# ConceptPose: Training-Free Zero-Shot Object Pose Estimation using Concept Vectors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09056 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09056/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [SigLIP 2: Multilingual Vision-Language Encoders with Improved Semantic Understanding, Localization, and Dense Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14786/) (2025)
- [Grounded SAM: Assembling Open-World Models for Diverse Visual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14159/) (2024)
- [PoseCNN: A Convolutional Neural Network for 6D Object Pose Estimation in Cluttered Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00199/) (2017)
- [Normalized Object Coordinate Space for Category-Level 6D Object Pose and Size Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02970/) (2019)
- [FoundationPose: Unified 6D Pose Estimation and Tracking of Novel Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08344/) (2023)
- [DenseFusion: 6D Object Pose Estimation by Iterative Dense Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04780/) (2019)
- [BOP: Benchmark for 6D Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08319/) (2018)
- [OnePose: One-Shot Object Pose Estimation without CAD Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12257/) (2022)
- [Open-Vocabulary Universal Image Segmentation with MaskCLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08984/) (2022)
- [Gen6D: Generalizable Model-Free 6-DoF Object Pose Estimation from RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10776/) (2022)
- [SAM-6D: Segment Anything Model Meets Zero-Shot 6D Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15707/) (2023)
- [ZebraPose: Coarse to Fine Surface Encoding for 6DoF Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09418/) (2022)
- [OnePose++: Keypoint-Free One-Shot Object Pose Estimation without CAD Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07673/) (2023)
- [GigaPose: Fast and Robust Novel Object Pose Estimation via One Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14155/) (2023)
- [FoundPose: Unseen Object Pose Estimation with Foundation Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18809/) (2023)
- [CLIP-DINOiser: Teaching CLIP a few DINO tricks for open-vocabulary semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12359/) (2023)
- [DeCap: Decoding CLIP Latents for Zero-Shot Captioning via Text-Only Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03032/) (2023)
- [FS6D: Few-Shot 6D Pose Estimation of Novel Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14628/) (2022)
- [DINOv2 Meets Text: A Unified Framework for Image- and Pixel-Level Vision-Language Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16334/) (2024)
- [FreeZe: Training-free zero-shot 6D pose estimation with geometric and vision foundation models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00947/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [ProxyPose: 6-DoF Pose Tracking via Video-to-Video Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.06555/) (2026)
- [Learning Cross-View Semantic Priors for Single-Reference Unseen Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22076/) (2026)
- [Emergence of a Shared Canonical Object Frame from In-the-Wild Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30058/) (2026)
- [UniPose9D: Universal Category-Agnostic Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.09985/) (2026)
- [Prior-free relative 6D pose estimation of multiple object instances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.08949/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Object pose estimation is a fundamental task in computer vision and robotics, yet most methods require extensive, dataset-specific training. Concurrently, large-scale vision language models show remarkable zero-shot capabilities. In this work, we bridge these two worlds by introducing ConceptPose, a framework for object pose estimation that is both training-free and model-free. ConceptPose leverages a vision-language-model (VLM) to create open-vocabulary 3D concept maps, where each point is tagged with a concept vector derived from saliency maps. By establishing robust 3D-3D correspondences across concept maps, our approach allows precise estimation of 6DoF relative pose. Without any object or dataset-specific training, our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on common zero shot relative pose estimation benchmarks, outperforming the strongest baseline by a relative 62% in average ADD(-S) score, including methods that utilize extensive dataset-specific training.
