Finding 3D Scene Analogies with Multimodal Foundation Models

Abstract: Connecting current observations with prior experiences helps robots adapt and plan in new, unseen 3D environments. Recently, 3D scene analogies have been proposed to connect two 3D scenes, which are smooth maps that align scene regions with common spatial relationships. These maps enable detailed transfer of trajectories or waypoints, potentially supporting demonstration transfer for imitation learning or task plan transfer across scenes. However, existing methods for the task require additional training and fixed object vocabularies. In this work, we propose to use multimodal foundation models for finding 3D scene analogies in a zero-shot, open-vocabulary setting. Central to our approach is a hybrid neural representation of scenes that consists of a sparse graph based on vision-LLM features and a feature field derived from 3D shape foundation models. 3D scene analogies are then found in a coarse-to-fine manner, by first aligning the graph and refining the correspondence with feature fields. Our method can establish accurate correspondences between complex scenes, and we showcase applications in trajectory and waypoint transfer.