# Relationship-Aware Hierarchical 3D Scene Graph for Task Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02456 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02456/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Spatial and embodied reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 0 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Feb 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Spatial and embodied reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/spatial-and-embodied-reasoning/)

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

- [3D Scene Graphs: Open Challenges and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19383/) (2026)
- [Just-In-Time Scene Graph Growth: Combating Perceptual Saturation in Long-Horizon Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13245/) (2026)
- [Vision-Language Model Reasoning for Contextual Semantic Mapping in Intralogistics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24814/) (2026)
- [Hierarchical Aggregation of Semantic Uncertainty in 3D Scene Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22351/) (2026)
- [PORTER: Edge-Cloud Residency for Persistent 3D Scene Graph Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33258/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Representing and understanding 3D environments in a structured manner is crucial for autonomous agents to navigate and reason about their surroundings. While traditional Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) methods generate metric reconstructions and can be extended to metric-semantic mapping, they lack a higher level of abstraction and relational reasoning. To address this gap, 3D scene graphs have emerged as a powerful representation for capturing hierarchical structures and object relationships. In this work, we propose an enhanced hierarchical 3D scene graph that integrates open-vocabulary features across multiple abstraction levels and supports object-relational reasoning. Our approach leverages a Vision Language Model (VLM) to infer semantic relationships. Notably, we introduce a task reasoning module that combines Large Language Models (LLM) and a VLM to interpret the scene graph's semantic and relational information, enabling agents to reason about tasks and interact with their environment more intelligently. We validate our method by deploying it on a quadruped robot in multiple environments and tasks, highlighting its ability to reason about them.
