# SLAG: Scalable Language-Augmented Gaussian Splatting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.08124 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08124/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [Nerfstudio: A Modular Framework for Neural Radiance Field Development](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04264/) (2023)
- [Point Transformer V3: Simpler, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10035/) (2023)
- [LERF: Language Embedded Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09553/) (2023)
- [LangSplat: 3D Language Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16084/) (2023)
- [Mega-NeRF: Scalable Construction of Large-Scale NeRFs for Virtual Fly-Throughs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10703/) (2021)
- [Gaussian Grouping: Segment and Edit Anything in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00732/) (2023)
- [Visual Language Maps for Robot Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05714/) (2022)
- [Language Embedded 3D Gaussians for Open-Vocabulary Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18482/) (2023)
- [Segment Any 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00860/) (2023)
- [OpenGaussian: Towards Point-Level 3D Gaussian-based Open Vocabulary Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02058/) (2024)
- [Distilled Feature Fields Enable Few-Shot Language-Guided Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07931/) (2023)
- [Language Embedded Radiance Fields for Zero-Shot Task-Oriented Grasping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07970/) (2023)
- [Improving 2D Feature Representations by 3D-Aware Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20229/) (2024)
- [OpenNeRF: Open Set 3D Neural Scene Segmentation with Pixel-Wise Features and Rendered Novel Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03650/) (2024)
- [Open-Vocabulary Functional 3D Scene Graphs for Real-World Indoor Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19199/) (2025)
- [On Scaling Up 3D Gaussian Splatting Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18533/) (2024)
- [AGILE3D: Attention Guided Interactive Multi-object 3D Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00977/) (2023)
- [Search3D: Hierarchical Open-Vocabulary 3D Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18431/) (2024)
- [3D Segmentation of Humans in Point Clouds with Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00786/) (2022)
- [ICGNet: A Unified Approach for Instance-Centric Grasping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09939/) (2024)
- [Spot-Compose: A Framework for Open-Vocabulary Object Retrieval and Drawer Manipulation in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12440/) (2024)
- [LABELMAKER: Automatic Semantic Label Generation from RGB-D Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12174/) (2023)
- [HybVIO: Pushing the Limits of Real-time Visual-inertial Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11857/) (2021)
- [ARKit LabelMaker: A New Scale for Indoor 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13924/) (2024)
- [OpenCity3D: What do Vision-Language Models know about Urban Environments?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16776/) (2025)

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

- [Hi-LSplat: Hierarchical 3D Language Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06822/) (2025)
- [HouseLayout3D: A Benchmark and Training-Free Baseline for 3D Layout Estimation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02450/) (2025)
- [CUS-GS: A Compact Unified Structured Gaussian Splatting Framework for Multimodal Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17904/) (2025)
- [MonoVoc: Decoupling Geometry and Semantics for Lightweight Monocular Open-Vocabulary 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.28300/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Language-augmented scene representations hold great promise for large-scale robotics applications such as search-and-rescue, smart cities, and mining. Many of these scenarios are time-sensitive, requiring rapid scene encoding while also being data-intensive, necessitating scalable solutions. Deploying these representations on robots with limited computational resources further adds to the challenge. To address this, we introduce SLAG, a multi-GPU framework for language-augmented Gaussian splatting that enhances the speed and scalability of embedding large scenes. Our method integrates 2D visual-language model features into 3D scenes using SAM and CLIP. Unlike prior approaches, SLAG eliminates the need for a loss function to compute per-Gaussian language embeddings. Instead, it derives embeddings from 3D Gaussian scene parameters via a normalized weighted average, enabling highly parallelized scene encoding. Additionally, we introduce a vector database for efficient embedding storage and retrieval. Our experiments show that SLAG achieves an 18 times speedup in embedding computation on a 16-GPU setup compared to OpenGaussian, while preserving embedding quality on the ScanNet and LERF datasets. For more details, visit our project website: https://slag-project.github.io/.