Transformer-based decoders for 3D instance segmentation typically commit to a fixed number of queries and positional modeling calibrated on the training distribution rather than on the scene at hand. Indoor scans vary widely in spatial extent and object count, so a fixed query set over-initializes small scenes and under-initializes large ones, while learned absolute and relative encodings are bound to the training scenes' extents and can saturate. We present AQ3D, which is designed to handle scenes of various sizes during training and inference. Queries are instantiated at a fixed ratio of the scene's superpoints, forming an overcomplete set whose background rejection is entirely left to the decoder. Positional information is encoded using 3D RoPE over quantized metric coordinates, replacing learned bounded lookup tables of prior decoders. Further, we improve the decoder itself by using attribution-based superpoint pooling, a mask refinement branch, and a cosine classifier for background rejection. Experiments show our method sets a new state-of-the-art on validation and hidden test splits across the datasets ScanNetV2, ScanNet200, and ScanNet++V2 among decoder methods trained without additional data augmentation. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/kenomo/aq3d}{github.com/kenomo/aq3d}.
Ted Lentsch, Santiago Montiel-Marín, Holger Caesar +1cs.CV
Unsupervised 3D instance segmentation of outdoor LiDAR scans has traditionally relied on handcrafted geometric priors such as density-based clustering, motion cues, or projected 2D detections. In this work, we investigate whether a frozen, self-supervised point transformer already contains the structural information required to isolate object instances without any handcrafted geometric prior. Using this transformer purely as a feature extractor, we probe its internal representations across the SemanticKITTI, nuScenes, and Waymo Perception datasets. Our analysis yields four core insights: (1) the instance signal concentrates in the attention queries and keys rather than in the values or final output features; (2) output features semantically collapse, merging adjacent same-class objects that the queries and keys keep distinct; (3) this instance signal is bimodal in depth, strongest at the shallowest and deepest encoder stages; and (4) this signal is driven predominantly by the rotary position encoding (RoPE), whose removal collapses its advantage. We put these findings into our method TokenGraph3D, a training-free segmenter that groups points via connected components on a key-similarity graph, using neither density-based clustering nor proximity priors. Under identical prior-free conditions, we substantially outperform output-feature baselines, making the emergent 3D instance structure visible.
Class-agnostic 3D instance segmentation is critical for robotic systems operating in unknown environments, enabling perception of previously unseen objects for reliable manipulation and navigation. Existing approaches typically project per-frame 2D instance masks into 3D and merge them, which often breaks object identities across time and yields fragmented 3D instances. We introduce Cross-Dimensional Class-Agnostic 3D Instance Segmentation (CDIS), a zero-shot framework that explicitly tracks 2D instance masks across frames and associates them with 3D superpoints, creating a feedback loop between 2D and 3D. This cross-dimensional reasoning links temporally stable 2D tracks with spatially coherent 3D regions, producing globally consistent 3D instance labels without any 3D-specific training. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that CDIS achieves higher accuracy and consistency than state-of-the-art zero-shot methods, while remaining efficient and scalable to diverse real-world environments.
Reliable instance-level scene understanding is a fundamental prerequisite for object-level interactions and high-fidelity 3D representations. While current methods often leverage 2D foundation segmentation models to obtain these priors, their 2D-centric design typically yields fragmented masks and inconsistent predictions across different views. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework that produces consistent 2D instance masks to guide the optimization of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) feature fields. Our framework consists of three main stages. (1) Multi-Cue Extraction that generates synergistic semantic, geometric, and structural priors from input images. (2) Multi-Cue-Guided Mask Merging process that consolidates fragmented masks using a composite merge score derived from semantic, depth, and edge cues. (3) Cross-View Mask Matching that establishes globally consistent identity assignments across all viewpoints. By transforming viewpoint-specific segments into coherent 3D primitives, our approach enables stable 3D instance segmentation and effective downstream editing tasks. Experiments demonstrate that our method significantly improves cross-view consistency and segmentation stability over existing baselines while maintaining high-fidelity photometric reconstruction.
Accurate 3D instance segmentation in point cloud data is critical for machine vision applications. Recent advancements leverage multiple pre-trained foundation models to generate 3D proposals, followed by the application of proposal aggregation methods, which significantly enhance performance. However, they often produce sub-optimal results due to inherent variations in confidence levels across different segmentation models, resulting in a bias toward the model with higher confidence. This bias is inherently model-dependent and is influenced by factors such as data preprocessing techniques and training strategies. To address this bias, we propose a novel, training-free 3D instance segmentation approach via Geometric Visual Correspondence (GVC-Seg), which exploits the correspondence between 3D geometric cues and 2D visual cues to mitigate the confidence bias. Additionally, a 3D proposal generation module and a mask-aware CLIP feature extraction module are introduced during the instance mask generation and instance semantic reasoning, respectively. In this way, GVC-Seg enhances proposal quality assessment, ensuring unbiased ensemble learning across different models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several challenging benchmarks, while also exhibiting strong potential in open-vocabulary semantic segmentation settings.