ZeroKey: Point-Level Reasoning and Zero-Shot 3D Keypoint Detection from Large Language Models

We propose a novel zero-shot approach for keypoint detection on 3D shapes. Point-level reasoning on visual data is challenging as it requires precise localization capability, posing problems even for powerful models like DINO or CLIP. Traditional methods for 3D keypoint detection rely heavily on annotated 3D datasets and extensive supervised training, limiting their scalability and applicability to new categories or domains. In contrast, our method utilizes the rich knowledge embedded within Multi-Modal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Specifically, we demonstrate, for the first time, that pixel-level annotations used to train recent MLLMs can be exploited for both extracting and naming salient keypoints on 3D models without any ground truth labels or supervision. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive performance on standard benchmarks compared to supervised methods, despite not requiring any 3D keypoint annotations during training. Our results highlight the potential of integrating language models for localized 3D shape understanding. This work opens new avenues for cross-modal learning and underscores the effectiveness of MLLMs in contributing to 3D computer vision challenges.