Marc Pollefeys
Publications
Loc3R-VLM: Language-based Localization and 3D Reasoning with Vision-Language Models
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made impressive progress in connecting vision and language, but they still struggle with spatial understanding and viewpoint-aware reasoning. Recent efforts aim to augment the input representations with geometric cues rather than explicitly teaching models to reason in 3D space. We introduce Loc3R-VLM, a framework that equips 2D Vision-Language Models with advanced 3D understanding capabilities from monocular video input. Inspired by human spatial cognition, Loc3R-VLM relies on two joint objectives: global layout reconstruction to build a holistic representation of the scene structure, and explicit situation modeling to anchor egocentric perspective. These objectives provide direct spatial supervision that grounds both perception and language in a 3D context. To ensure geometric consistency and metric-scale alignment, we leverage lightweight camera pose priors extracted from a pre-trained 3D foundation model. Loc3R-VLM achieves state-of-the-art performance in language-based localization and outperforms existing 2D- and video-based approaches on situated and general 3D question-answering benchmarks, demonstrating that our spatial supervision framework enables strong 3D understanding. Project page: https://kevinqu7.github.io/loc3r-vlm
LSA: Localized Semantic Alignment for Enhancing Temporal Consistency in Traffic Video Generation
Controllable video generation has emerged as a versatile tool for autonomous driving, enabling realistic synthesis of traffic scenarios. However, existing methods depend on control signals at inference time to guide the generative model towards temporally consistent generation of dynamic objects, limiting their utility as scalable and generalizable data engines. In this work, we propose Localized Semantic Alignment (LSA), a simple yet effective framework for fine-tuning pre-trained video generation models. LSA enhances temporal consistency by aligning semantic features between ground-truth and generated video clips. Specifically, we compare the output of an off-the-shelf feature extraction model between the ground-truth and generated video clips localized around dynamic objects inducing a semantic feature consistency loss. We fine-tune the base model by combining this loss with the standard diffusion loss. The model fine-tuned for a single epoch with our novel loss outperforms the baselines in common video generation evaluation metrics. To further test the temporal consistency in generated videos we adapt two additional metrics from object detection task, namely mAP and mIoU. Extensive experiments on nuScenes and KITTI datasets show the effectiveness of our approach in enhancing temporal consistency in video generation without the need for external control signals during inference and any computational overheads.