Annotation-Free Furniture Codes: What They Encode, and How Far They Transfer
Layout-based 3D scene synthesizers place each object using two human-annotated channels: a categorical class label and a canonical-pose convention. We ask whether a single self-supervised token derived from object geometry can replace both, and study such tokens directly as a representation, decoupled from any synthesizer. A Finite Scalar Quantization (FSQ) point-cloud autoencoder is chamfer-trained on placed 3D-FUTURE furniture with no labels or pose annotations. Diagnostic probes recover fine-category (62.6 +/- 0.5%), super-category (85.6 +/- 1.3%), and yaw (52.7 +/- 0.5 deg) from the codes alone. Swapping the chamfer target from the rotated to the un-rotated point cloud collapses the yaw signal while raising class recovery, showing the codes'rotation content can be set by the training objective. Scaling across asset libraries needs codes that transfer; on an unseen dataset (ShapeNet), alignment is category-dependent: box-like furniture transfers, organically-shaped furniture does not, and a target-blind augmentation partly closes the gap.