3D Visual Grounding (3DVG) localizes objects from natural-language descriptions in 3D scenes and is fundamental to embodied AI applications. Although foundation models enable open-vocabulary reasoning, they typically rely on pre-generated candidates, creating two sequential bottlenecks. The candidate bottleneck occurs when dataset-specific 3D proposal models miss, fragment, or incorrectly group targets under distribution shifts, excluding them from VLM reasoning. The evidence bottleneck stems from incomplete visual evidence: global renderings preserve spatial context but obscure object details, whereas candidate-centric views capture local appearance but lack global context. To address these bottlenecks, we propose UniGround, a zero-shot 3DVG framework that addresses both bottlenecks through Global Candidate Filtering and Contextual Precision Grounding. Global Candidate Filtering constructs topology-consistent, class-agnostic candidates from 3D topology and multi-view semantic cues, without dataset-trained 3D detectors, task-specific proposal supervision, or predefined box and category priors. Contextual Precision Grounding jointly reasons over global spatial context and candidate-centric visual evidence, followed by closed-loop consistency verification for reliable target identification. UniGround achieves 46.1%/34.1% [email protected]/0.5 on ScanRefer and 28.7% [email protected] on the evaluated ARKitScenes subset of EmbodiedScan. Further experiments demonstrate competitive grounding without dataset-specific 3D priors, cross-dataset generalization to unseen indoor scenes, and robustness to real-world reconstruction noise and practical domain shifts.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Overview of UniGround. Top left: Prior methods depend on dataset-specific proposals and limited visual evidence. Bottom left: UniGround combines training-free candidate filtering with contextual precision grounding. Right: Real-world deployment.
Figure 2: Overview of UniGround. Global Candidate Filtering constructs topology-consistent, query-relevant candidates without supervised 3D proposals. Contextual Precision Grounding identifies the referent by integrating global context, candidate-centric evidence, and closed-loop consistency verification.
Method
Agent
Prior
Unique
Multiple
ScanRefer
ES
Rep.
VLM
Box
Cls.
.25
.50
.25
.50
.25
.50
.25
Fully Supervised Learning-Based Methods
ScanRefer Chen et al. [2020]
✗
✗
–
–
67.6
46.2
32.1
21.3
39.0
26.1
12.9
InstanceRefer Yuan et al. [2021]
✗
✗
–
–
77.5
66.8
31.3
24.8
40.2
32.9
–
3DVG-T Zhao et al. [2021]
✗
✗
–
–
77.2
58.5
38.4
28.7
45.9
34.5
–
BUTD-DETR Jain et al. [2022]
✗
✗
–
–
84.2
66.3
46.6
35.1
52.2
39.8
22.1
Table 1: Evaluations of 3DVG on the ScanRefer validation set and a subset of the EmbodiedScan set within ARKitScenes. “ES” denotes EmbodiedScan; .25 and .50 denote [email protected] and [email protected], respectively.
Figure 4: Qualitative comparison on ARKitScenes under domain shift. Purple/green boxes denote incorrect/correct predictions. UniGround improves candidate construction and disambiguation through topology-aware proposals and global–local evidence.
Figure 5: Qualitative results from the real-world indoor case study. UniGround localizes referred targets in previously unseen Conference, Lounge, Office, and Corridor environments under real-capture noise, imperfect reconstruction, and layout shifts.
Figure 6: Sensitivity to the number of candidates retained by Global Candidate Filtering.
Method
Conference
Lounge
Office
Corridor
SeeGround Li et al. [2025b]
2/25
0/25
5/25
0/25
SeqVLM Lin et al. [2025a]
0/25
0/25
3/25
0/25
Ours
10/25
13/25
15/25
5/25
Table 2: Evaluations of 3D visual grounding in four real-world environments.
Appendix figures & tables11 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Component
Setting
Role
Frame sampling
Stride max(1,⌊Nf/1000⌋)
Adapts image processing density to the available RGB sequence.
Geometric initialization
VCCS resolution 0.05 ,m
Forms topology-preserving primitives before instance aggregation.
Progressive aggregation
Five stages; similarity 0.9→0.5
Merges confident fragments early and recovers more complete instances progressively.
Multi-view encoding
10 views; visibility threshold 0.2
Accumulates semantic evidence across observations of an object hypothesis.
Mask prompting
10 rounds; 5 points; 5 crop levels; expansion 0.1
Improves coverage across object scales and partial observations.
Exported visual evidence
3 diverse views per candidate
Supplies compact, object-centric evidence to Stage 2.
