SceneForge: Enhancing 3D-text alignment with Structured Scene Compositions

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, even in 3D-text contrastive learning. We introduce SCENEFORGE, a novel framework that enhances contrastive alignment between 3D point clouds and text through structured multi-object scene compositions. SCENEFORGE leverages individual 3D shapes to construct multiobject scenes with explicit spatial relations, pairing them with coherent multi-object descriptions refined by a large language model. By augmenting contrastive training with these structured, compositional samples, SCENEFORGE effectively addresses the scarcity of large-scale 3D-text datasets, significantly enriching data complexity and diversity. We systematically investigate critical design elements, such as the optimal number of objects per scene, the proportion of compositional samples in training batches, and scene construction strategies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SCENEFORGE delivers substantial performance gains across multiple tasks, including zero-shot classification on ModelNet, ScanObjNN, Objaverse-LVIS, and ScanNet, as well as few-shot part segmentation on ShapeNetPart. SCENEFORGE's compositional augmentations are model-agnostic, consistently improving performance across multiple encoder architectures. Moreover, SCENEFORGE improves 3D visual question answering on ScanQA, generalizes robustly to retrieval scenarios with increasing scene complexity, and showcases spatial reasoning capabilities by adapting spatial configurations to align precisely with textual instructions.