# RelationField: Relate Anything in Radiance Fields

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.13652 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13652/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 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 55 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Dec 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 55)

- [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)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [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)
- [ScanNet++: A High-Fidelity Dataset of 3D Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11417/) (2023)
- [Deep Hough Voting for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09664/) (2019)
- [When and why vision-language models behave like bags-of-words, and what to do about it?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01936/) (2022)
- [Nerfstudio: A Modular Framework for Neural Radiance Field Development](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04264/) (2023)
- [OpenScene: 3D Scene Understanding with Open Vocabularies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15654/) (2022)
- [LERF: Language Embedded Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09553/) (2023)
- [Scaling Open-Vocabulary Image Segmentation with Image-Level Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12143/) (2021)
- [In-Place Scene Labelling and Understanding with Implicit Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15875/) (2021)
- [LangSplat: 3D Language Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16084/) (2023)
- [ConceptGraphs: Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Graphs for Perception and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16650/) (2023)
- [Visual Relationship Detection with Language Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00187/) (2016)
- [An End-to-End Transformer Model for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08141/) (2021)
- [Mask3D: Mask Transformer for 3D Semantic Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03105/) (2022)
- [Graph R-CNN for Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00191/) (2018)
- [SayPlan: Grounding Large Language Models using 3D Scene Graphs for Scalable Robot Task Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06135/) (2023)
- [OpenMask3D: Open-Vocabulary 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13631/) (2023)
- [3D Scene Graph: A Structure for Unified Semantics, 3D Space, and Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02527/) (2019)
- [Learning 3D Semantic Scene Graphs from 3D Indoor Reconstructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03967/) (2020)
- [Hierarchical Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Graphs for Language-Grounded Robot Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17846/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Describe Anything Anywhere At Any Moment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00565/) (2025)
- [Multiplayer Interactive World Models with Representation Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.05352/) (2026)
- [KeySG: Hierarchical Keyframe-Based 3D Scene Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01049/) (2025)
- [Unified Semantic Transformer for 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14364/) (2025)
- [ReLaGS: Relational Language Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17605/) (2026)
- [OpenHype: Hyperbolic Embeddings for Hierarchical Open-Vocabulary Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21441/) (2025)
- [3D Scene Graphs: Open Challenges and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19383/) (2026)
- [Point2Act: Efficient 3D Distillation of Multimodal LLMs for Zero-Shot Context-Aware Grasping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03099/) (2025)
- [Remove360: Benchmarking Residuals After Object Removal in 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11431/) (2025)
- [Is there anything left? Measuring semantic residuals of objects removed from 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17574/) (2025)
- [EmbodiedSplat: Online Feed-Forward Semantic 3DGS for Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04254/) (2026)
- [Analogical Trajectory Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14393/) (2026)
- [WildGHand: Learning Anti-Perturbation Gaussian Hand Avatars from Monocular In-the-Wild Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20556/) (2026)
- [NoPA: Non-Parametric Online 3D Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00529/) (2026)
- [GraphWrit3R: End-to-End 3D Scene Graph Writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.31595/) (2026)
- [RelationVGGT: Visual Geometry Transformers for 3D Spatial Relation Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00970/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Neural radiance fields are an emerging 3D scene representation and recently even been extended to learn features for scene understanding by distilling open-vocabulary features from vision-language models. However, current method primarily focus on object-centric representations, supporting object segmentation or detection, while understanding semantic relationships between objects remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we propose RelationField, the first method to extract inter-object relationships directly from neural radiance fields. RelationField represents relationships between objects as pairs of rays within a neural radiance field, effectively extending its formulation to include implicit relationship queries. To teach RelationField complex, open-vocabulary relationships, relationship knowledge is distilled from multi-modal LLMs. To evaluate RelationField, we solve open-vocabulary 3D scene graph generation tasks and relationship-guided instance segmentation, achieving state-of-the-art performance in both tasks. See the project website at https://relationfield.github.io.