# A Unified Framework for 3D Scene Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.03263 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03263/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 65 of its 77 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 65)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [4D Spatio-Temporal ConvNets: Minkowski Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08755/) (2019)
- [The Replica Dataset: A Digital Replica of Indoor Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05797/) (2019)
- [PointConv: Deep Convolutional Networks on 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07246/) (2018)
- [OpenScene: 3D Scene Understanding with Open Vocabularies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15654/) (2022)
- [ScanRefer: 3D Object Localization in RGB-D Scans using Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08830/) (2019)
- [PointNeXt: Revisiting PointNet++ with Improved Training and Scaling Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04670/) (2022)
- [Point Transformer V2: Grouped Vector Attention and Partition-based Pooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05666/) (2022)
- [Large-scale Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation with Superpoint Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09869/) (2017)
- [OneFormer: One Transformer to Rule Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06220/) (2022)
- [PointGroup: Dual-Set Point Grouping for 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01658/) (2020)
- [Mask3D: Mask Transformer for 3D Semantic Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03105/) (2022)
- [OpenMask3D: Open-Vocabulary 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13631/) (2023)
- [Language-Grounded Indoor 3D Semantic Segmentation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07761/) (2022)
- [3D-SIS: 3D Semantic Instance Segmentation of RGB-D Scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07003/) (2018)
- [3D-VisTA: Pre-trained Transformer for 3D Vision and Text Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04352/) (2023)
- [SoftGroup for 3D Instance Segmentation on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01509/) (2022)
- [OccuSeg: Occupancy-aware 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06537/) (2020)
- [Panoptic Lifting for 3D Scene Understanding with Neural Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09802/) (2022)
- [SqueezeSegV3: Spatially-Adaptive Convolution for Efficient Point-Cloud Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01803/) (2020)
- [Stratified Transformer for 3D Point Cloud Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14508/) (2022)
- [PointMamba: A Simple State Space Model for Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10739/) (2024)
- [SceneGraphFusion: Incremental 3D Scene Graph Prediction from RGB-D Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14898/) (2021)
- [SAM3D: Segment Anything in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03908/) (2023)
- [GSPN: Generative Shape Proposal Network for 3D Instance Segmentation in Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03320/) (2018)
- [AugGPT: Leveraging ChatGPT for Text Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13007/) (2023)

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

- [Multimodal Referring Segmentation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00265/) (2025)
- [SIU3R: Simultaneous Scene Understanding and 3D Reconstruction Beyond Feature Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02705/) (2025)
- [RG-SAN: Rule-Guided Spatial Awareness Network for End-to-End 3D Referring Expression Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02402/) (2024)
- [iSegMan: Interactive Segment-and-Manipulate 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11934/) (2025)
- [Lost & Found: Tracking Changes from Egocentric Observations in 3D Dynamic Scene Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19162/) (2024)
- [Generation Models Know Space: Unleashing Implicit 3D Priors for Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19235/) (2026)
- [OpenScan: A Benchmark for Generalized Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11030/) (2024)
- [Point Linguist Model: Segment Any Object via Bridged Large 3D-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.07825/) (2025)
- [PointTPA: Dynamic Network Parameter Adaptation for 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04933/) (2026)
- [GeoPurify: A Data-Efficient Geometric Distillation Framework for Open-Vocabulary 3D Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02186/) (2025)
- [FUME: Fused Unified Multi-Gas Emission Network for Livestock Rumen Acidosis Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08205/) (2026)
- [HAECcity: Open-Vocabulary Scene Understanding of City-Scale Point Clouds with Superpoint Graph Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13590/) (2025)
- [Unleashing the Multi-View Fusion Potential: Noise Correction in VLM for Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.22817/) (2025)
- [SPORTS: Simultaneous Panoptic Odometry, Rendering, Tracking and Segmentation for Urban Scenes Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12749/) (2025)
- [Dynamic-Robust Photometric-Semantic Reconstruction for Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29177/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose UniSeg3D, a unified 3D scene understanding framework that achieves panoptic, semantic, instance, interactive, referring, and open-vocabulary segmentation tasks within a single model. Most previous 3D segmentation approaches are typically tailored to a specific task, limiting their understanding of 3D scenes to a task-specific perspective. In contrast, the proposed method unifies six tasks into unified representations processed by the same Transformer. It facilitates inter-task knowledge sharing, thereby promoting comprehensive 3D scene understanding. To take advantage of multi-task unification, we enhance performance by establishing explicit inter-task associations. Specifically, we design knowledge distillation and contrastive learning methods to transfer task-specific knowledge across different tasks. Experiments on three benchmarks, including ScanNet20, ScanRefer, and ScanNet200, demonstrate that the UniSeg3D consistently outperforms current SOTA methods, even those specialized for individual tasks. We hope UniSeg3D can serve as a solid unified baseline and inspire future work. Code and models are available at https://github.com/dk-liang/UniSeg3D.