# LLaNA: Large Language and NeRF Assistant

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.11840 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11840/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in MLLM training and visual instruction tuning, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 71 of its 86 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jun 2024.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [MLLM training and visual instruction tuning](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/mllm-training-and-visual-instruction-tuning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 71)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14988/) (2022)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03378/) (2023)
- [Plenoxels: Radiance Fields without Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05131/) (2021)
- [Objaverse: A Universe of Annotated 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08051/) (2022)
- [TensoRF: Tensorial Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09517/) (2022)
- [NeRF in the Wild: Neural Radiance Fields for Unconstrained Photo Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02268/) (2020)
- [ImageBind: One Embedding Space To Bind Them All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05665/) (2023)
- [Kosmos-2: Grounding Multimodal Large Language Models to the World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14824/) (2023)
- [Video-ChatGPT: Towards Detailed Video Understanding via Large Vision and Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05424/) (2023)
- [Direct Voxel Grid Optimization: Super-fast Convergence for Radiance Fields Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11215/) (2021)
- [LLaMA-Adapter: Efficient Fine-tuning of Language Models with Zero-init Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16199/) (2023)
- [LLaMA-Adapter V2: Parameter-Efficient Visual Instruction Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.15010/) (2023)
- [Language Is Not All You Need: Aligning Perception with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14045/) (2023)
- [LERF: Language Embedded Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09553/) (2023)
- [Latent-NeRF for Shape-Guided Generation of 3D Shapes and Textures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07600/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [A Survey on Multimodal Benchmarks: In the Era of Large AI Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18142/) (2024)
- [Towards Scalable Spatial Intelligence via 2D-to-3D Data Lifting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18678/) (2025)
- [From 2D to 3D Cognition: A Brief Survey of General World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20134/) (2025)
- [NeuroVoxel-LM: Language-Aligned 3D Perception via Dynamic Voxelization and Meta-Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20110/) (2025)
- [Weight Space Representation Learning on Diverse NeRF Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09623/) (2025)
- [Scaling LLaNA: Advancing NeRF-Language Understanding Through Large-Scale Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13995/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated an excellent understanding of images and 3D data. However, both modalities have shortcomings in holistically capturing the appearance and geometry of objects. Meanwhile, Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs), which encode information within the weights of a simple Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), have emerged as an increasingly widespread modality that simultaneously encodes the geometry and photorealistic appearance of objects. This paper investigates the feasibility and effectiveness of ingesting NeRF into MLLM. We create LLaNA, the first general-purpose NeRF-language assistant capable of performing new tasks such as NeRF captioning and Q&A. Notably, our method directly processes the weights of the NeRF's MLP to extract information about the represented objects without the need to render images or materialize 3D data structures. Moreover, we build a dataset of NeRFs with text annotations for various NeRF-language tasks with no human intervention. Based on this dataset, we develop a benchmark to evaluate the NeRF understanding capability of our method. Results show that processing NeRF weights performs favourably against extracting 2D or 3D representations from NeRFs.