3D VQA

VQA: Visual Question Answering

Overview

Three-dimensional visual question answering (VQA) asks models to answer questions that require understanding objects, layouts, distances, viewpoints, or events in 3D scenes and volumes. Systems combine language models with point clouds, RGB-D images, multiview video, or reconstructed scene representations such as occupancy maps and scene graphs; some also use geometric tools to measure or retrieve relevant evidence. Benchmarks such as ScanQA and SQA3D test scene understanding and spatial reasoning, while medical VQA evaluates reasoning over volumetric scans. A central challenge is ensuring answers are grounded in 3D evidence rather than language or visual shortcuts, while making reasoning over many views accurate and efficient.

Latest papers

51 papers9 papers in the last four weeks, up 50% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

Jun 1, 2026

MASER: Modality-Adaptive Specialist Routing for Embodied 3D Spatial Intelligence

In 3D environments, Embodied Agents answer spatially relevant questions through reasoning from a mixture of modalities including natural language, RGB images, point clouds, depth maps and camera poses. Existing Vision-Language models (VLMs) are fine-tuned over a single modality. This completely ignores the question semantics which may favor a different modality than the finetuned modality. To address this, we propose MASER (Modality-Adaptive SpEcialist Routing), a lightweight framework that trains five different modality adapters of a shared VLM backbone and learns a neural routing policy that selects the best adapter based on the question during inference. We encode each question with a frozen sentence transformer and pass the embedding through a small Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP) trained on oracle adapter-accuracy labels. We evaluate our methodology over the Open3D-VQA benchmark and our evaluations show that no single modality is universally optimal -- point-cloud answers are best in 51.5% of cases. MASER routes with 51.3% oracle agreement, outperforming a Random-Forest ablation (43.5%), with only a single adapter call per question.
May 19, 2026

NeuroQA: A Large-Scale Image-Grounded Benchmark for 3D Brain MRI Understanding

We present NeuroQA, a large-scale benchmark for visual question answering in 3D brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), with 56,953 QA pairs from 12,977 subjects across 12 datasets. It spans ages 5-104 and five clinical domains: Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, tumors, white matter disease, and neurodevelopment. Unlike prior medical Visual Question Answering (VQA) efforts that operate on 2D slices or rely on narrow diagnostic labels, NeuroQA pairs every item with a full 3D volume. It evaluates 11 clinically grounded reasoning skills across Yes/No, multiple-choice, and open-ended formats. Of the 203 templates, 131 are image-grounded (answerable from a 3-plane viewer) and 72 are image-informed (ground truth from quantitative volumetry or clinical instruments). To remove text-only shortcuts, we apply answer-distribution refinement, reducing closed-format text-only accuracy from >>80% to 44.6%; image necessity is assessed separately through an image-grounding protocol released with the benchmark. A 38-rule deterministic pipeline and two rounds of expert review verify every QA pair against FreeSurfer measurements, metadata, or radiology report fields, with zero same-subject contradictions across templates. We conduct a clinician evaluation in which two clinicians independently assess 100 frozen test items on a three-plane viewer. On closed-format (Yes/No + multiple-choice) test-public items, the best zero-shot vision-language model and a supervised 3D CNN baseline reach 47.5% and 43.7% accuracy respectively, both below the 49.4% text-only majority-template floor. NeuroQA adopts a two-tier release with public QA pairs for open-access datasets and reproducible generation scripts for datasets restricted by data use agreements (DUAs), plus subject-level splits, a held-out private test set, and an online leaderboard.
May 18, 2026

SPATIOROUTE: Dynamic Prompt Routing for Zero-Shot Spatial Reasoning

Spatial question answering over egocentric video is a challenging task that requires Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to reason about 3D object positions, scene affordances, and directional relationships, particularly in the zero-shot setting where no task-specific fine-tuning is available. We introduce SpatioRoute, a dynamic prompt generation approach that routes each incoming question to a semantically tailored prompt template -- without any additional training, fine-tuning, or 3D sensor input. SpatioRoute operates in two complementary modes: SpatioRoute-R, a rule-based router that deterministically maps question typologies (e.g., What, Is, How, Can, Which) to specialized prompt templates; and SpatioRoute-L, an LLM-driven approach that generates task-specific prompts from the question and situational context alone, with no video input at routing time. We evaluate SpatioRoute on the SQA3D benchmark across VLMs spanning model families. SpatioRoute achieves consistent overall accuracy gains up to 5% over fixed prompt baselines, establishing a new state-of-the-art for zero-shot video-only spatial VQA without requiring 3D point-cloud inputs. As an additional finding, we observe that Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, implemented via the Think it Twice architecture, consistently degrades performance in this setting on Qwen series models, confirming that question-aware routing is more effective than uniform reasoning instructions for spatial video understanding.
May 8, 2026

