SNOW: Spatio-Temporal Scene Understanding with World Knowledge for Open-World Embodied Reasoning

Abstract

Autonomous robotic systems require spatio-temporal understanding of dynamic environments to ensure reliable navigation and interaction. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) provide open-world semantic priors, they lack grounding in 3D geometry and temporal dynamics. Conversely, geometric perception captures structure and motion but remains semantically sparse. We propose SNOW (Scene Understanding with Open-World Knowledge), a training-free and backbone-agnostic framework for unified 4D scene understanding that integrates VLM-derived semantics with point cloud geometry and temporal consistency. SNOW processes synchronized RGB images and 3D point clouds, using HDBSCAN clustering to generate object-level proposals that guide SAM2-based segmentation. Each segmented region is encoded through our proposed Spatio-Temporal Tokenized Patch Encoding (STEP), producing multimodal tokens that capture localized semantic, geometric, and temporal attributes. These tokens are incrementally integrated into a 4D Scene Graph (4DSG), which serves as 4D prior for downstream reasoning. A lightweight SLAM backend anchors all STEP tokens spatially in the environment, providing the global reference alignment, and ensuring unambiguous spatial grounding across time. The resulting 4DSG forms a queryable, unified world model through which VLMs can directly interpret spatial scene structure and temporal dynamics. Experiments on a diverse set of benchmarks demonstrate that SNOW enables precise 4D scene understanding and spatially grounded inference, thereby setting new state-of-the-art performance in several settings, highlighting the importance of structured 4D priors for embodied reasoning and autonomous robotics.