# Describe Anything Anywhere At Any Moment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.00565 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00565/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 64 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 64)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01691/) (2022)
- [Modeling Context in Referring Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00272/) (2016)
- [SpatialVLM: Endowing Vision-Language Models with Spatial Reasoning Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12168/) (2024)
- [VILA: On Pre-training for Visual Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07533/) (2023)
- [Habitat-Matterport 3D Dataset (HM3D): 1000 Large-scale 3D Environments for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08238/) (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)
- [Video-R1: Reinforcing Video Reasoning in MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21776/) (2025)
- [Sentence-T5: Scalable Sentence Encoders from Pre-trained Text-to-Text Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08877/) (2021)
- [LM-Nav: Robotic Navigation with Large Pre-Trained Models of Language, Vision, and Action](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04429/) (2022)
- [BoT-SORT: Robust Associations Multi-Pedestrian Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14651/) (2022)
- [ConceptFusion: Open-set Multimodal 3D Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07241/) (2023)
- [SayPlan: Grounding Large Language Models using 3D Scene Graphs for Scalable Robot Task Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06135/) (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)
- [VLFM: Vision-Language Frontier Maps for Zero-Shot Semantic Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03275/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Graphs for Language-Grounded Robot Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17846/) (2024)
- [Kimera: an Open-Source Library for Real-Time Metric-Semantic Localization and Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02490/) (2019)
- [PLA: Language-Driven Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16312/) (2022)
- [FoundationStereo: Zero-Shot Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09898/) (2025)
- [CLIP-Fields: Weakly Supervised Semantic Fields for Robotic Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05663/) (2022)
- [SceneGraphFusion: Incremental 3D Scene Graph Prediction from RGB-D Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14898/) (2021)
- [Open-vocabulary Queryable Scene Representations for Real World Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09874/) (2022)
- [3D Dynamic Scene Graphs: Actionable Spatial Perception with Places, Objects, and Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06289/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [RAG-3DSG: Enhancing 3D Scene Graphs with Re-Shot Guided Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10168/) (2026)
- [3D Scene Graphs: Open Challenges and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19383/) (2026)
- [Remember with Confidence: Uncertainty Quantification for Spatio-temporal Memory with Probabilistic Guarantees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08277/) (2026)
- [Just-In-Time Scene Graph Growth: Combating Perceptual Saturation in Long-Horizon Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13245/) (2026)
- [LT-Mem: Volatility-Aware Spatio-Temporal Memory for Lifelong Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.19059/) (2026)
- [Actively Resolving Contextual Uncertainty for Underspecified Tasks in Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.30428/) (2026)
- [Prior-SG: Task and Prior Driven Region Segmentation for Scene Graphs in Arbitrarily-Structured Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.06170/) (2026)
- [GESTO: Human-Centric Spatio-Temporal Memory for Reasoning in Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.10886/) (2026)
- [Physico-Geospatial Grounded Scene Interpretation for Mobile Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06629/) (2026)
- [Finder: Agentic Closed-Loop Object Finding for Embodied Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.18058/) (2026)
- [A Scene Language Model for Open-Vocabulary Scene Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.21400/) (2026)
- [Hierarchical Aggregation of Semantic Uncertainty in 3D Scene Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22351/) (2026)
- [Kairos: Grounded Forecasting of Presence and Directional Flow in 4D Scene Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.27467/) (2026)
- [VLMs Can Describe, But Not Measure: Object-Centric Scene Understanding for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.28184/) (2026)
- [PORTER: Edge-Cloud Residency for Persistent 3D Scene Graph Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33258/) (2026)
- [SafeVantage: Vantage-Aware Memory for Reliable Embodied Decisions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36906/) (2026)
- [Beyond the Remembered World: Predictive 4D Belief for Persistent Navigation in Evolving Worlds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39166/) (2026)
- [Retrospective Open-Vocabulary Memory for Long-Term Object Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00330/) (2026)
- [A Review Of Robotic World Models For Dynamic Environments Based On Factor And Scene Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.08800/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Computer vision and robotics applications ranging from augmented reality to robot autonomy in large-scale environments require spatio-temporal memory frameworks that capture both geometric structure for accurate language-grounding as well as semantic detail. Existing methods face a tradeoff, where producing rich open-vocabulary descriptions comes at the expense of real-time performance when these descriptions have to be grounded in 3D. To address these challenges, we propose Describe Anything, Anywhere, at Any Moment (DAAAM), a novel spatio-temporal memory framework for large-scale and real-time 4D scene understanding. DAAAM introduces a novel optimization-based frontend to infer detailed semantic descriptions from localized captioning models, such as the Describe Anything Model (DAM), leveraging batch processing to speed up inference by an order of magnitude for online processing. It leverages such semantic understanding to build a hierarchical 4D scene graph (SG), which acts as an effective globally spatially and temporally consistent memory representation. DAAAM constructs 4D SGs with detailed, geometrically grounded descriptions while maintaining real-time performance. We show that DAAAM's 4D SG interfaces well with a tool-calling agent for inference and reasoning. We thoroughly evaluate DAAAM in the complex task of spatio-temporal question answering on the NaVQA benchmark and show its generalization capabilities for sequential task grounding on the SG3D benchmark. We further curate an extended OC-NaVQA benchmark for large-scale and long-time evaluations. DAAAM achieves state-of-the-art results in both tasks, improving OC-NaVQA question accuracy by 53.6%, position errors by 21.9%, temporal errors by 21.6%, and SG3D task grounding accuracy by 27.8% over the most competitive baselines, respectively. We release our data and code open-source.