Proxy3D: Efficient 3D Representations for Vision-Language Models via Semantic Clustering and Alignment

Spatial intelligence in vision-language models (VLMs) attracts research interest with the practical demand to reason in the 3D world.Despite promising results, most existing methods follow the conventional 2D pipeline in VLMs and use pixel-aligned representations for the vision modality. However, correspondence-based models with implicit 3D scene understanding often fail to achieve spatial consistency, and representation-based models with 3D geometric priors lack efficiency in vision sequence serialization. To address this, we propose a Proxy3D method with compact yet comprehensive 3D proxy representations for the vision modality. Given only video frames as input, we employ semantic and geometric encoders to extract scene features and then perform their semantic-aware clustering to obtain a set of proxies in the 3D space. For representation alignment, we further curate the SpaceSpan dataset and apply multi-stage training to adopt the proposed 3D proxy representations with the VLM. When using shorter sequences for vision information, our method achieves competitive or state-of-the-art performance in 3D visual question answering, visual grounding and general spatial intelligence benchmarks.
Apr 15, 2026

SpatialEvo: Self-Evolving Spatial Intelligence via Deterministic Geometric Environments

Spatial reasoning over three-dimensional scenes is a core capability for embodied intelligence, yet continuous model improvement remains bottlenecked by the cost of geometric annotation. The self-evolving paradigm offers a promising path, but its reliance on model consensus to construct pseudo-labels causes training to reinforce rather than correct the model's own geometric errors. We identify a property unique to 3D spatial reasoning that circumvents this limitation: ground truth is a deterministic consequence of the underlying geometry, computable exactly from point clouds and camera poses without any model involvement. Building on this insight, we present SpatialEvo, a self-evolving framework for 3D spatial reasoning, centered on the Deterministic Geometric Environment (DGE). The DGE formalizes 16 spatial reasoning task categories under explicit geometric validation rules and converts unannotated 3D scenes into zero-noise interactive oracles, replacing model consensus with objective physical feedback. A single shared-parameter policy co-evolves across questioner and solver roles under DGE constraints: the questioner generates physically valid spatial questions grounded in scene observations, while the solver derives precise answers against DGE-verified ground truth. A task-adaptive scheduler endogenously concentrates training on the model's weakest categories, producing a dynamic curriculum without manual design. Experiments across nine benchmarks demonstrate that SpatialEvo achieves the highest average score at both 3B and 7B scales, with consistent gains on spatial reasoning benchmarks and no degradation on general visual understanding.
Apr 14, 2026

GeoAlign: Geometric Feature Realignment for MLLM Spatial Reasoning

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have exhibited remarkable performance in various visual tasks, yet still struggle with spatial reasoning. Recent efforts mitigate this by injecting geometric features from 3D foundation models, but rely on static single-layer extractions. We identify that such an approach induces a task misalignment bias: the geometric features naturally evolve towards 3D pretraining objectives, which may contradict the heterogeneous spatial demands of MLLMs, rendering any single layer fundamentally insufficient. To resolve this, we propose GeoAlign, a novel framework that dynamically aggregates multi-layer geometric features to realign with the actual demands. GeoAlign constructs a hierarchical geometric feature bank and leverages the MLLM's original visual tokens as content-aware queries to perform layer-wise sparse routing, adaptively fetching the suitable geometric features for each patch. Extensive experiments on VSI-Bench, ScanQA, and SQA3D demonstrate that our compact 4B model effectively achieves state-of-the-art performance, even outperforming larger existing MLLMs.
Mar 31, 2026

