General 3D Vision-Language Model With Fast Rendering and Pre-Training Vision-Language Alignment

Current prevailing vision-language models have achieved remarkable progress in 3D scene understanding while trained in the closed-set setting and with full labels. The major bottleneck for the current robot 3D scene recognition approach for robotic applications is that these models do not have the capacity to recognize any unseen novel classes beyond the training categories in diverse real-world robot applications such as robot manipulation as well as robot navigation. In the meantime, current state-of-the-art 3D scene understanding approaches primarily require a large number of high-quality labels to train neural networks, which merely perform well in a fully supervised manner. Therefore, we are in urgent need of a framework that can simultaneously be applicable to both 3D point cloud segmentation and detection, particularly in the circumstances where the labels are rather scarce. This work presents a generalized and straightforward framework for dealing with 3D scene understanding when the labeled scenes are quite limited. To extract knowledge for novel categories from the pre-trained vision-language models, we propose a hierarchical feature-aligned pre-training and knowledge distillation strategy to extract and distill meaningful information from large-scale vision-language models, which helps benefit the open-vocabulary scene understanding tasks. To leverage the boundary information, we propose a novel energy-based loss with boundary awareness benefiting from the region-level boundary predictions. To encourage latent instance discrimination and to guarantee efficiency, we propose the unsupervised region-level semantic contrastive learning scheme for point clouds, using confident predictions of the neural network to discriminate the intermediate feature embeddings at multiple stages. In the limited reconstruction case, our proposed approach, termed WS3D++, ranks 1st on the large-scale ScanNet benchmark on both the task of semantic segmentation and instance segmentation. Also, our proposed WS3D++ achieves state-of-the-art data-efficient learning performance on the other large-scale real-scene indoor and outdoor datasets S3DIS and SemanticKITTI. Extensive experiments with both indoor and outdoor scenes demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach in both data-efficient learning and open-world few-shot learning.