This paper reconsiders intelligence from a vision-centered perspective and examines whether intelligence emerging from visual experience and learning may provide a pathway toward AGI. In the language domain, beginning with the introduction of the Transformer architecture, the GPT series has demonstrated transfer to unseen tasks through autoregressive language modeling on web-scale text combined with aggressive scaling. This raises a natural question, namely, what capabilities and forms of intelligence can emerge from visual modalities such as images, videos, and geometry? In this paper, we discuss whether visual intelligence can serve as a pathway toward AGI, referred to in this paper as visual general intelligence (VGI), by bringing together contributors from diverse standpoints and affiliations. Our aim is not to offer a single definition of visual intelligence, but to clarify the principles that computer vision should pursue in the AGI era, the visual input modalities, the benchmarks, the learning paradigms, and the relationship between vision, when taken as the core, and other modalities such as language.

3D reconstruction and view synthesis are foundational problems in computer vision, graphics, and immersive technologies such as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and digital twins. Traditional methods rely on computationally intensive iterative optimization in a complex chain, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios. Recent advances in feed-forward approaches, driven by deep learning, have revolutionized this field by enabling fast and generalizable 3D reconstruction and view synthesis. This survey offers a comprehensive review of feed-forward techniques for 3D reconstruction and view synthesis, with a taxonomy according to the underlying representation architectures including point cloud, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), etc. We examine key tasks such as pose-free reconstruction, dynamic 3D reconstruction, and 3D-aware image and video synthesis, highlighting their applications in digital humans, SLAM, robotics, and beyond. In addition, we review commonly used datasets with detailed statistics, along with evaluation protocols for various downstream tasks. We conclude by discussing open research challenges and promising directions for future work, emphasizing the potential of feed-forward approaches to advance the state of the art in 3D vision. The project page is available at https://fnzhan.com/projects/Feed-Forward-3D Feed-Forward-3D.

Recent work has shown that neural networks can perform 3D tasks such as Novel View Synthesis (NVS) without explicit 3D reconstruction. Even so, we argue that strong 3D inductive biases are still helpful in the design of such networks. We show this point by introducing LagerNVS, an encoder-decoder neural network for NVS that builds on `3D-aware' latent features. The encoder is initialized from a 3D reconstruction network pre-trained using explicit 3D supervision. This is paired with a lightweight decoder, and trained end-to-end with photometric losses. LagerNVS achieves state-of-the-art deterministic feed-forward Novel View Synthesis (including 31.4 PSNR on Re10k), with and without known cameras, renders in real time, generalizes to in-the-wild data, and can be paired with a diffusion decoder for generative extrapolation.

Streaming 3D reconstruction aims to recover 3D information, such as camera poses and point clouds, from a video stream, which necessitates geometric accuracy, temporal consistency, and computational efficiency. Motivated by the principles of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), we introduce LingBot-Map, a feed-forward 3D foundation model for reconstructing scenes from streaming data, built upon a geometric context transformer (GCT) architecture. A defining aspect of LingBot-Map lies in its carefully designed attention mechanism, which integrates an anchor context, a pose-reference window, and a trajectory memory to address coordinate grounding, dense geometric cues, and long-range drift correction, respectively. This design keeps the streaming state compact while retaining rich geometric context, enabling stable efficient inference at around 20 FPS on 518 x 378 resolution inputs over long sequences exceeding 10,000 frames. Extensive evaluations across a variety of benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance compared to both existing streaming and iterative optimization-based approaches.

The convergence of 3D geometric perception and video synthesis has created an unprecedented demand for large-scale video data that is rich in both semantic and spatio-temporal information. While existing datasets have advanced either 3D understanding or video generation, a significant gap remains in providing a unified resource that supports both domains at scale. To bridge this chasm, we introduce SceneScribe-1M, a new large-scale, multi-modal video dataset. It comprises one million in-the-wild videos, each meticulously annotated with detailed textual descriptions, precise camera parameters, dense depth maps, and consistent 3D point tracks. We demonstrate the versatility and value of SceneScribe-1M by establishing benchmarks across a wide array of downstream tasks, including monocular depth estimation, scene reconstruction, and dynamic point tracking, as well as generative tasks such as text-to-video synthesis, with or without camera control. By open-sourcing SceneScribe-1M, we aim to provide a comprehensive benchmark and a catalyst for research, fostering the development of models that can both perceive the dynamic 3D world and generate controllable, realistic video content.

