Multiview image-based 3D visual grounding predicts a coordinate frame to define a coordinate system and then regresses a 3D bounding box for localization. However, existing methods jointly optimize coordinate frame selection and box regression, leading to coordinate-relative box ambiguity and degraded grounding performance. This ambiguity arises because the same box admits different numerical representations across coordinate frames, creating multiple optimization targets and yielding invalid compromise predictions. To tackle this challenge, we propose CoordRefer, a coordinate-aware framework that decouples coordinate frame selection from coordinate-conditioned grounding. CoordRefer first selects a reference frame to define the coordinate system and then conditions 3D box prediction on the coordinate system. We perform coordinate-aware supervised fine-tuning to establish coordinate frame selection and coordinate-conditioned box regression, followed by Group Relative Policy Optimization with 3D IoU-based rewards to align both stages with downstream grounding quality. On ScanRefer with Qwen3-VL-2B, CoordRefer achieves gains of 11% in Acc@0.25 and 7% in Acc@0.5 over the coordinate-agnostic baseline, while its geometrically refined variant surpasses methods using explicit 3D inputs.
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 Acc@0.25 and Acc@0.5 on ScanRefer, outperforming previous baselines by substantial margins of 6.4% and 4.0%.
Visual grounding with multimodal large language models is commonly formulated as autoregressive coordinate generation, where a model outputs bounding-box coordinates as text given an image and a referring-expression prompt. While this interface is simple and compatible with instruction following, it introduces a mismatch between training and evaluation: training optimizes token-level likelihood over coordinate strings, whereas grounding quality is measured by geometric overlap. We propose IoU-PD, an IoU-aware privileged distillation method for coordinate-generating multimodal large language models. IoU-PD uses ground-truth boxes not only as coordinate targets, but also as privileged training-time guidance. During training, the student receives the original image and prompt, while a frozen teacher receives a box-marked image and an augmented prompt that indicates the marked region. The student is trained with a supervised fine-tuning anchor and a privileged distillation loss whose token weights reflect both geometric importance and teacher reliability. At inference time, IoU-PD requires no box overlay, privileged hint, teacher branch, or additional prediction module. Experiments on standard referring-expression grounding benchmarks show consistent region-level improvements over strong coordinate-generating baselines, demonstrating that ground-truth boxes can provide useful privileged guidance beyond serving as coordinate labels.
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% Acc@0.5 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.