# Think While You Map: Asynchronous Vision-Language Agents for Incremental 3D Scene Graphs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.31471 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31471/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Spatial and embodied reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 40 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jun 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Spatial and embodied reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/spatial-and-embodied-reasoning/)
- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Embodied and 3D vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/embodied-and-3d-vision-language-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (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)
- [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)
- [ScanRefer: 3D Object Localization in RGB-D Scans using Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08830/) (2019)
- [EVA-02: A Visual Representation for Neon Genesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11331/) (2023)
- [Visual Language Maps for Robot Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05714/) (2022)
- [ConceptGraphs: Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Graphs for Perception and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16650/) (2023)
- [SQA3D: Situated Question Answering in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07474/) (2022)
- [OpenMask3D: Open-Vocabulary 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13631/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Graphs for Language-Grounded Robot Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17846/) (2024)
- [Kimera: an Open-Source Library for Real-Time Metric-Semantic Localization and Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02490/) (2019)
- [Hydra: A Real-time Spatial Perception System for 3D Scene Graph Construction and Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.13360/) (2022)
- [CLIP-Fields: Weakly Supervised Semantic Fields for Robotic Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05663/) (2022)
- [SceneGraphFusion: Incremental 3D Scene Graph Prediction from RGB-D Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14898/) (2021)
- [Open-vocabulary Queryable Scene Representations for Real World Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09874/) (2022)
- [Kimera: from SLAM to Spatial Perception with 3D Dynamic Scene Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06894/) (2021)
- [LLM-Grounder: Open-Vocabulary 3D Visual Grounding with Large Language Model as an Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12311/) (2023)
- [Fusion++: Volumetric Object-Level SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08378/) (2018)
- [MaskFusion: Real-Time Recognition, Tracking and Reconstruction of Multiple Moving Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09194/) (2018)
- [Clio: Real-time Task-Driven Open-Set 3D Scene Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13696/) (2024)
- [Open3DSG: Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Graphs from Point Clouds with Queryable Objects and Open-Set Relationships](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12259/) (2024)
- [Open-Set Image Tagging with Multi-Grained Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15200/) (2023)
- [Open-Fusion: Real-time Open-Vocabulary 3D Mapping and Queryable Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03923/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [OpenBelief-Nav: Evidence-Preserving Object Memory for Open-Vocabulary Language-Guided Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.13923/) (2026)
- [TRACKGRAPH: Online Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Graphs via Image-Space Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.31005/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Open-vocabulary 3D scene graph methods typically operate in two stages: first reconstruct, then enrich with vision-language models, leaving the graph unqueryable during exploration. We argue that this sequential coupling is unnecessary and propose an asynchronous architecture in which lightweight online mapping runs concurrently with heavyweight semantic refinement. A probabilistic voxel-based backbone maintains stable object identities incrementally, while background VLM agents progressively enrich the graph. This framework resolves duplicate object tracks through semantic loop closure, attaches fine-grained visual attributes and derives spatial relations between objects. A multi-target frame scheduler amortizes VLM cost by selecting a small set of informative frames that jointly cover multiple targets. The resulting scene graph is queryable during exploration and grows in semantic richness over time. Our method matches or outperforms existing open-vocabulary 3D scene graph methods on semantic segmentation (ScanNet, Replica) and surpasses the prior state-of-the-art across three visual grounding benchmarks (Sr3D+, Nr3D, ScanRefer) by 15.3 to 18.8 A@0.25. Project page: https://denizbickici.github.io/thinkgraphs/