EgoAlign: Situated 3D Understanding without Situation Descriptions

Abstract

Situated 3D Question Answering requires models to interpret a 3D scene relative to an agent's pose. Existing methods commonly convey that pose through a natural-language situation description, which may be unavailable or costly to obtain in real-world deployments. While some methods additionally incorporate numerical pose, we find that randomly shuffling the agent pose causes little performance degradation, indicating limited functional dependence on the numerical pose. To address this gap, we introduce EgoAlign, a simple 3D language model that represents a scene in an agent-centric coordinate frame, together with a dedicated egocentric alignment stage comprising four complementary tasks: object category recognition, egocentric direction prediction, metric distance estimation, and spatial relation prediction. This stage teaches the model to consistently interpret scene geometry relative to the agent's pose before task-specific fine-tuning. EgoAlign achieves the strongest performance on SQA3D, Real-3DQA, and MSQA among compared methods while remaining highly efficient. More importantly, removing textual situation descriptions yields comparable or better downstream performance, whereas shuffling EgoAlign's numerical pose causes substantial degradation. These results show that EgoAlign establishes agent-centric spatial context directly from numerical pose without requiring textual situation descriptions.