# Learning 3D Scene Analogies with Neural Contextual Scene Maps

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.15897 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15897/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 88 of its 130 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 88)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [NeuS: Learning Neural Implicit Surfaces by Volume Rendering for Multi-view Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10689/) (2021)
- [SuperGlue: Learning Feature Matching with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11763/) (2019)
- [Big Self-Supervised Models are Strong Semi-Supervised Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10029/) (2020)
- [Volume Rendering of Neural Implicit Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12052/) (2021)
- [A Point Set Generation Network for 3D Object Reconstruction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00603/) (2016)
- [Vision Transformers Need Registers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16588/) (2023)
- [Deep Hough Voting for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09664/) (2019)
- [NICE-SLAM: Neural Implicit Scalable Encoding for SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12130/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Neural Fields in Visual Computing and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11426/) (2021)
- [PointContrast: Unsupervised Pre-training for 3D Point Cloud Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10985/) (2020)
- [ARKitScenes: A Diverse Real-World Dataset For 3D Indoor Scene Understanding Using Mobile RGB-D Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08897/) (2021)
- [Emergent Correspondence from Image Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03881/) (2023)
- [DeiT III: Revenge of the ViT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07118/) (2022)
- [In-Place Scene Labelling and Understanding with Implicit Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15875/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Finding 3D Scene Analogies with Multimodal Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23184/) (2025)
- [Analogical Trajectory Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14393/) (2026)
- [POIL: Point-based One-Shot Imitation Learning with Stable Dynamical Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.30404/) (2026)
- [Scene Retargeting: Learning Object Placement with Analogical Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36801/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Understanding scene contexts is crucial for machines to perform tasks and adapt prior knowledge in unseen or noisy 3D environments. As data-driven learning is intractable to comprehensively encapsulate diverse ranges of layouts and open spaces, we propose teaching machines to identify relational commonalities in 3D spaces. Instead of focusing on point-wise or object-wise representations, we introduce 3D scene analogies, which are smooth maps between 3D scene regions that align spatial relationships. Unlike well-studied single instance-level maps, these scene-level maps smoothly link large scene regions, potentially enabling unique applications in trajectory transfer in AR/VR, long demonstration transfer for imitation learning, and context-aware object rearrangement. To find 3D scene analogies, we propose neural contextual scene maps, which extract descriptor fields summarizing semantic and geometric contexts, and holistically align them in a coarse-to-fine manner for map estimation. This approach reduces reliance on individual feature points, making it robust to input noise or shape variations. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in identifying scene analogies and transferring trajectories or object placements in diverse indoor scenes, indicating its potential for robotics and AR/VR applications. Project page including the code is available through this link: https://82magnolia.github.io/3d_scene_analogies/.