3D-MoE: Towards Spatial Intelligence with Mixture-of-Experts for 3D Reasoning and Action Generation

Yueen Ma, Zenglin Xu, Irwin King


Abstract
Spatial intelligence, encompassing 3D perception and reasoning, is the essential next frontier of AI. Scaling current 3D vision-language models (VLMs) that rely on dense Transformers for spatial tasks incurs prohibitive computational costs. In this paper, we introduce 3D-MoE, a 3D VLM leveraging an efficient mixture-of-experts architecture with a modality- and spatial-context-aware probabilistic routing scheme, stably cultivated by a novel routing curriculum. To seamlessly extend 3D-MoE to embodied AI, we integrate a diffusion-based action head, Pose-DiT, transforming 3D-MoE into a 3D vision-language-action (VLA) model. By employing a rectified flow framework, Pose-DiT generates precise 6D pose actions in a single sampling step. Extensive experiments demonstrate that 3D-MoE achieves superior performance on diverse 3D vision-language benchmarks with drastically fewer activated parameters and yields higher success rates while enabling real-time inference for robot manipulation tasks.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-main.1301
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
29624–29643
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1301/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yueen Ma, Zenglin Xu, and Irwin King. 2026. 3D-MoE: Towards Spatial Intelligence with Mixture-of-Experts for 3D Reasoning and Action Generation. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 29624–29643, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
3D-MoE: Towards Spatial Intelligence with Mixture-of-Experts for 3D Reasoning and Action Generation (Ma et al., EMNLP 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1301.pdf