# Visibility-Aware Language Aggregation for Open-Vocabulary Segmentation in 3D Gaussian Splatting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05515 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05515/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [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)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [4D Spatio-Temporal ConvNets: Minkowski Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08755/) (2019)
- [KPConv: Flexible and Deformable Convolution for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08889/) (2019)
- [Open-vocabulary Object Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13921/) (2021)
- [ORB-SLAM2: an Open-Source SLAM System for Monocular, Stereo and RGB-D Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.06475/) (2016)
- [Detecting Twenty-thousand Classes using Image-level Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02605/) (2022)
- [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)
- [LangSplat: 3D Language Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16084/) (2023)
- [Past, Present, and Future of Simultaneous Localization And Mapping: Towards the Robust-Perception Age](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05830/) (2016)
- [Feature 3DGS: Supercharging 3D Gaussian Splatting to Enable Distilled Feature Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03203/) (2023)
- [gsplat: An Open-Source Library for Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06765/) (2024)
- [Language Embedded 3D Gaussians for Open-Vocabulary Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18482/) (2023)
- [OpenGaussian: Towards Point-Level 3D Gaussian-based Open Vocabulary Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02058/) (2024)
- [FMGS: Foundation Model Embedded 3D Gaussian Splatting for Holistic 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01970/) (2024)
- [OpenNeRF: Open Set 3D Neural Scene Segmentation with Pixel-Wise Features and Rendered Novel Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03650/) (2024)
- [GOI: Find 3D Gaussians of Interest with an Optimizable Open-vocabulary Semantic-space Hyperplane](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17596/) (2024)
- [Dr. Splat: Directly Referring 3D Gaussian Splatting via Direct Language Embedding Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16652/) (2025)
- [LangSplatV2: High-dimensional 3D Language Gaussian Splatting with 450+ FPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07136/) (2025)
- [InstanceGaussian: Appearance-Semantic Joint Gaussian Representation for 3D Instance-Level Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19235/) (2024)
- [SuperGSeg: Open-Vocabulary 3D Segmentation with Structured Super-Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10231/) (2024)
- [OpenSplat3D: Open-Vocabulary 3D Instance Segmentation using Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07697/) (2025)
- [GAGS: Granularity-Aware Feature Distillation for Language Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13654/) (2024)
- [VoteSplat: Hough Voting Gaussian Splatting for 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.22799/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [ReLaGS: Relational Language Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17605/) (2026)
- [Sparse Code Uplifting for Efficient 3D Language Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13600/) (2026)
- [OpenGaFF: Open-Vocabulary Gaussian Feature Field with Codebook Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06088/) (2026)
- [TrackRef3D: Multi-View Consistent Track-then-Label for Open-World Referring Segmentation in 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.26576/) (2026)
- [A3R: Agentic Affordance Reasoning via Cross-Dimensional Evidence in 3D Gaussian Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01882/) (2026)
- [OP2GS: Object-Aware 3D Gaussian Splatting with Dual-Opacity Primitives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.20044/) (2026)
- [Lift, Associate, and Fuse: A Decision-Centric Framework for 2D-to-3D Foundation Model Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20659/) (2026)
- [NormLift: From Lifted Features To Semantic Reliability In 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.18898/) (2026)
- [EviSplat: Preserving Multi-View Evidence in 3D Gaussian Splatting for Open-Vocabulary Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34853/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, distilling open-vocabulary language features from 2D images into 3D Gaussians has attracted significant attention. Although existing methods achieve impressive language-based interactions of 3D scenes, we observe two fundamental issues: background Gaussians contributing negligibly to a rendered pixel get the same feature as the dominant foreground ones, and multi-view inconsistencies due to view-specific noise in language embeddings. We introduce Visibility-Aware Language Aggregation (VALA), a lightweight yet effective method that computes marginal contributions for each ray and applies a visibility-aware gate to retain only visible Gaussians. Moreover, we propose a streaming weighted geometric median in cosine space to merge noisy multi-view features. Our method yields a robust, view-consistent language feature embedding in a fast and memory-efficient manner. VALA improves open-vocabulary localization and segmentation across reference datasets, consistently surpassing existing works. More results are available at https://vala3d.github.io