Struct-Align: Zero-Shot Text-to-3D Scene Retrieval via Locality-Aware Structural Alignment
Abstract
Text-to-3D Scene Retrieval (T3SR) aims to retrieve 3D scenes that match users' linguistic queries, enabling intuitive access to 3D scene repositories. Existing approaches rely on joint embedding learning with large amounts of paired text–scene data, which is expensive to collect and often fails to generalize under open-vocabulary queries and diverse scene distributions. In this paper, we propose Struct-Align, a foundation-model-driven framework for zero-shot T3SR that eliminates the need for paired training data. Our key insight is to reformulate T3SR as a single-modality structural alignment problem by converting both 3D scenes and textual queries into a shared, schema-aligned textual representation compatible with pretrained text embedding models. To reliably derive such representations from complex 3D environments, we introduce a role-decomposed scene structuring pipeline that mitigates generative instability and produces semantically consistent scene depictions. To address the inherent semantic asymmetry between query and scene representations, we further propose a locality-aware structural matching strategy that explicitly localizes query intent and performs instance- and relation-level alignment within query-relevant substructures. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that Struct-Align outperforms both training-based and zero-shot baselines while exhibiting strong robustness to domain shift.
Assigned reviewers
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jianfeng Dong | 71 | 100 PRVR: Partially Relevant Video Retrieval (2026) Video and Moment Retrieval 100 FeatInter: Exploring fine-grained object features for video-text retrieval (2022) Video and Moment Retrieval 100 Rethinking Video Sentence Grounding From a Tracking Perspective With Memory Network and Masked Attention (2024) Video and Moment Retrieval |
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| 2 | Huaiwen Zhang | 47 | 100 Sequence-Event Semantic Consistent Learning for Text-to-Motion Retrieval (2025) Video and Moment Retrieval 100 Hierarchical Semantics Alignment for 3D Human Motion Retrieval (2024) Video and Moment Retrieval 100 Robust Video-Text Retrieval Via Noisy Pair Calibration (2023) Video and Moment Retrieval |
Area chair
| Area chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Xun Yang 0001 | 50 |
Area-chair candidates (5)
| Xun Yang 0001 assigned | 50 | 4 papers | |
| Xiaoye Qu | 49 | 15 papers | |
| Hongjin Qian | 33 | 12 papers | |
| Chenyan Xiong | 33 | 15 papers | |
| Kam-Fai Wong | 32 | 6 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jianfeng Dong assigned | 71 | 3 | 100 PRVR: Partially Relevant Video Retrieval (2026) Video and Moment Retrieval 100 FeatInter: Exploring fine-grained object features for video-text retrieval (2022) Video and Moment Retrieval |
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| 2 | Linchao Zhu | 64 | 3 | 100 ActBERT: Learning Global-Local Video-Text Representations (2020) Video and Moment Retrieval 100 Align and Tell: Boosting Text-Video Retrieval With Local Alignment and Fine-Grained Supervision (2023) Video and Moment Retrieval |
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| 5 | Huaiwen Zhang assigned | 47 | 3 | 100 Sequence-Event Semantic Consistent Learning for Text-to-Motion Retrieval (2025) Video and Moment Retrieval 100 Hierarchical Semantics Alignment for 3D Human Motion Retrieval (2024) Video and Moment Retrieval |
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| 6 | Zhe Xu 0009 | 46 | 3 | 100 HiSA: Hierarchically Semantic Associating for Video Temporal Grounding (2022) Video and Moment Retrieval 100 Point-Supervised Video Temporal Grounding (2023) Video and Moment Retrieval |
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| 7 | Haokun Wen | 41 | 3 | 45 A Comprehensive Survey on Composed Image Retrieval (2026) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval 45 Fine-grained Textual Inversion Network for Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval (2024) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval |
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| 8 | Haiyang Xu 0001 | 41 | 3 | 100 Learning Semantics-Grounded Vocabulary Representation for Video-Text Retrieval (2023) Video and Moment Retrieval 100 Unifying Latent and Lexicon Representations for Effective Video-Text Retrieval (2024) Video and Moment Retrieval |
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| 9 | Junjie Zhou 0001 | 39 | 3 | 100 MomentSeeker: A Task-Oriented Benchmark For Long-Video Moment Retrieval (2025) Video and Moment Retrieval 46 Video-XL: Extra-Long Vision Language Model for Hour-Scale Video Understanding (2025) Video and Temporal Understanding |
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| 10 | Jinpeng Wang 0002 | 37 | 3 | 100 Enhancing Partially Relevant Video Retrieval with Hyperbolic Learning (2025) Video and Moment Retrieval 45 Heterogeneous Uncertainty-Guided Composed Image Retrieval with Fine-Grained Probabilistic Learning (2026) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval |
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| 11 | Jian Lang | 37 | 3 | 45 Generative Thinking, Corrective Action: User-Friendly Composed Image Retrieval via Automatic Multi-Agent Collaboration (2025) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval 45 Echoes in the Feed: Evolution-aware Prompt-augmented Micro-video Popularity Prediction (2025) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval |
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| 12 | Zheng Zhang 0006 | 37 | 3 | 37 Enhancing Cross-Modal Retrieval via Visual-Textual Prompt Hashing (2024) Cross-Modal Hashing and Quantization 37 From Sparse to Dense: Semantic Graph Evolutionary Hashing for Unsupervised Cross-Modal Retrieval (2022) Cross-Modal Hashing and Quantization |
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| 13 | Minghui Fang 0002 | 36 | 3 | 45 Multimodal Conditional Retrieval with High Controllability (2025) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval 45 CART: A Generative Cross-Modal Retrieval Framework With Coarse-To-Fine Semantic Modeling (2025) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval |
