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11094/) (2022)
- [PartNet: A Large-scale Benchmark for Fine-grained and Hierarchical Part-level 3D Object Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02713/) (2018)
- [PointCLIP: Point Cloud Understanding by CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02413/) (2021)
- [ScanRefer: 3D Object Localization in RGB-D Scans using Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08830/) (2019)
- [Joint 2D-3D-Semantic Data for Indoor Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.01105/) (2017)
- [Language-Grounded Indoor 3D Semantic Segmentation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07761/) (2022)
- [Learning 3D Semantic Scene Graphs from 3D Indoor Reconstructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03967/) (2020)
- [RIO: 3D Object Instance Re-Localization in Changing Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06109/) (2019)
- [OccuSeg: Occupancy-aware 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06537/) (2020)
- [Tangent Convolutions for Dense Prediction in 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02443/) (2018)
- [CLIP-Fields: Weakly Supervised Semantic Fields for Robotic Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05663/) (2022)
- [F-VLM: Open-Vocabulary Object Detection upon Frozen Vision and Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15639/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 559)

- [LERF: Language Embedded Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09553/) (2023)
- [Gaussian Grouping: Segment and Edit Anything in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00732/) (2023)
- [ConceptGraphs: Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Graphs for Perception and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16650/) (2023)
- [An Embodied Generalist Agent in 3D World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12871/) (2023)
- [ConceptFusion: Open-set Multimodal 3D Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07241/) (2023)
- [OpenMask3D: Open-Vocabulary 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13631/) (2023)
- [Language Embedded 3D Gaussians for Open-Vocabulary Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18482/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Graphs for Language-Grounded Robot Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17846/) (2024)
- [OpenShape: Scaling Up 3D Shape Representation Towards Open-World Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10764/) (2023)
- [Towards Open Vocabulary Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15880/) (2023)
- [Physically Grounded Vision-Language Models for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02561/) (2023)
- [Segment Any 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00860/) (2023)
- [EmbodiedScan: A Holistic Multi-Modal 3D Perception Suite Towards Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16170/) (2023)
- [OpenGaussian: Towards Point-Level 3D Gaussian-based Open Vocabulary Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02058/) (2024)
- [ShapeLLM: Universal 3D Object Understanding for Embodied Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17766/) (2024)
- [Weakly Supervised 3D Open-vocabulary Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14093/) (2023)
- [LLM-Grounder: Open-Vocabulary 3D Visual Grounding with Large Language Model as an Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12311/) (2023)
- [SceneVerse: Scaling 3D Vision-Language Learning for Grounded Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09340/) (2024)
- [Distilled Feature Fields Enable Few-Shot Language-Guided Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07931/) (2023)
- [Vision Language Models in Autonomous Driving: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14414/) (2023)
- [Open3DIS: Open-Vocabulary 3D Instance Segmentation with 2D Mask Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10671/) (2023)
- [Grounded 3D-LLM with Referent Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10370/) (2024)
- [GPT4Scene: Understand 3D Scenes from Videos with Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01428/) (2025)
- [CLIP-DINOiser: Teaching CLIP a few DINO tricks for open-vocabulary semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12359/) (2023)
- [PARTFIELD: Learning 3D Feature Fields for Part Segmentation and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11451/) (2025)
- [RegionPLC: Regional Point-Language Contrastive Learning for Open-World 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00962/) (2023)
- [Language Embedded Radiance Fields for Zero-Shot Task-Oriented Grasping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07970/) (2023)
- [SAI3D: Segment Any Instance in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11557/) (2023)
- [CLIP-FO3D: Learning Free Open-world 3D Scene Representations from 2D Dense CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04748/) (2023)
- [OpenIns3D: Snap and Lookup for 3D Open-vocabulary Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00616/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Traditional 3D scene understanding approaches rely on labeled 3D datasets to train a model for a single task with supervision. We propose OpenScene, an alternative approach where a model predicts dense features for 3D scene points that are co-embedded with text and image pixels in CLIP feature space. This zero-shot approach enables task-agnostic training and open-vocabulary queries. For example, to perform SOTA zero-shot 3D semantic segmentation it first infers CLIP features for every 3D point and later classifies them based on similarities to embeddings of arbitrary class labels. More interestingly, it enables a suite of open-vocabulary scene understanding applications that have never been done before. For example, it allows a user to enter an arbitrary text query and then see a heat map indicating which parts of a scene match. Our approach is effective at identifying objects, materials, affordances, activities, and room types in complex 3D scenes, all using a single model trained without any labeled 3D data.