cs.CVApr 23, 2026

Do MLLMs Understand Pointing? Benchmarking and Enhancing Referential Reasoning in Egocentric Vision

Authors: Chentao Li, Zirui Gao, Mingze Gao, Yinglian Ren, Jianjiang Feng, Jie Zhou

Organizations: Department of Automation, Tsinghua University · Academy of Art & Design, Tsinghua University

Abstract

Egocentric AI agents, such as smart glasses, rely on pointing gestures to resolve referential ambiguities in natural language commands. However, despite advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), current systems often fail to precisely ground the spatial semantics of pointing. Instead, they rely on spurious correlations with visual proximity or object saliency, a phenomenon we term "Referential Hallucination." To address this gap, we introduce EgoPoint-Bench, a comprehensive question-answering benchmark designed to evaluate and enhance multimodal pointing reasoning in egocentric views. Comprising over 11k high-fidelity simulated and real-world samples, the benchmark spans five evaluation dimensions and three levels of referential complexity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that while state-of-the-art proprietary and open-source models struggle with egocentric pointing, models fine-tuned on our synthetic data achieve significant performance gains and robust sim-to-real generalization. This work highlights the importance of spatially aware supervision and offers a scalable path toward precise egocentric AI assistants. Project page: https://guyyyug.github.io/EgoPoint-Bench/

Explore similar work

Jun 23, 2026cs.CV

PointVG-R: Internalizing Geometric Reasoning in MLLMs for Precise Pointing Localization via Visual Chain of Thought

Pointing-based visual grounding requires models to precisely locate target objects by deciphering complex spatial relationships between the visual scene and pointing gestures. Traditional methods typically encode input images into static feature representations and perform reasoning primarily within the linguistic domain, often overlooking the rich perceptual cues and explicit spatial geometry inherent in images. In this study, we aim to mitigate the cognitive vulnerability of models in interpreting gestural spatial relations by proposing PointVG-R, a reasoning-guided Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM). PointVG-R introduces geometric-aware reasoning for pointing-based grounding, enabling the model to think with images through the strategic integration of Reinforcement Learning (RL) and cold-start data. Specifically, we design a novel geometric reasoning pipeline that simulates the iterative cognitive process humans employ when interpreting pointing gestures. Furthermore, we construct EgoPoint-CoT, a high-quality visual Chain-of-Thought (CoT) dataset featuring detailed reasoning trajectories to guide the model via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and RL. To address the varying quality of learning signals encountered during training, we further propose an Adaptive Importance Weighting strategy based on Group Variance, which dynamically adjusts reward signals to optimize the learning process. Experimental results demonstrate that PointVG-R achieves SOTA performance, outperforming the baseline by 15.86\textbf{15.86} points in mIoU. Extensive ablation studies further validate the efficacy of our proposed modules. Code: https://github.com/lingli1724/PointVG-R.
Ling Li, Bowen Liu, Zinuo Zhan +5
Jun 29, 2026cs.CV

Efficient Visual Pointing for Embodied AI:Agent-Driven Data Synthesis, Cross-Block Attention, and Iterative Correction

Visual pointing maps a language instruction to pixel co ordinates, a core skill for embodied AI. We describe our PointArena 2026 solution, which achieves 77.2% overall accuracy and ranks second on the benchmark. The ap proach targets three failure modes. First, agent-driven syn thesis builds large semantic and anchor-relative candidate pools; the server inventory contains 55,372 processed out puts, 53,772 de-duplicated sample IDs, and 37,574 train able completed or accepted rows. Second, a determinis tic steerable-data pipeline creates a verified 10,000-sample main set, plus reserve samples, using masks, templates, and path verification. Third, two model-side modules address complementary errors: AttnRes adds gated cross-block at tention for steerability, while ABC correction encodes per turbed coordinates with visual features for general coordi nate grounding. Category-aware routing combines comple mentary specialists; local validation used to select experts records 93.9% Affordance, 82.6% Spatial Relation, 78.2% Reasoning, 70.4% Counting, and 63.0% Steerability.
Zijian Hong, Qi Lv, Yuxiang Xie +4
May 23, 2026cs.CV

EgoProx: Evaluating MLLMs on Egocentric 3D Proximity Reasoning Across a Cognitive Hierarchy

Humans constantly reason about 3D proximity, the relations between their body and surrounding objects, to guide perception and action in daily life. Whether multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can perform such embodied 3D reasoning remains unclear. To this end, we introduce EgoProx, a benchmark for egocentric 3D proximity reasoning. We organize our tasks along a cognitive chain, covering intention, exploration, exploitation, and chain-of-actions reasoning. We also design an agent based data engine that produces diverse and consistent QA pairs at scale. We benchmark prevailing MLLMs on EgoProx and conduct additional analyses with dataset specific and task specific instruction tuning. We observe large cross-domain gains, indicating that current MLLMs contain some spatial knowledge; however, they still struggle to effectively leverage it for spatial reasoning VQA.
Jinzhao Li, Yinuo Chen, Dongxu Piao +9