Novel View Synthesis has often relied on explicit 3D representations, which inject a strong 3D bias in the process; however, recent work has shown that network-based rendering can work better despite lacking 3D inductive biases. In this paper, we show that much better quality can be obtained by leveraging a strong 3D bias without a 3D representation. To do so, we introduce LagerNVS, an encoder-decoder network that uses 3D-aware features as a latent scene encoding. The encoder is initialized from a 3D reconstruction network, paired with a lightweight decoder, and trained end-to-end with photometric losses. LagerNVS achieves state-of-the-art deterministic feed-forward Novel View Synthesis results (including 31.1 PSNR on Re10k), with and without known cameras, renders in real-time, generalizes to in-the-wild data without known cameras, and can be paired with a diffusion decoder for generative completions.

Recent feed-forward reconstruction models, such as VGGT, have proven competitive with traditional optimization-based reconstructors while also providing geometry-aware features useful for other tasks. Here, we show that the quality of these models scales predictably with model and data size. We do so by introducing VGGT-Ω, which substantially improves reconstruction accuracy, efficiency, and capabilities for both static and dynamic scenes. To enable training this model at an unprecedented scale, we introduce architectural changes that improve training efficiency, a high-quality data annotation pipeline that supports dynamic scenes, and a self-supervised learning protocol. We simplify VGGT's architecture by using a single dense prediction head with multi-task supervision and removing the expensive high-resolution convolutional layers. We also use registers to aggregate scene information into a compact representation and introduce register attention, which restricts inter-frame information exchange to these registers, in part replacing global attention. In this way, during training, VGGT-Ω uses only about 30

Modern neural architectures for 3D point cloud processing contain both convolutional layers and attention blocks, but the best way to assemble them remains unclear. We analyse the role of different computational blocks in 3D point cloud networks and find an intuitive behaviour: convolution is adequate to extract low-level geometry at high-resolution in early layers, where attention is expensive without bringing any benefits; attention captures high-level semantics and context in low-resolution, deep layers more efficiently. Guided by this design principle, we propose a new, improved 3D point cloud backbone that employs convolutions in early stages and switches to attention for deeper layers. To avoid the loss of spatial layout information when discarding redundant convolution layers, we introduce a novel, training-free 3D positional encoding, PointROPE. The resulting LitePT model has 3.6× fewer parameters, runs 2× faster, and uses 2× less memory than the state-of-the-art Point Transformer V3, but nonetheless matches or even outperforms it on a range of tasks and datasets.

Most state-of-the-art point trackers are trained on synthetic data due to the difficulty of annotating real videos for this task. However, this can result in suboptimal performance due to the statistical gap between synthetic and real videos. In order to understand these issues better, we introduce CoTracker3, comprising a new tracking model and a new semi-supervised training recipe. This allows real videos without annotations to be used during training by generating pseudo-labels using off-the-shelf teachers. The new model eliminates or simplifies components from previous trackers, resulting in a simpler and often smaller architecture. This training scheme is much simpler than prior work and achieves better results using 1,000 times less data. We further study the scaling behaviour to understand the impact of using more real unsupervised data in point tracking. The model is available in online and offline variants and reliably tracks visible and occluded points.

We present SpatialTrackerV2, a feed-forward 3D point tracking method for monocular videos. Going beyond modular pipelines built on off-the-shelf components for 3D tracking, our approach unifies the intrinsic connections between point tracking, monocular depth, and camera pose estimation into a high-performing and feedforward 3D point tracker. It decomposes world-space 3D motion into scene geometry, camera ego-motion, and pixel-wise object motion, with a fully differentiable and end-to-end architecture, allowing scalable training across a wide range of datasets, including synthetic sequences, posed RGB-D videos, and unlabeled in-the-wild footage. By learning geometry and motion jointly from such heterogeneous data, SpatialTrackerV2 outperforms existing 3D tracking methods by 30

