Zero-Shot Depth Completion with Vision-Language Model

Zhiqiang Yan, Yuan Wu, Gim Hee Lee; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026, pp. 19833-19843

Vision language models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success in semantic understanding tasks under language guidance, yet their potential for geometric perception remains largely underexplored. This paper introduces the first VLM-based depth completion framework. With almost no architectural modifications, we propose a sparse depth injection mechanism that extends the capability of VLM toward 3D perception through three key aspects: visual tokenization, textual prompt, and textual supervision. At the visual input side, sparse depth is tokenized to provide absolute scale and accurate geometric cues, alleviating the scale and camera ambiguities of RGB-only inputs. At the textual input side, a binary mask derived from sparse depth serves as a prompt, instructing the model where to complete and where to preserve. At the supervision side, the model is fine-tuned using text labels generated from sparse depth, requiring no ground-truth depth. Benefiting from the strong semantic priors and cross-modal expressiveness of VLM, our framework achieves superior zero-shot performance across diverse sensors, sparsity levels, and scenes.