# Lightweight 3D Feature Pretraining by Bayesian Inversion of 2D Foundation Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.21292 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.21292/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [Zero-1-to-3: Zero-shot One Image to 3D Object](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11328/) (2023)
- [Deep Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06114/) (2017)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06158/) (2017)
- [Open-vocabulary Object Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13921/) (2021)
- [Extract Free Dense Labels from CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01071/) (2021)
- [OpenScene: 3D Scene Understanding with Open Vocabularies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15654/) (2022)
- [Image Segmentation Using Text and Image Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10003/) (2021)
- [iMAP: Implicit Mapping and Positioning in Real-Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12352/) (2021)
- [Scaling Open-Vocabulary Image Segmentation with Image-Level Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12143/) (2021)
- [PointCLIP: Point Cloud Understanding by CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02413/) (2021)
- [Deep ViT Features as Dense Visual Descriptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05814/) (2021)
- [ConceptFusion: Open-set Multimodal 3D Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07241/) (2023)
- [OpenMask3D: Open-Vocabulary 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13631/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation by Distilling Feature Correspondences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08414/) (2022)
- [CLIP2Scene: Towards Label-efficient 3D Scene Understanding by CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04926/) (2023)
- [PLA: Language-Driven Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16312/) (2022)
- [Improving Diffusion Inverse Problem Solving with Decoupled Noise Annealing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01521/) (2024)
- [SemanticFusion: Dense 3D Semantic Mapping with Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05130/) (2016)
- [MSeg: A Composite Dataset for Multi-domain Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.13762/) (2021)
- [CLIP-DINOiser: Teaching CLIP a few DINO tricks for open-vocabulary semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12359/) (2023)
- [Semantic Abstraction: Open-World 3D Scene Understanding from 2D Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11514/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [VLRC: Vision-Language Reprojection Consistency as a scalable signal for better feed-forward 3D pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02707/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present Casper3D, a lightweight probabilistic framework for converting noisy multi-view 2D foundation-model embeddings into a latent 3D semantic representation. We model view-level semantic features as noisy observations of an underlying 3D semantic state and infer this state with a set-based variational model that incorporates relative pose during multi-view reasoning. Casper3D is trained by predicting held-out semantic observations from novel viewpoints, while remaining aligned with visual and text semantic spaces for open-vocabulary 3D understanding. The framework is backbone-agnostic and applies to both language-aligned and self-supervised embeddings. Experiments show that Casper3D produces more stable 3D semantics than simple multi-view pooling, especially in ambiguous and noisy settings.
