GAP-MLLM: Geometry-Aligned Pre-training for Activating 3D Spatial Perception in Multimodal Large Language Models

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Main Authors: Zhang, Jiaxin, Jiang, Junjun, Li, Haijie, Chen, Youyu, Jiang, Kui, Chen, Dave Zhenyu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Zhang, Jiaxin
Jiang, Junjun
Li, Haijie
Chen, Youyu
Jiang, Kui
Chen, Dave Zhenyu
author_facet Zhang, Jiaxin
Jiang, Junjun
Li, Haijie
Chen, Youyu
Jiang, Kui
Chen, Dave Zhenyu
contents Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate exceptional semantic reasoning but struggle with 3D spatial perception when restricted to pure RGB inputs. Despite leveraging implicit geometric priors from 3D reconstruction models, image-based methods still exhibit a notable performance gap compared to methods using explicit 3D data. We argue that this gap does not arise from insufficient geometric priors, but from a misalignment in the training paradigm: text-dominated fine-tuning fails to activate geometric representations within MLLMs. Existing approaches typically resort to naive feature concatenation and optimize directly for downstream tasks without geometry-specific supervision, leading to suboptimal structural utilization. To address this limitation, we propose GAP-MLLM, a Geometry-Aligned Pre-training paradigm that explicitly activates structural perception before downstream adaptation. Specifically, we introduce a visual-prompted joint task that compels the MLLMs to predict sparse pointmaps alongside semantic labels, thereby enforcing geometric awareness. Furthermore, we design a multi-level progressive fusion module with a token-level gating mechanism, enabling adaptive integration of geometric priors without suppressing semantic reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GAP-MLLM significantly enhances geometric feature fusion and consistently enhances performance across 3D visual grounding, 3D dense captioning, and 3D video object detection tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_16461
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle GAP-MLLM: Geometry-Aligned Pre-training for Activating 3D Spatial Perception in Multimodal Large Language Models
Zhang, Jiaxin
Jiang, Junjun
Li, Haijie
Chen, Youyu
Jiang, Kui
Chen, Dave Zhenyu
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate exceptional semantic reasoning but struggle with 3D spatial perception when restricted to pure RGB inputs. Despite leveraging implicit geometric priors from 3D reconstruction models, image-based methods still exhibit a notable performance gap compared to methods using explicit 3D data. We argue that this gap does not arise from insufficient geometric priors, but from a misalignment in the training paradigm: text-dominated fine-tuning fails to activate geometric representations within MLLMs. Existing approaches typically resort to naive feature concatenation and optimize directly for downstream tasks without geometry-specific supervision, leading to suboptimal structural utilization. To address this limitation, we propose GAP-MLLM, a Geometry-Aligned Pre-training paradigm that explicitly activates structural perception before downstream adaptation. Specifically, we introduce a visual-prompted joint task that compels the MLLMs to predict sparse pointmaps alongside semantic labels, thereby enforcing geometric awareness. Furthermore, we design a multi-level progressive fusion module with a token-level gating mechanism, enabling adaptive integration of geometric priors without suppressing semantic reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GAP-MLLM significantly enhances geometric feature fusion and consistently enhances performance across 3D visual grounding, 3D dense captioning, and 3D video object detection tasks.
title GAP-MLLM: Geometry-Aligned Pre-training for Activating 3D Spatial Perception in Multimodal Large Language Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.16461