# DiSCO-3D : Discovering and segmenting Sub-Concepts from Open-vocabulary queries in NeRF

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14596 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14596/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (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)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12077/) (2021)
- [The Replica Dataset: A Digital Replica of Indoor Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05797/) (2019)
- [Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00868/) (2018)
- [Language-driven Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03546/) (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)
- [DL3DV-10K: A Large-Scale Scene Dataset for Deep Learning-based 3D Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16256/) (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)
- [Decomposing NeRF for Editing via Feature Field Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15585/) (2022)
- [Deep Multi-modal Object Detection and Semantic Segmentation for Autonomous Driving: Datasets, Methods, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07830/) (2019)
- [Generalized Decoding for Pixel, Image, and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11270/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation by Distilling Feature Correspondences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08414/) (2022)
- [Language Embedded 3D Gaussians for Open-Vocabulary Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18482/) (2023)
- [Neural Feature Fusion Fields: 3D Distillation of Self-Supervised 2D Image Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03494/) (2022)
- [Weakly Supervised 3D Open-vocabulary Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14093/) (2023)
- [Open-Vocabulary Universal Image Segmentation with MaskCLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08984/) (2022)
- [Distilled Feature Fields Enable Few-Shot Language-Guided Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07931/) (2023)
- [Deep Semantic Segmentation of Natural and Medical Images: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07655/) (2019)
- [GARField: Group Anything with Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09419/) (2024)
- [CLIP-DINOiser: Teaching CLIP a few DINO tricks for open-vocabulary semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12359/) (2023)
- [OpenNeRF: Open Set 3D Neural Scene Segmentation with Pixel-Wise Features and Rendered Novel Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03650/) (2024)
- [ACSeg: Adaptive Conceptualization for Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05944/) (2022)
- [GrowSP: Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation of 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16404/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [LLaVA3: Representing 3D Scenes like a Cubist Painter to Boost 3D Scene Understanding of VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16454/) (2025)
- [VCDP: Variation-Conditioned Distributional Proxy Learning for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.07416/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D semantic segmentation provides high-level scene understanding for applications in robotics, autonomous systems, textitetc. Traditional methods adapt exclusively to either task-specific goals (open-vocabulary segmentation) or scene content (unsupervised semantic segmentation). We propose DiSCO-3D, the first method addressing the broader problem of 3D Open-Vocabulary Sub-concepts Discovery, which aims to provide a 3D semantic segmentation that adapts to both the scene and user queries. We build DiSCO-3D on Neural Fields representations, combining unsupervised segmentation with weak open-vocabulary guidance. Our evaluations demonstrate that DiSCO-3D achieves effective performance in Open-Vocabulary Sub-concepts Discovery and exhibits state-of-the-art results in the edge cases of both open-vocabulary and unsupervised segmentation.