# Unified Semantic Transformer for 3D Scene Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.14364 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14364/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 53 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [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)
- [The Replica Dataset: A Digital Replica of Indoor Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05797/) (2019)
- [ScanNet++: A High-Fidelity Dataset of 3D Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11417/) (2023)
- [Deep Hough Voting for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09664/) (2019)
- [Point Transformer V3: Simpler, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10035/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Scaling Open-Vocabulary Image Segmentation with Image-Level Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12143/) (2021)
- [LangSplat: 3D Language Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16084/) (2023)
- [ConceptGraphs: Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Graphs for Perception and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16650/) (2023)
- [An End-to-End Transformer Model for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08141/) (2021)
- [MapAnything: Universal Feed-Forward Metric 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13414/) (2025)
- [ConceptFusion: Open-set Multimodal 3D Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07241/) (2023)
- [Mask3D: Mask Transformer for 3D Semantic Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03105/) (2022)
- [OpenMask3D: Open-Vocabulary 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13631/) (2023)
- [Language-Grounded Indoor 3D Semantic Segmentation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07761/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [FAST3DIS: Feed-forward Anchored Scene Transformer for 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25993/) (2026)
- [GAP-MLLM: Geometry-Aligned Pre-training for Activating 3D Spatial Perception in Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16461/) (2026)
- [SegVGGT: Joint 3D Reconstruction and Instance Segmentation from Multi-View Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19926/) (2026)
- [Pano3D: Unified 3D Reconstruction and Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.14307/) (2026)
- [GroupForward: Building Referable 3D Scenes via Instance-Grouped Feed-Forward Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.17535/) (2026)
- [DINOcular: Self-Supervised Visuospatial Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.27226/) (2026)
- [GraphWrit3R: End-to-End 3D Scene Graph Writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.31595/) (2026)
- [Every View Counts: View-Consistent Panoptic Quality for Multi-view Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.05911/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Holistic 3D scene understanding involves capturing and parsing unstructured 3D environments. Due to the inherent complexity of the real world, existing models have predominantly been developed and limited to be task-specific. We introduce UNITE, a Unified Semantic Transformer for 3D scene understanding, a novel feed-forward neural network that unifies a diverse set of 3D dense semantic indoor tasks within a single model. Our model operates on unseen scenes trained in a fully end-to-end manner and only takes a couple seconds to infer the full 3D semantic geometry. Our approach is capable of directly predicting multiple dense semantic attributes, including 3D scene segmentation, instance embeddings, open-vocabulary features, and articulations, solely from RGB images. The method is trained using a combination of 2D distillation, heavily relying on self-supervision and leverages novel multi-view losses designed to ensure 3D view consistency. We demonstrate that UNITE achieves state-of-the-art performance on several different dense indoor semantic tasks and even outperforms task-specific models, in many cases, surpassing methods that operate on ground truth 3D geometry. See the project website at unite-page.github.io