Zero-shot 3D Question Answering via Voxel-based Dynamic Token Compression

Recent advancements in 3D Large Multi-modal Models (3D-LMMs) have driven significant progress in 3D question answering. However, recent multi-frame Vision-Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate superior performance compared to 3D-LMMs on 3D question answering tasks, largely due to the greater scale and diversity of available 2D image data in contrast to the more limited 3D data. Multi-frame VLMs, although achieving superior performance, suffer from the difficulty of retaining all the detailed visual information in the 3D scene while limiting the number of visual tokens. Common methods such as token pooling, reduce visual token usage but often lead to information loss, impairing the model’s ability to preserve visual details essential for 3D question answering tasks. To address this, we propose voxel-based Dynamic Token Compression (DTC), which combines 3D spatial priors and visual semantics to achieve over 90% reduction in visual tokens usage for current multi-frame VLMs. Our method maintains performance comparable to state-of-the-art models on 3D question answering benchmarks including OpenEQA and ScanQA, demonstrating its effectiveness.