Appendix
Table 4: Principal Stage 1 implementation settings. They are fixed for the evaluated scenes and do not require task-specific training.
Module
Prompt Content
Purpose
System Role
You are a helpful assistant designed to identify objects based on images and descriptions.
Defines the VLM as an object-grounding agent.
Visual Inputs
A stitched global render provides scene-level spatial context (IDs and boxes), while stitched candidate images grouped by object ID provide object-centric visual evidence.
Combines global layout cues and local semantic evidence for robust grounding.
Grounding Context
Candidate IDs, target name, anchor name, optional anchor bbox, and each candidate’s 3D center and size are provided.
Defines the grounding search space and explicit spatial metadata.
Decision Protocol
First identify candidates from candidate views, then verify the final target using global spatial relations and 3D coordinates; if ambiguous, resolve via anchor-first spatial reasoning.
Separates semantic identification from spatial verification and improves ambiguity handling.
Ensures deterministic parsing and interpretable reasoning traces.
Appendix
Table 5: Agent definition prompt used in UniGround. The prompt explains visual inputs, grounding context, decision rules, and response constraints for the VLM.
Field
Description
Predicted ID
The final object ID selected as the grounding result.
Explanation
A concise explanation describing the appearance and spatial cues used in the decision.
Candidate Names
Semantic names assigned to all candidate objects, formatted as ID -> short phrase .
Target name matches?
Indicates whether the selected candidate semantically matches the queried target category.
Anchor ID
The anchor object used during spatial reasoning, or unknown if no anchor is used.
Relation used
The spatial relation applied in the final decision (e.g., left of, near, behind).
Appendix
Table 6: Structured output fields used for deterministic parsing of VLM reasoning results.
Example VLM Output (Real Inference Trace)
Query: a window that sits above the dresser cabinet. there is an air conditioner in the window.
Explanation: ID 22 visually shows a window with a window air conditioner installed. In the 3D data it is positioned higher (Z 1.11) and directly above the dresser/radiator cabinet (ID 20, Z 0.49), matching “a window that sits above the dresser cabinet with an air conditioner in it.”
Appendix
Table 7: Example VLM reasoning output in our structured format. This case correctly grounds the query to ID 22.
Figure 7: Examples of global multi-view scene renderings used as scene-level spatial context for the VLM. Each row shows a real grounding case with three candidate-set-centered rendered views from different azimuths. Candidate IDs are overlaid on the scene, the queried anchor is marked in red, and coordinate axes are visualized to support relation-aware reasoning.
Table 8: Comparison on the same 250-task subset used by VLM-Grounder. Both accuracy columns are percentages.
Configuration
Global
Candidate
Structured
Full (Spa.+Sem.+Vis.)
Yes
Yes
Yes
No Global
No
Yes
Yes
No Candidate
Yes
No
Yes
Simple Prompt
Yes
Yes
No
Appendix
Table 9: Implementation mapping of the Stage 2 component ablations. Global denotes the scene render, Candidate denotes candidate-centric RGB, and Structured denotes the full reasoning prompt.
Figure 8: Qualitative comparison of Stage 1 candidate construction across four previously unseen indoor scenes. From top to bottom, each column shows the language instruction, the instance partition and selected proposal from a reference trained 3D-mask front end (purple), and the training-free UniGround partition and retained proposal (green). The examples highlight same-category confusion and small targets that are absorbed into larger supporting objects by the reference proposals, while UniGround exposes target-aligned candidates for downstream grounding.
Candidates
Latency (s)
Tokens
3
30.61
1927.67
5
38.95
5737.66
7
49.09
7200.53
10
59.82
9597.21
Appendix
Table 10: Measured Stage 2 inference cost as the number of retained candidates increases.
Figure 9: Representative real-world grounding outputs from comparison predictions, UniGround, and the annotated targets.
Target Object
Instruction
cardboard box
Locate the cardboard box positioned to the right of the black box .
Identify the cardboard box situated on the right side of the black box .
Look for the cardboard box that is placed immediately to the right of the black box .
Spot the cardboard box sitting adjacent to the right of the black box .
Find the cardboard box located near the right-hand side of the black box .
black office chair
Find the black office chair closest to the door .
Appendix
Table 11: Examples of task instructions for the Office scene in real-world environments. For each target, five diverse natural language queries are provided to evaluate the model’s grounding consistency. Bold text denotes the target object, while underlined text indicates the spatial anchor used for relational reasoning.
