# 3DAxiesPrompts: Unleashing the 3D Spatial Task Capabilities of GPT-4V

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.09738 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09738/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 59 of its 85 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 59)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12712/) (2023)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [Occupancy Networks: Learning 3D Reconstruction in Function Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03828/) (2018)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [Conditional Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05557/) (2022)
- [Multimodal Machine Learning: A Survey and Taxonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09406/) (2017)
- [How Can We Know What Language Models Know?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12543/) (2019)
- [LLaMA-Adapter: Efficient Fine-tuning of Language Models with Zero-init Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16199/) (2023)
- [Visual ChatGPT: Talking, Drawing and Editing with Visual Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04671/) (2023)
- [AtlasNet: A Papier-Mach'e Approach to Learning 3D Surface Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05384/) (2018)
- [PointCLIP: Point Cloud Understanding by CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02413/) (2021)
- [Object Goal Navigation using Goal-Oriented Semantic Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00643/) (2020)
- [PointLLM: Empowering Large Language Models to Understand Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16911/) (2023)
- [Images Speak in Images: A Generalist Painter for In-Context Visual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02499/) (2022)
- [Learning to Prompt for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection with Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14940/) (2022)
- [ConceptFusion: Open-set Multimodal 3D Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07241/) (2023)
- [Exploring Visual Prompts for Adapting Large-Scale Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17274/) (2022)
- [ULIP: Learning a Unified Representation of Language, Images, and Point Clouds for 3D Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05171/) (2022)
- [Point-M2AE: Multi-scale Masked Autoencoders for Hierarchical Point Cloud Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14401/) (2022)
- [Visual Prompting via Image Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00647/) (2022)
- [Personalize Segment Anything Model with One Shot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03048/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Visual Sketchpad: Sketching as a Visual Chain of Thought for Multimodal Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09403/) (2024)
- [PIVOT: Iterative Visual Prompting Elicits Actionable Knowledge for VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07872/) (2024)
- [SpatialPIN: Enhancing Spatial Reasoning Capabilities of Vision-Language Models through Prompting and Interacting 3D Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13438/) (2024)
- [GenSim2: Scaling Robot Data Generation with Multi-modal and Reasoning LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03645/) (2024)
- [SoFar: Language-Grounded Orientation Bridges Spatial Reasoning and Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13143/) (2025)
- [When LLMs step into the 3D World: A Survey and Meta-Analysis of 3D Tasks via Multi-modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10255/) (2024)
- [N3D-VLM: Native 3D Grounding Enables Accurate Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16561/) (2025)
- [Coarse Correspondences Boost Spatial-Temporal Reasoning in Multimodal Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00754/) (2024)
- [Struct2D: A Perception-Guided Framework for Spatial Reasoning in MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04220/) (2025)
- [Actial: Activate Spatial Reasoning Ability of Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01618/) (2025)
- [Thinking in Blender: Staged Executable Inverse Graphics with Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.02580/) (2026)
- [Towards Scalable Spatial Intelligence via 2D-to-3D Data Lifting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18678/) (2025)
- [3DHarnessBench: Probing Agentic 3D-to-Code Capabilities of Frontier Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06535/) (2026)
- [DC3DO: Diffusion Classifier for 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06693/) (2024)
- [PhysQuantAgent: An Inference Pipeline of Mass Estimation for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16958/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this work, we present a new visual prompting method called 3DAxiesPrompts (3DAP) to unleash the capabilities of GPT-4V in performing 3D spatial tasks. Our investigation reveals that while GPT-4V exhibits proficiency in discerning the position and interrelations of 2D entities through current visual prompting techniques, its abilities in handling 3D spatial tasks have yet to be explored. In our approach, we create a 3D coordinate system tailored to 3D imagery, complete with annotated scale information. By presenting images infused with the 3DAP visual prompt as inputs, we empower GPT-4V to ascertain the spatial positioning information of the given 3D target image with a high degree of precision. Through experiments, We identified three tasks that could be stably completed using the 3DAP method, namely, 2D to 3D Point Reconstruction, 2D to 3D point matching, and 3D Object Detection. We perform experiments on our proposed dataset 3DAP-Data, the results from these experiments validate the efficacy of 3DAP-enhanced GPT-4V inputs, marking a significant stride in 3D spatial task execution.