# ROOT: VLM based System for Indoor Scene Understanding and Beyond

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.15714 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15714/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Embodied and 3D vision-language models, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 51 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Nov 2024.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Embodied and 3D vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/embodied-and-3d-vision-language-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [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)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [Unified Perceptual Parsing for Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10221/) (2018)
- [ChatGLM: A Family of Large Language Models from GLM-130B to GLM-4 All Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12793/) (2024)
- [MiniCPM-V: A GPT-4V Level MLLM on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01800/) (2024)
- [Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02983/) (2018)
- [AI2-THOR: An Interactive 3D Environment for Visual AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05474/) (2017)
- [SpatialVLM: Endowing Vision-Language Models with Spatial Reasoning Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12168/) (2024)
- [OpenScene: 3D Scene Understanding with Open Vocabularies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15654/) (2022)
- [3D-FUTURE: 3D Furniture shape with TextURE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09633/) (2020)
- [Holodeck: Language Guided Generation of 3D Embodied AI Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09067/) (2023)
- [Data Filtering Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17425/) (2023)
- [PLA: Language-Driven Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16312/) (2022)
- [Scene-LLM: Extending Language Model for 3D Visual Understanding and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11401/) (2024)
- [EmbodiedScan: A Holistic Multi-Modal 3D Perception Suite Towards Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16170/) (2023)
- [PhyScene: Physically Interactable 3D Scene Synthesis for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09465/) (2024)
- [Context Prior for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01547/) (2020)
- [Is A Picture Worth A Thousand Words? Delving Into Spatial Reasoning for Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14852/) (2024)
- [Seamless Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01220/) (2019)
- [Semantic Abstraction: Open-World 3D Scene Understanding from 2D Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11514/) (2022)

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

- [How Far are VLMs from Visual Spatial Intelligence? A Benchmark-Driven Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18905/) (2025)
- [Generative Physical AI in Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.10928/) (2025)
- [SpatiaLQA: A Benchmark for Evaluating Spatial Logical Reasoning in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20901/) (2026)
- [Hierarchical Evidence-Driven Reasoning for Long Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.04625/) (2026)
- [DreamScene: 3D Gaussian-based End-to-end Text-to-3D Scene Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13985/) (2025)
- [Intelligence of Things: A Spatial Context-Aware Control System for Smart Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13942/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, Vision Language Models (VLMs) have experienced significant advancements, yet these models still face challenges in spatial hierarchical reasoning within indoor scenes. In this study, we introduce ROOT, a VLM-based system designed to enhance the analysis of indoor scenes. Specifically, we first develop an iterative object perception algorithm using GPT-4V to detect object entities within indoor scenes. This is followed by employing vision foundation models to acquire additional meta-information about the scene, such as bounding boxes. Building on this foundational data, we propose a specialized VLM, SceneVLM, which is capable of generating spatial hierarchical scene graphs and providing distance information for objects within indoor environments. This information enhances our understanding of the spatial arrangement of indoor scenes. To train our SceneVLM, we collect over 610,000 images from various public indoor datasets and implement a scene data generation pipeline with a semi-automated technique to establish relationships and estimate distances among indoor objects. By utilizing this enriched data, we conduct various training recipes and finish SceneVLM. Our experiments demonstrate that rootname facilitates indoor scene understanding and proves effective in diverse downstream applications, such as 3D scene generation and embodied AI. The code will be released at urlhttps://github.com/harrytea/ROOT.