3D Visual Grounding (3DVG) is an essential capability for embodied AI, requiring agents to localize objects in 3D scenes based on natural language descriptions. Recent zero-shot methods leverage 2D vision-language models (LVLMs). However, they often rely on existing sets of multi-view images and struggle with the limited semantic and spatial details provided by standard 3D segmentation tools. We present AgentGrounder, a zero-shot 3D visual grounding framework that operates directly on colored point clouds without task-specific 3D training. Our approach follows a two-stage design: (1) an offline stage that applies 3D model to build an Object Lookup Table (OLT) with instance IDs, semantic labels, 3D bounding boxes; and (2) an online tool-driven agent that decomposes each query, retrieves only relevant candidates from the OLT, performs geometric scoring, and triggers image rendering on demand when additional visual evidence (e.g., color, material, or viewpoint-sensitive cues) is required. Compared with fixed anchor-target matching pipelines, this design reduces cascading matching errors and improves context-window efficiency by avoiding prompts overloaded with irrelevant objects. We evaluate on ScanRefer and Nr3D under a zero-shot setting and observe consistent improvements over SeeGround in our setup, including +2.5% [email protected] on ScanRefer and +6.3% on Nr3D, with a notable +6.3% gain on Nr3D view-independent queries. These results show that combining selective retrieval, geometric reasoning, and adaptive visual inspection yields a practical and robust foundation for open-vocabulary 3D grounding. Our code is available at https://github.com/be2rlab/AgentGrounder.
Cuong Huynh, Maxim Popov, Denis Gridusov +1
Biomechatronics and Energy-Efficient Robotics (BE2R) Lab, ITMO University, Saint Petersburg, Russia
Zero-shot 3D Visual Grounding (3DVG) is a critical capability for open-world embodied AI. However, existing methods are fundamentally bottlenecked by the poor quality of open-vocabulary 3D proposals, suffering from inaccurate categories and imprecise geometries, as well as the spatial redundancy of exhaustive multi-view reasoning. To address these challenges, we propose MCM-VG, a novel framework that achieves robust zero-shot 3DVG by explicitly establishing Multiple Consistent 2D-3D Mappings. Instead of passively relying on noisy 3D segments, MCM-VG enforces 2D-3D consistency across three fundamental dimensions to achieve precise target localization and reliable reasoning. First, a Semantic Alignment module corrects category mismatches via LLM-driven query parsing and coarse-to-fine 2D-3D matching. Second, an Instance Rectification module leverages VLM-guided 2D segmentations to reconstruct missing targets, back-projecting these reliable visual priors to establish accurate 3D geometries. Finally, to eliminate spatial redundancy, a Viewpoint Distillation module clusters 3D camera directions to extract optimal frames. By pairing these optimal RGB frames with Bird's Eye View maps into concise visual prompt sets, we formulate the final target disambiguation as a multiple-choice reasoning task for Vision-Language Models. Extensive evaluations on ScanRefer and Nr3D benchmarks demonstrate that MCM-VG sets a new state-of-the-art for zero-shot 3D visual grounding. Remarkably, it achieves 62.0% and 53.6% in [email protected] and [email protected] on ScanRefer, outperforming previous baselines by substantial margins of 6.4% and 4.0%.
Yufei Yin, Jie Zheng, Qianke Meng +7
Hangzhou Dianzi University Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China · Zhejiang University Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China · Alibaba Group Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China
3D Visual Grounding (3DVG) aims to localize target objects in 3D scenes given natural language descriptions. Existing approaches typically perform reasoning over the entire scene, leading to ambiguous predictions and high computational cost, especially in cluttered environments. We observe that many referential expressions rely on local spatial context and often correspond to restricted spatial regions rather than the full scene. Motivated by this insight, we propose PruneGround, an effective plug-and-play framework for 3DVG built upon three key components. First, we introduce Language-Guided Spatial Pruning (LGSP), which leverages a frozen Vision Language Model (VLM) to identify language-relevant regions, thereby reducing spatial computation and grounding candidates in the narrower search space. Second, we propose MultiView-Conditioned Description Reformulation (MCDR), which decomposes complex expressions into simplified target--anchor relations and augments missing spatial cues through multi-view reasoning. Finally, we propose LLM-Grounder, which repurposes a detection-pretrained spatial LLM into a language-conditioned grounding model by aligning point cloud and linguistic representations within the pruned region. Extensive experiments on the three most popular point cloud benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art results on all three ScanRefer settings and on 9 out of 10 Nr3D/Sr3D settings. Code and models are publicly available: https://github.com/leduckhai/PruneGround
Duc Cao Dinh, Khai Le-Duc, Florent Draye +4
Knovel Engineering Lab · University of Toronto · Vector Institute +3