We introduce AutoPartGen, a model that generates objects composed of 3D parts in an autoregressive manner. This model can take as input an image of an object, 2D masks of the object's parts, or an existing 3D object, and generate a corresponding compositional 3D reconstruction. Our approach builds upon 3DShape2VecSet, a recent latent 3D representation with powerful geometric expressiveness. We observe that this latent space exhibits strong compositional properties, making it particularly well-suited for part-based generation tasks. Specifically, AutoPartGen generates object parts autoregressively, predicting one part at a time while conditioning on previously generated parts and additional inputs, such as 2D images, masks, or 3D objects. This process continues until the model decides that all parts have been generated, thus determining automatically the type and number of parts. The resulting parts can be seamlessly assembled into coherent objects or scenes without requiring additional optimization. We evaluate both the overall 3D generation capabilities and the part-level generation quality of AutoPartGen, demonstrating that it achieves state-of-the-art performance in 3D part generation.

Text- or image-to-3D generators and 3D scanners can now produce 3D assets with high-quality shapes and textures, but as single, fused entities lacking meaningful structure. In contrast, most applications and creative workflows require 3D assets to be composed of distinct, meaningful parts that can be independently manipulated. To bridge this gap, we introduce PartGen, a novel approach for generating, from text, images, or unstructured 3D objects, 3D objects composed of meaningful parts. Our method leverages a multi-view diffusion model to extract plausible and view-consistent part segmentations from multiple views of a 3D object, dividing it into meaningful components. A second multi-view diffusion model then processes each part individually, filling in occlusions and generating completed views, which are subsequently passed to a 3D reconstruction network. The completion process ensures that the reconstructed parts integrate cohesively by considering the context of the entire object, compensating for missing information caused by occlusions and, in extreme cases, hallucinating entirely invisible parts based on contextual cues. We evaluate PartGen on both generated and real 3D assets, demonstrating significant improvements over segmentation and part completion baselines. We also showcase downstream applications such as text-guided 3D part editing.

We present FLARE, a feed-forward model designed to infer high-quality camera poses and 3D geometry from uncalibrated sparse-view images (i.e., as few as 2-8 inputs), which is a challenging yet practical setting in real-world applications. Our solution features a cascaded learning paradigm with camera pose serving as the critical bridge, recognizing its essential role in mapping 3D structures onto 2D image planes. Concretely, FLARE starts with camera pose estimation, whose results condition the subsequent learning of geometric structure and appearance, optimized through the objectives of geometry reconstruction and novel-view synthesis. Utilizing large-scale public datasets for training, our method delivers state-of-the-art performance in the tasks of pose estimation, geometry reconstruction, and novel view synthesis, while maintaining the inference efficiency (i.e., less than 0.5 seconds). The project page and code can be found at: https://zhanghe3z.github.io/FLARE/

We introduce Uncommon Objects in 3D (uCO3D), a new object-centric dataset for 3D deep learning and 3D generative AI. uCO3D is the largest publicly-available collection of high-resolution videos of objects with 3D annotations that ensures full-360 coverage. uCO3D is significantly more diverse than MVImgNet and CO3Dv2, covering more than 1,000 object categories. It is also of higher quality, due to extensive quality checks of both the collected videos and the 3D annotations. Similar to analogous datasets, uCO3D contains annotations for 3D camera poses, depth maps and sparse point clouds. In addition, each object is equipped with a caption and a 3D Gaussian Splat reconstruction. We train several large 3D models on MVImgNet, CO3Dv2, and uCO3D and obtain superior results using the latter, showing that uCO3D is better for learning applications.

We present SpatialTrackerV2, a feed-forward 3D point tracking method for monocular videos. Going beyond modular pipelines built on off-the-shelf components for 3D tracking, our approach unifies the intrinsic connections between point tracking, monocular depth, and camera pose estimation into a high-performing and feedforward 3D point tracker. It decomposes world-space 3D motion into scene geometry, camera ego-motion, and pixel-wise object motion, with a fully differentiable and end-to-end architecture, allowing scalable training across a wide range of datasets, including synthetic sequences, posed RGB-D videos, and unlabeled in-the-wild footage. By learning geometry and motion jointly from such heterogeneous data, SpatialTrackerV2 outperforms existing 3D tracking methods by $\mathbf{3 0 \%}$, and matches the accuracy of leading dynamic 3D reconstruction approaches while running $50 \times$ faster.

