# Motion4D: Learning 3D-Consistent Motion and Semantics for 4D Scene Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.03601 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03601/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [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)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [Towards Robust Monocular Depth Estimation: Mixing Datasets for Zero-shot Cross-dataset Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01341/) (2019)
- [D-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13961/) (2020)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [4D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Dynamic Scene Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08528/) (2023)
- [Deformable 3D Gaussians for High-Fidelity Monocular Dynamic Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13101/) (2023)
- [K-Planes: Explicit Radiance Fields in Space, Time, and Appearance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10241/) (2023)
- [Dynamic 3D Gaussians: Tracking by Persistent Dynamic View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09713/) (2023)
- [CoTracker: It is Better to Track Together](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07635/) (2023)
- [Real-time Photorealistic Dynamic Scene Representation and Rendering with 4D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10642/) (2023)
- [XMem: Long-Term Video Object Segmentation with an Atkinson-Shiffrin Memory Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07115/) (2022)
- [Video Object Segmentation using Space-Time Memory Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00607/) (2019)
- [CAT3D: Create Anything in 3D with Multi-View Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10314/) (2024)
- [Dynamic View Synthesis from Dynamic Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06468/) (2021)
- [In-Place Scene Labelling and Understanding with Implicit Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15875/) (2021)
- [Gaussian Splatting SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06741/) (2023)
- [LangSplat: 3D Language Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16084/) (2023)
- [Gaussian Grouping: Segment and Edit Anything in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00732/) (2023)
- [YouTube-VOS: A Large-Scale Video Object Segmentation Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.03327/) (2018)
- [TAPIR: Tracking Any Point with per-frame Initialization and temporal Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08637/) (2023)
- [GS-SLAM: Dense Visual SLAM with 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11700/) (2023)
- [TAP-Vid: A Benchmark for Tracking Any Point in a Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03726/) (2022)
- [Shape of Motion: 4D Reconstruction from a Single Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13764/) (2024)
- [DynIBaR: Neural Dynamic Image-Based Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11082/) (2022)
- [Monocular Dynamic View Synthesis: A Reality Check](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13445/) (2022)

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

- [SM4RT: Learning Structured Motion Geometry for 4D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.22534/) (2026)
- [LMM-Track4D: Eliciting 4D Dynamic Reasoning in LMMs via Trajectory-Grounded Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.19390/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advancements in foundation models for 2D vision have substantially improved the analysis of dynamic scenes from monocular videos. However, despite their strong generalization capabilities, these models often lack 3D consistency, a fundamental requirement for understanding scene geometry and motion, thereby causing severe spatial misalignment and temporal flickering in complex 3D environments. In this paper, we present Motion4D, a novel framework that addresses these challenges by integrating 2D priors from foundation models into a unified 4D Gaussian Splatting representation. Our method features a two-part iterative optimization framework: 1) Sequential optimization, which updates motion and semantic fields in consecutive stages to maintain local consistency, and 2) Global optimization, which jointly refines all attributes for long-term coherence. To enhance motion accuracy, we introduce a 3D confidence map that dynamically adjusts the motion priors, and an adaptive resampling process that inserts new Gaussians into under-represented regions based on per-pixel RGB and semantic errors. Furthermore, we enhance semantic coherence through an iterative refinement process that resolves semantic inconsistencies by alternately optimizing the semantic fields and updating prompts of SAM2. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our Motion4D significantly outperforms both 2D foundation models and existing 3D-based approaches across diverse scene understanding tasks, including point-based tracking, video object segmentation, and novel view synthesis. Our code is available at https://hrzhou2.github.io/motion4d-web/.
