# Vision Pretraining for Dense Spatial Perception

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05247 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.05247/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 60 of its 75 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 60)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [DUSt3R: Geometric 3D Vision Made Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14132/) (2023)
- [Objaverse: A Universe of Annotated 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08051/) (2022)
- [VGGT: Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11651/) (2025)
- [D-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13961/) (2020)
- [4D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Dynamic Scene Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08528/) (2023)
- [Grounding Image Matching in 3D with MASt3R](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09756/) (2024)
- [The Replica Dataset: A Digital Replica of Indoor Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05797/) (2019)
- [K-Planes: Explicit Radiance Fields in Space, Time, and Appearance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10241/) (2023)
- [MegaDepth: Learning Single-View Depth Prediction from Internet Photos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00607/) (2018)
- [Dynamic 3D Gaussians: Tracking by Persistent Dynamic View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09713/) (2023)
- [Depth Anything 3: Recovering the Visual Space from Any Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10647/) (2025)
- [Common Objects in 3D: Large-Scale Learning and Evaluation of Real-life 3D Category Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00512/) (2021)
- [Hypersim: A Photorealistic Synthetic Dataset for Holistic Indoor Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02523/) (2020)
- [HexPlane: A Fast Representation for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.09632/) (2023)
- [Continuous 3D Perception Model with Persistent State](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12387/) (2025)
- [DL3DV-10K: A Large-Scale Scene Dataset for Deep Learning-based 3D Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16256/) (2023)
- [Habitat 2.0: Training Home Assistants to Rearrange their Habitat](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14405/) (2021)
- [BlendedMVS: A Large-scale Dataset for Generalized Multi-view Stereo Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10127/) (2019)
- [MonST3R: A Simple Approach for Estimating Geometry in the Presence of Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03825/) (2024)
- [Kubric: A scalable dataset generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03570/) (2022)
- [Virtual KITTI 2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.10773/) (2020)
- [DeepMVS: Learning Multi-view Stereopsis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00650/) (2018)
- [PointOdyssey: A Large-Scale Synthetic Dataset for Long-Term Point Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15055/) (2023)

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

- [Predict, Then Retrieve: Cross-Instance Future-State Retrieval from Video Prefixes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.04426/) (2026)
- [N0-Foundation: Towards the Age of Tactile Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29601/) (2026)
- [PAVE: Predictive Alignment and Value-Guided Evolution for World-Action Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.30378/) (2026)
- [BruNet: A Cross-Domain Transfer Framework for Bruise Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.11463/) (2026)
- [Learning Skills from Historical Action Trajectories: Action Experience Dictionary for World Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.40219/) (2026)
- [Compact Robot Policies Need Fine-Grained Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.08183/) (2026)
- [Scalable Patch-Level Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.10013/) (2026)
- [What Visual Representations Do World Action Models Need?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13024/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Dense spatial perception is essential for physical intelligence, where visual systems are expected to recover structured, metric, and actionable representations from pixel observations. Modern visual foundation models tend to prioritize semantic invariance, often at the expense of detailed spatial understanding. In this work, we study vision pretraining through a boundary-centric lens, motivated by the premise that boundaries and shape discontinuities offer essential cues for perceiving geometric properties. Concretely, we propose masked boundary modeling, a self-supervised paradigm that dynamically learns sub-pixel boundary representations and subsequently leverages the discovered boundary-bearing tokens as masked targets to facilitate dense visual token learning. By scaling this framework, we develop LingBot-Vision and demonstrate its efficacy across a diverse set of downstream vision tasks with DINOv3 as a strong baseline. Remarkably, LingBot-Vision drives the progression from LingBot-Depth 1.0 to LingBot-Depth 2.0 for depth completion, and thereby yields enhanced depth estimation, a key pillar for embodied artificial intelligence. Our findings reveal that boundary modeling goes beyond simple line segments and instead serves as a scalable pretraining principle for learning spatially structured visual representations.