CVDec 16, 2025

Unified Semantic Transformer for 3D Scene Understanding

arXiv:2512.14364v23 citations
Originality Highly original
AI Analysis

This addresses the limitation of task-specific models in 3D scene understanding, offering a more efficient and versatile solution for applications in robotics and augmented reality.

The paper tackles the problem of holistic 3D scene understanding by introducing UNITE, a unified model that predicts multiple semantic attributes from RGB images, achieving state-of-the-art performance on various tasks and outperforming task-specific models in many cases.

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 semantic tasks within a single model. Our model operates on unseen scenes in a fully end-to-end manner and only takes a few seconds to infer the full 3D semantic geometry. Our approach is capable of directly predicting multiple semantic attributes, including 3D scene segmentation, instance embeddings, open-vocabulary features, as well as affordance 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 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

Foundations

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