Map2SLAM: From Streaming Map Prediction to Real-Time SLAM

Jian Gao, Lin-Zhuo Chen, Yihang Chen, Jiagang Chen, Jiacheng Dong +4

Streaming 3D foundation models (3DFMs) estimate camera poses and dense geometry online, but they fall short of SLAM: their predictions are fixed once emitted, so loop closures cannot correct accumulated drift. With such models already providing strong geometric capability, a central question for SLAM becomes how to schedule their inference and how to keep its results as revisable state. We present Map2SLAM, which keeps LingBot-Map frozen, trains only a lightweight retrieval head, and builds SLAM on the model's inference interface, turning its predictions into observations of an external persistent SLAM state. The front-end tracks every incoming frame with the model's causal streaming inference and decides which frames are written to the persistent state as keyframes. The back-end asynchronously decides when and which past frames to re-observe, re-running the model's joint inference over them with fresh context; verified loop observations correct the trajectory online, and segment observations refine dense geometry after the sequence. All invocations share a single frame encoder pass per image, whose cached features also drive loop retrieval, so frequent re-invocation incurs no…