Accurate open-vocabulary 3D scene understanding requires semantic representations that are both language-aligned and spatially precise at the pixel level, while remaining scalable when lifted to 3D space. However, existing representations struggle to jointly satisfy these requirements, and densely propagating pixel-wise semantics to 3D often results in substantial redundancy, leading to inefficient storage and querying in large-scale scenes. To address these challenges, we present \emph{PLAF}, a Pixel-wise Language-Aligned Feature extraction framework that enables dense and accurate semantic alignment in 2D without sacrificing open-vocabulary expressiveness. Building upon this representation, we further design an efficient semantic storage and querying scheme that significantly reduces redundancy across both 2D and 3D domains. Experimental results show that \emph{PLAF} provides a strong semantic foundation for accurate and efficient open-vocabulary 3D scene understanding. The codes are publicly available at https://github.com/RockWenJJ/PLAF.
@article{arxiv.2604.15770,
title = {PLAF: Pixel-wise Language-Aligned Feature Extraction for Efficient 3D Scene Understanding},
author = {Junjie Wen and Junlin He and Fei Ma and Jinqiang Cui},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.15770},
year = {2026}
}