Vision & Multimodal Nov 2025 · #18 most cited · 197 citations

SAM 3D: 3Dfy Anything in Images

SAM 3D Team et al.

arXiv:2511.16624

In short

SAM 3D reconstructs an object’s 3D shape, texture and position from a single photo, even in cluttered real-world scenes. Its leap comes from data: a human-and-model annotation loop that produced 3D labels at a new scale, plus synthetic pre-training.

Why it matters

Breaking the 3D data bottleneck makes single-photo 3D practical for real images.

Read first

The 3 Field Guide ideas this paper leans on.

Starting from scratch? The full route 9 ideas · basics first
  1. Machine Learning ✓ understood

    Building systems that learn patterns from data instead of following hand-written rules, getting better at a task as they see more examples.

  2. Neural Network ✓ understood

    A computational model inspired by biological neural networks, consisting of interconnected nodes (neurons) organized in layers that process information through weighted connections.

  3. Deep Learning ✓ understood

    A subset of machine learning that uses neural networks with multiple layers (deep neural networks) to learn hierarchical representations of data.

  4. Computer Vision ✓ understood

    The field of AI that gets computers to extract meaning from images and video: what is in them, where it is, and how it moves.

  5. Depth Estimation ✓ understood

    Predicting distance of objects from the camera using monocular or stereo images.

  6. 3D Reconstruction · read first ✓ understood

    Creating 3D models from 2D images using geometry and deep learning.

  7. Dataset ✓ understood

    A collection of data examples used for training, validating, or testing machine learning models.

  8. Synthetic Data · read first ✓ understood

    Artificially generated data created to augment training sets, protect privacy, or simulate rare scenarios.

  9. Image Generation · read first ✓ understood

    Creating new images from scratch or from text descriptions using generative models (GANs, diffusion models, VAEs).

In the frontier

Rank
#18 of 100
Citations
197
as of Aug 9, 2026
Published
Nov 2025

Topics: 3D and spatial intelligence , Image generation and editing , Data and synthetic generation

Selection: 1kpapers.com by Together AI, most-cited as of Aug 9, 2026

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