We present VGGT, a feed-forward neural network that directly infers all key 3D attributes of a scene, including camera parameters, point maps, depth maps, and 3D point tracks, from one, a few, or hundreds of its views. This approach is a step forward in 3D computer vision, where models have typically been constrained to and specialized for single tasks. It is also simple and efficient, reconstructing images in under one second, and still outperforming alternatives that require post-processing with visual geometry optimization techniques. The network achieves state-of-the-art results in multiple 3D tasks, including camera parameter estimation, multi-view depth estimation, dense point cloud reconstruction, and 3D point tracking. We also show that using pretrained VGGT as a feature backbone significantly enhances downstream tasks, such as non-rigid point tracking and feed-forward novel view synthesis. Code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/vggt.

Generating high-quality 3D content from text, single images, or sparse view images remains a challenging task with broad applications.Existing methods typically employ multi-view diffusion models to synthesize multi-view images, followed by a feed-forward process for 3D reconstruction. However, these approaches are often constrained by a small and fixed number of input views, limiting their ability to capture diverse viewpoints and, even worse, leading to suboptimal generation results if the synthesized views are of poor quality.To address these limitations, we propose Flex3D, a novel two-stage framework capable of leveraging an arbitrary number of high-quality input views. The first stage consists of a candidate view generation and curation pipeline. In the second stage, the curated views are fed into a Flexible Reconstruction Model (FlexRM), built upon a transformer architecture that can effectively process an arbitrary number of inputs. Through extensive exploration of design and training strategies, we optimize FlexRM to achieve superior performance in both reconstruction and generation tasks. Our results demonstrate that Flex3D achieves state-of-the-art performance, with a user study winning rate of over 92% in 3D generation tasks when compared to several of the latest feed-forward 3D generative models.

Structure-from-motion (SfM) is a long-standing problem in the computer vision community, which aims to reconstruct the camera poses and 3D structure of a scene from a set of unconstrained 2D images. Classical frameworks solve this problem in an incremental manner by detecting and matching keypoints, registering images, triangulating 3D points, and conducting bundle adjustment. Recent research efforts have predominantly revolved around harnessing the power of deep learning techniques to enhance specific elements (e.g., keypoint matching), but are still based on the original, non-differentiable pipeline. Instead, we propose a new deep pipeline VGGSfM, where each component is fully differentiable and thus can be trained in an end-to-end manner. To this end, we introduce new mechanisms and simplifications. First, we build on recent advances in deep 2D point tracking to extract reliable pixel-accurate tracks, which eliminates the need for chaining pairwise matches. Furthermore, we recover all cameras simultaneously based on the image and track features instead of gradually registering cameras. Finally, we optimise the cameras and triangulate 3D points via a differentiable bundle adjustment layer. We attain state-of-the-art performance on three popular datasets, CO3D, IMC Phototourism, and ETH3D.

We propose a new problem called audio-visual segmentation (AVS), in which the goal is to output a pixel-level map of the object(s) that produce sound at the time of the image frame. To facilitate this research, we construct the first audio-visual segmentation benchmark, i.e., AVSBench, providing pixel-wise annotations for sounding objects in audible videos. It contains three subsets: AVSBench-object (Single-source subset, Multi-sources subset) and AVSBench-semantic (Semantic-labels subset). Accordingly, three settings are studied: 1) semi-supervised audio-visual segmentation with a single sound source; 2) fully-supervised audio-visual segmentation with multiple sound sources, and 3) fully-supervised audio-visual semantic segmentation. The first two settings need to generate binary masks of sounding objects indicating pixels corresponding to the audio, while the third setting further requires generating semantic maps indicating the object category. To deal with these problems, we propose a new baseline method that uses a temporal pixel-wise audio-visual interaction module to inject audio semantics as guidance for the visual segmentation process. We also design a regularization loss to encourage audio-visual mapping during training. Quantitative and qualitative experiments on AVSBench compare our approach to several existing methods for related tasks, demonstrating that the proposed method is promising for building a bridge between the audio and pixel-wise visual semantics. Code is available at https://github.com/OpenNLPLab/AVSBench. Online benchmark is available at http://www.avlbench.opennlplab.cn.