# AnyLoc: Towards Universal Visual Place Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.00688 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00688/

## Key facts

- Cited by 163 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [NetVLAD: CNN architecture for weakly supervised place recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07247/) (2015)
- [Fine-tuning CNN Image Retrieval with No Human Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02512/) (2017)
- [Deep ViT Features as Dense Visual Descriptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05814/) (2021)
- [Google Landmarks Dataset v2 -- A Large-Scale Benchmark for Instance-Level Recognition and Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01804/) (2020)
- [ConceptFusion: Open-set Multimodal 3D Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07241/) (2023)
- [Large-Scale Image Retrieval with Attentive Deep Local Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06321/) (2016)
- [Rethinking Visual Geo-localization for Large-Scale Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02287/) (2022)
- [MixVPR: Feature Mixing for Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02190/) (2023)
- [Learning the Best Pooling Strategy for Visual Semantic Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04305/) (2020)
- [Self-supervising Fine-grained Region Similarities for Large-scale Image Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03926/) (2020)
- [On the duality between contrastive and non-contrastive self-supervised learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02574/) (2022)
- [TransVPR: Transformer-based place recognition with multi-level attention aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02001/) (2022)
- [R2Former: Unified Retrieval and Reranking Transformer for Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03410/) (2023)
- [VPR-Bench: An Open-Source Visual Place Recognition Evaluation Framework with Quantifiable Viewpoint and Appearance Change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08135/) (2020)
- [GSV-Cities: Toward Appropriate Supervised Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10239/) (2022)
- [What Do Self-Supervised Vision Transformers Learn?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00729/) (2023)
- [Training Vision Transformers for Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05644/) (2021)
- [Deep Visual Geo-localization Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03444/) (2022)
- [Where is your place, Visual Place Recognition?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06443/) (2021)
- [On the Performance of ConvNet Features for Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.04158/) (2015)
- [Visual Instance Retrieval with Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6574/) (2014)
- [X-View: Graph-Based Semantic Multi-View Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.09905/) (2017)
- [Data-efficient Large Scale Place Recognition with Graded Similarity Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11739/) (2023)
- [Benchmarking Image Retrieval for Visual Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11946/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 163)

- [Optimal Transport Aggregation for Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15937/) (2023)
- [Toward General-Purpose Robots via Foundation Models: A Survey and Meta-Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08782/) (2023)
- [BoQ: A Place is Worth a Bag of Learnable Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07364/) (2024)
- [CricaVPR: Cross-image Correlation-aware Representation Learning for Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19231/) (2024)
- [MegaLoc: One Retrieval to Place Them All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17237/) (2025)
- [Towards Seamless Adaptation of Pre-trained Models for Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14505/) (2024)
- [Where am I? Cross-View Geo-localization with Natural Language Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17007/) (2024)
- [UFM: A Simple Path towards Unified Dense Correspondence with Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09278/) (2025)
- [Beyond Bare Queries: Open-Vocabulary Object Grounding with 3D Scene Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07113/) (2024)
- [SceneGraphLoc: Cross-Modal Coarse Visual Localization on 3D Scene Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00469/) (2024)
- [What Is The Best 3D Scene Representation for Robotics? From Geometric to Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03422/) (2025)
- [Close, But Not There: Boosting Geographic Distance Sensitivity in Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02422/) (2024)
- [UAVScenes: A Multi-Modal Dataset for UAVs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22412/) (2025)
- [RoboHop: Segment-based Topological Map Representation for Open-World Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05792/) (2024)
- [General Place Recognition Survey: Towards Real-World Autonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04812/) (2024)
- [RayFronts: Open-Set Semantic Ray Frontiers for Online Scene Understanding and Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06994/) (2025)
- [AddressCLIP: Empowering Vision-Language Models for City-wide Image Address Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08156/) (2024)
- [Revisit Anything: Visual Place Recognition via Image Segment Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18049/) (2024)
- [Learning Cross-view Visual Geo-localization without Ground Truth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12702/) (2024)
- [Distillation of Diffusion Features for Semantic Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03512/) (2024)
- [EffoVPR: Effective Foundation Model Utilization for Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18065/) (2024)
- [SelaVPR++: Towards Seamless Adaptation of Foundation Models for Efficient Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16601/) (2025)
- [Design Space Exploration of Low-Bit Quantized Neural Networks for Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09028/) (2023)
- [EDTformer: An Efficient Decoder Transformer for Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00784/) (2024)
- [Scaling Image Geo-Localization to Continent Level](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26795/) (2025)
- [Applications of Spiking Neural Networks in Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13186/) (2023)
- [Multiview Scene Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11187/) (2024)
- [Improving Visual Place Recognition Based Robot Navigation By Verifying Localization Estimates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08162/) (2024)
- [GV-Bench: Benchmarking Local Feature Matching for Geometric Verification of Long-term Loop Closure Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11736/) (2024)
- [UnLoc: Leveraging Depth Uncertainties for Floorplan Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11301/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is vital for robot localization. To date, the most performant VPR approaches are environment- and task-specific: while they exhibit strong performance in structured environments (predominantly urban driving), their performance degrades severely in unstructured environments, rendering most approaches brittle to robust real-world deployment. In this work, we develop a universal solution to VPR -- a technique that works across a broad range of structured and unstructured environments (urban, outdoors, indoors, aerial, underwater, and subterranean environments) without any re-training or fine-tuning. We demonstrate that general-purpose feature representations derived from off-the-shelf self-supervised models with no VPR-specific training are the right substrate upon which to build such a universal VPR solution. Combining these derived features with unsupervised feature aggregation enables our suite of methods, AnyLoc, to achieve up to 4X significantly higher performance than existing approaches. We further obtain a 6% improvement in performance by characterizing the semantic properties of these features, uncovering unique domains which encapsulate datasets from similar environments. Our detailed experiments and analysis lay a foundation for building VPR solutions that may be deployed anywhere, anytime, and across anyview. We encourage the readers to explore our project page and interactive demos: https://anyloc.github.io/.