LLaNA: Large Language and NeRF Assistant
Authors: name: Andrea Amaduzzi, name: Pierluigi Zama Ramirez, name: Giuseppe Lisanti, name: Samuele Salti, name: Luigi Di Stefano

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated an excellent
understanding of images and 3D data. However, both modalities have shortcomings
in holistically capturing the appearance and geometry of objects. Meanwhile,
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs), which encode information within the weights of
a simple Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), have emerged as an increasingly
widespread modality that simultaneously encodes the geometry and photorealistic
appearance of objects. This paper investigates the feasibility and
effectiveness of ingesting NeRF into MLLM. We create LLaNA, the first
general-purpose NeRF-language assistant capable of performing new tasks such as
NeRF captioning and Q\&A. Notably, our method directly processes the weights of
the NeRF's MLP to extract information about the represented objects without the
need to render images or materialize 3D data structures. Moreover, we build a
dataset of NeRFs with text annotations for various NeRF-language tasks with no
human intervention. Based on this dataset, we develop a benchmark to evaluate
the NeRF understanding capability of our method. Results show that processing
NeRF weights performs favourably against extracting 2D or 3D representations
from NeRFs.