ConceptPose: Training-Free Zero-Shot Object Pose Estimation
using Concept Vectors


CVPR 2026
Liming Kuang1,2
Yordanka Velikova1,2
Mahdi Saleh1
Jan-Nico Zaech3
Danda Pani Paudel3
Benjamin Busam1,2,4
1Technical University of Munich
2Munich Center for Machine Learning
3INSAIT, Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski"
43dwe.ai

[Paper]
[Code]
[BibTeX]

TL;DR: We tag every 3D point with a concept vector — a semantic descriptor obtained from VLM saliency maps. By matching these vectors between an anchor and a query view, we estimate relative object pose without any training or object-specific models.


Abstract

Object pose estimation is a fundamental task in computer vision and robotics, yet most methods require extensive, dataset-specific training. Concurrently, large-scale vision language models show remarkable zero-shot capabilities. In this work, we bridge these two worlds by introducing ConceptPose, a framework for object pose estimation that is both training-free and model-free. ConceptPose leverages a vision-language-model (VLM) to create open-vocabulary 3D concept maps, where each point is tagged with a concept vector derived from saliency maps. By establishing robust 3D-3D correspondences across concept maps, our approach allows precise estimation of 6DoF relative pose. Without any object or dataset-specific training, our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on common zero-shot relative pose estimation benchmarks, significantly outperforming existing methods by over 62% in ADD(-S) score, including those that utilize extensive dataset-specific training.


Method


Overview of ConceptPose. Given an object, an LLM generates semantic concepts describing its visual parts and features. A VLM then produces GradCAM saliency maps for each concept across multiple views, which are back-projected into 3D to form concept vectors for each point. By matching these concept vectors between the reference model and the target observation, we establish robust 3D-3D correspondences that enable accurate 6DoF pose estimation via RANSAC.


Qualitative Results


Qualitative results of ConceptPose across multiple benchmarks. Our method produces accurate pose estimates on diverse objects without any dataset-specific training.


Quantitative Results

Relative pose estimation performance comparison on REAL275, Toyota-Light, YCB-Video, and LINEMOD. We report ADD(-S) and BOP AR scores. The (%) improvement over the strongest baseline is shown in the last row. TF indicates training-free methods. Average columns marked with † denote averages over only REAL275 and TYOL for fair comparison with Any6D and One2Any, which were not evaluated on YCB-Video and LINEMOD.

Method TF REAL275 Toyota-Light YCB-Video LINEMOD Average
ADD(-S) BOP AR ADD(-S) BOP AR ADD(-S) BOP AR ADD(-S) BOP AR ADD(-S) BOP AR
SIFT ✗ 21.6 38.8 16.5 32.4 13.9 19.3 10.8 18.7 15.7 27.3
ObjectMatch ✗ 13.4 26.0 5.4 9.8 3.7 6.0 11.1 12.2 8.4 13.5
Oryon ✗ 34.9 46.5 22.9 34.1 12.8 19.4 20.4 25.3 22.8 31.3
Horyon ✗ 51.6 57.9 25.1 33.0 22.6 28.6 27.6 34.4 31.7 38.5
Any6D ✗ 53.5 51.0 32.2 43.3 -- -- -- -- (42.9†) (47.2†)
One2Any ✗ 41.0 54.9 34.6 42.0 -- -- -- -- (37.8†) (48.5†)
Ours ✓ 71.5 60.4 55.0 51.6 41.2 32.8 38.6 31.0 51.6 (63.3†) 44.0 (56.0†)
Δ(%) +33.6% +4.3% +59.0% +19.2% +82.3% +14.7% +39.9% -9.9% +62.8% +14.3%


Citation

If you find our work useful, please consider citing:

@inproceedings{kuang2026conceptpose,
    title={ConceptPose: Training-Free Zero-Shot Object Pose Estimation using Concept Vectors},
    author={Kuang, Liming and Velikova, Yordanka and Saleh, Mahdi and Zaech, Jan-Nico and Paudel, Danda Pani and Busam, Benjamin},
    booktitle={IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    year={2026}
}


Template adapted from source.