GuideGround: VLM-guided Semantic Understanding and Viewpoint-aware Reasoning for 3D Visual Grounding

3D Visual Grounding (3DVG) is a critical bridge from vision-language perception to robotics, requiring both language understanding and 3D scene reasoning. Traditional supervised models leverage explicit 3D geometry but exhibit limited generalization, owing to the scarcity of 3D vision-language datasets and the limited reasoning capabilities compared to modern vision-language models (VLMs). We propose a generalizable 3DVG framework, PanoGrounder, that couples multi-modal panoramic representation with pretrained 2D VLMs for strong vision-language reasoning. Panoramic renderings, augmented with 3D semantic and geometric features, serve as an intermediate representation between 2D and 3D, and offer two major benefits: (i) they can be directly fed to VLMs with minimal adaptation and (ii) they retain long-range object-to-object relations thanks to their 360-degree field of view. We devise a three-stage pipeline that places a compact set of panoramic viewpoints considering the scene layout and geometry, grounds a text query on each panoramic rendering with a VLM, and fuses per-view predictions into a single 3D bounding box via lifting. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on ScanRefer and Nr3D, and demonstrates strong generalization to unseen 3D datasets and text rephrasings.

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

We present GR3D, a spatial vision language model equipped with three complementary grounding capabilities--explicit 2D grounding, implicit 2D grounding, and monocular 3D grounding--within a single framework. GR3D introduces an implicit grounding mechanism that identifies entity mentions during generation and inserts the corresponding region tokens into the text stream, allowing the model to reference visual evidence on the fly when producing spatial chain-of-thought responses. In parallel, a region-prompted monocular 3D grounding design predicts 3D bounding boxes in the camera view from grounded region queries, supported by intrinsic-aware normalization and dense geometric supervision. Together, these grounding capabilities enable GR3D to decompose complex spatial understanding problems into grounded 2D perception followed by 3D inference. GR3D achieves consistent improvements across grounded and non-grounded spatial benchmarks, demonstrating grounding as an effective inductive bias for strengthening spatial understanding in VLMs. These grounding capabilities collectively enhance general spatial understanding beyond the grounding task itself.