# OpenMonoGS-SLAM: Monocular Gaussian Splatting SLAM with Open-set Semantics

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08625 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08625/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [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)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [DUSt3R: Geometric 3D Vision Made Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14132/) (2023)
- [VGGT: Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11651/) (2025)
- [DINO: DETR with Improved DeNoising Anchor Boxes for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03605/) (2022)
- [ORB-SLAM: a Versatile and Accurate Monocular SLAM System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.00956/) (2015)
- [Grounding Image Matching in 3D with MASt3R](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09756/) (2024)
- [Grounded SAM: Assembling Open-World Models for Diverse Visual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14159/) (2024)
- [The Replica Dataset: A Digital Replica of Indoor Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05797/) (2019)
- [LERF: Language Embedded Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09553/) (2023)
- [MonST3R: A Simple Approach for Estimating Geometry in the Presence of Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03825/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Gaussian Grouping: Segment and Edit Anything in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00732/) (2023)
- [SplaTAM: Splat, Track & Map 3D Gaussians for Dense RGB-D SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02126/) (2023)
- [Feature 3DGS: Supercharging 3D Gaussian Splatting to Enable Distilled Feature Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03203/) (2023)
- [RoMa: Robust Dense Feature Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15404/) (2023)
- [gsplat: An Open-Source Library for Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06765/) (2024)
- [GS-SLAM: Dense Visual SLAM with 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11700/) (2023)
- [Global Structure-from-Motion Revisited](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20219/) (2024)
- [MASt3R-SLAM: Real-Time Dense SLAM with 3D Reconstruction Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12392/) (2024)
- [Self-Supervised Transformers for Unsupervised Object Discovery using Normalized Cut](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11539/) (2022)
- [CroCo v2: Improved Cross-view Completion Pre-training for Stereo Matching and Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10408/) (2022)
- [Segment Any 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00860/) (2023)
- [CroCo: Self-Supervised Pre-training for 3D Vision Tasks by Cross-View Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10716/) (2022)

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

- [LatentAM: Real-Time, Large-Scale Latent Gaussian Attention Mapping via Online Dictionary Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12314/) (2026)
- [X-GS: An Extensible Framework for Perceiving and Thinking with 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09632/) (2026)
- [VOIM: Training-Free Open-Vocabulary 3D Instance Mapping for RGB-D and Monocular SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.00775/) (2026)
- [ActiveLang: Active Open-Vocabulary 3D Mapping with Semantic-Uncertainty-Guided Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.09518/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is a foundational component in robotics, AR/VR, and autonomous systems. With the rising focus on spatial AI in recent years, combining SLAM with semantic understanding has become increasingly important for enabling intelligent perception and interaction. Recent efforts have explored this integration, but they often rely on depth sensors or closed-set semantic models, limiting their scalability and adaptability in open-world environments. In this work, we present OpenMonoGS-SLAM, the first monocular SLAM framework that unifies 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) with open-set semantic understanding. To achieve our goal, we leverage recent advances in Visual Foundation Models (VFMs), including MASt3R for visual geometry and SAM and CLIP for open-vocabulary semantics. These models provide robust generalization across diverse tasks, enabling accurate monocular camera tracking and mapping, as well as a rich understanding of semantics in open-world environments. Our method operates without any depth input or 3D semantic ground truth, relying solely on self-supervised learning objectives. Furthermore, we propose a memory mechanism specifically designed to manage high-dimensional semantic features, which effectively constructs Gaussian semantic feature maps, leading to strong overall performance. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves performance comparable to or surpassing existing baselines in both closed-set and open-set segmentation tasks, all without relying on supplementary sensors such as depth maps or semantic annotations.