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| 14 | Liwei Wang 0009 | 36 | 3 | 46 AIM: Adaptive Inference of Multi-Modal LLMs via Token Merging and Pruning (2025) Video and Temporal Understanding 45 Learning Deep Structure-Preserving Image-Text Embeddings (2016) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval |
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| 15 | Sheng-Chieh Lin | 35 | 3 | 42 Contextualized Query Embeddings for Conversational Search (2021) Conversational Search and Retrieval 41 Multi-Stage Conversational Passage Retrieval: An Approach to Fusing Term Importance Estimation and Neural Query Rewriting (2021) Conversational Search and Retrieval |
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| 16 | Meiyu Liang | 35 | 3 | 45 Knowledge Graph Enhanced Multimodal Transformer for Image-Text Retrieval (2024) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval 45 Dynamic Self-adaptive Multiscale Distillation from Pre-trained Multimodal Large Model for Efficient Cross-modal Retrieval (2025) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval |
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| 17 | Navve Wasserman | 34 | 3 | 40 REAL-MM-RAG: A Real-World Multi-Modal Retrieval Benchmark (2025) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval 40 DocReRank: Single-Page Hard Negative Query Generation for Training Multi-Modal RAG Rerankers (2025) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval |
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| 18 | Zihao Yue | 34 | 3 | 39 OpenMMEgo: Enhancing Egocentric Understanding for LMMs with Open Weights and Data (2025) Video and Temporal Understanding 39 Movie101v2: Improved Movie Narration Benchmark (2025) Video and Temporal Understanding |
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| 21 | Fengling Li 0001 | 33 | 3 | 37 Noise-Robust Generative Hashing for Cross-Modal Retrieval (2026) Cross-Modal Hashing and Quantization 37 One for more: Structured Multi-Modal Hashing for multiple multimedia retrieval tasks (2023) Cross-Modal Hashing and Quantization |
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| 22 | Xueguang Ma | 33 | 3 | 38 PromptReps: Prompting Large Language Models to Generate Dense and Sparse Representations for Zero-Shot Document Retrieval (2024) Text Embedding and Representation Learning 36 R2LLMs: Retrieval and Ranking with LLMs (2025) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking |
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| 23 | Xiao Wang 0043 | 33 | 3 | 37 Improving zero-shot retrieval using dense external expansion (2022) Query Reformulation and Expansion 34 Neural Pseudo-Relevance Feedback Models for Sparse and Dense Retrieval (2022) Query Reformulation and Expansion |
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| 24 | Yanzhao Zhang | 33 | 3 | 45 Rethinking Composed Image Retrieval Evaluation: A Fine-Grained Benchmark from Image Editing (2026) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval 45 Towards Text-Image Interleaved Retrieval (2025) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval |
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| 25 | Shengyao Zhuang | 33 | 3 | 47 Embark on DenseQuest: A System for Selecting the Best Dense Retriever for a Custom Collection (2024) Zero-Shot and Domain Generalization for Retrieval 37 Leveraging LLMs for Unsupervised Dense Retriever Ranking (2024) Query Performance Prediction |
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| 26 | Huiqiang Jiang | 32 | 3 | 45 Attentive Mask CLIP (2023) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval 45 SeCom: On Memory Construction and Retrieval for Personalized Conversational Agents (2025) Conversational Search and Retrieval |
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| 27 | Ruqing Zhang 0001 | 32 | 3 | 35 CorpusBrain: Pre-train a Generative Retrieval Model for Knowledge-Intensive Language Tasks (2022) Generative Retrieval 35 Generative Retrieval Meets Multi-Graded Relevance (2024) Generative Retrieval |
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| 29 | Xinyu Ma 0001 | 31 | 3 | 37 Pre-training with Aspect-Content Text Mutual Prediction for Multi-Aspect Dense Retrieval (2023) Sparse and Dense Retrieval Encoders 35 Replication and Exploration of Generative Retrieval over Dynamic Corpora (2025) Generative Retrieval |
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| 30 | Antonio Mallia | 31 | 3 | 34 Improved Learned Sparse Retrieval with Corpus-Specific Vocabularies (2024) Learned Sparse Retrieval Efficiency 34 Learning Passage Impacts for Inverted Indexes (2021) Learned Sparse Retrieval Efficiency |
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| 31 | Xinying Qian | 31 | 3 | 45 Hyperbolic Multimodal Generative Representation Learning for Generalized Zero-Shot Multimodal Information Extraction (2026) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval 45 SMIR: Span-based multi-grained information refinement for joint multimodal entity-relation extraction (2026) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval |
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| 32 | Tingyu Song | 31 | 3 | 40 Rethinking Composed Image Retrieval Evaluation: A Fine-Grained Benchmark from Image Editing (2026) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval 39 VF-Eval: Evaluating Multimodal LLMs for Generating Feedback on AIGC Videos (2025) Video and Temporal Understanding |
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| 33 | Negar Arabzadeh | 30 | 3 | 34 Enhanced Retrieval Effectiveness through Selective Query Generation (2024) Query Reformulation and Expansion 34 ReFormeR: Learning and Applying Explicit Query Reformulation Patterns (2026) Query Reformulation and Expansion |
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| 34 | Jingtao Zhan | 30 | 3 | 42 Combining Multiple Supervision for Robust Zero-Shot Dense Retrieval (2024) Sparse and Dense Retrieval Encoders 35 Scaling Laws For Dense Retrieval (2024) Sparse and Dense Retrieval Encoders |
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| 35 | Peitian Zhang | 30 | 3 | 46 Video-XL: Extra-Long Vision Language Model for Hour-Scale Video Understanding (2025) Video and Temporal Understanding 36 INTERS: Unlocking the Power of Large Language Models in Search with Instruction Tuning (2024) LLM-Based Reranking |