Spatially-aware Weights Tokenization for NeRF-Language Models

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) are neural networks – typically multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) – that represent the geometry and appearance of objects, with applications in vision, graphics, and robotics. Recent works propose understanding NeRFs with natural language using Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) that directly process the weights of a NeRF’s MLP. However, these approaches rely on a global representation of the input object, making them unsuitable for spatial reasoning and fine-grained understanding. In contrast, we propose weights2space, a self-supervised framework featuring a novel meta-encoder that can compute a sequence of spatial tokens directly from the weights of a NeRF. Leveraging this representation, we build Spatial LLaNA, a novel MLLM for NeRFs, capable of understanding details and spatial relationships in objects represented as NeRFs. We evaluate Spatial LLaNA on NeRF captioning and NeRF Q&A tasks, using both existing benchmarks and our novel Spatial ObjaNeRF dataset consisting of 100 manually-curated language annotations for NeRFs. This dataset features 3D models and descriptions that challenge the spatial reasoning capability of MLLMs. Spatial LLaNA outperforms existing approaches across all tasks.