SeGPruner: Semantic-Geometric Visual Token Pruner for 3D Question Answering

Vision-language models (VLMs) have been widely adopted for 3D question answering (3D QA). In typical pipelines, visual tokens extracted from multiple viewpoints are concatenated with language tokens and jointly processed by a large language model (LLM) for inference. However, aggregating multi-view observations inevitably introduces severe token redundancy, leading to an overly large visual token set that significantly hinders inference efficiency under constrained token budgets. Visual token pruning has emerged as a prevalent strategy to address this issue. Nevertheless, most existing pruners are primarily tailored to 2D inputs or rely on indirect geometric cues, which limits their ability to explicitly retain semantically critical objects and maintain sufficient spatial coverage for robust 3D reasoning. In this paper, we propose SeGPruner, a semantic-aware and geometry-guided token reduction framework for efficient 3D QA with multi-view images. Specifically, SeGPruner first preserves semantically salient tokens through an attention-based importance module (Saliency-aware Token Selector), ensuring that object-critical evidence is retained. It then complements these tokens with spatially diverse ones via a geometry-guided selector (Geometry-aware Token Diversifier), which jointly considers semantic relevance and 3D geometric distance. This cooperation between saliency preservation and geometry-guided diversification balances object-level evidence and global scene coverage under aggressive token reduction. Extensive experiments on ScanQA and OpenEQA demonstrate that SeGPruner substantially improves inference efficiency, reducing the visual token budget by 91% and inference latency by 86%, while maintaining competitive performance in 3D reasoning tasks.
Mar 29, 2026

Chat-Scene++: Exploiting Context-Rich Object Identification for 3D LLM

Recent advancements in multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong potential for 3D scene understanding. However, existing methods struggle with fine-grained object grounding and contextual reasoning, limiting their ability to interpret and interact with complex 3D environments. In this paper, we present Chat-Scene++, an MLLM framework that represents 3D scenes as context-rich object sequences. By structuring scenes as sequences of objects with contextual semantics, Chat-Scene++ enables object-centric representation and interaction. It decomposes a 3D scene into object representations paired with identifier tokens, allowing LLMs to follow instructions across diverse 3D vision-language tasks. To capture inter-object relationships and global semantics, Chat-Scene++ extracts context-rich object features using large-scale pre-trained 3D scene-level and 2D image-level encoders, unlike the isolated per-object features in Chat-Scene. Its flexible object-centric design also supports grounded chain-of-thought (G-CoT) reasoning, enabling the model to distinguish objects at both category and spatial levels during multi-step inference. Without the need for additional task-specific heads or fine-tuning, Chat-Scene++ achieves state-of-the-art performance on five major 3D vision-language benchmarks: ScanRefer, Multi3DRefer, Scan2Cap, ScanQA, and SQA3D. These results highlight its effectiveness in scene comprehension, object grounding, and spatial reasoning. Additionally, without reconstructing 3D worlds through computationally expensive processes, we demonstrate its applicability to real-world scenarios using only 2D inputs.
Mar 26, 2026

HiSpatial: Taming Hierarchical 3D Spatial Understanding in Vision-Language Models

Achieving human-like spatial intelligence for vision-language models (VLMs) requires inferring 3D structures from 2D observations, recognizing object properties and relations in 3D space, and performing high-level spatial reasoning. In this paper, we propose a principled hierarchical framework that decomposes the learning of 3D spatial understanding in VLMs into four progressively complex levels, from geometric perception to abstract spatial reasoning. Guided by this framework, we construct an automated pipeline that processes approximately 5M images with over 45M objects to generate 3D spatial VQA pairs across diverse tasks and scenes for VLM supervised fine-tuning. We also develop an RGB-D VLM incorporating metric-scale point maps as auxiliary inputs to further enhance spatial understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple spatial understanding and reasoning benchmarks, surpassing specialized spatial models and large proprietary systems such as Gemini-2.5-pro and GPT-5. Moreover, our analysis reveals clear dependencies among hierarchical task levels, offering new insights into how multi-level task design facilitates the emergence of 3D spatial intelligence.
Mar 24, 2026

3DCity-LLM: Empowering Multi-modality Large Language Models for 3D City-scale Perception and Understanding

While multi-modality large language models excel in object-centric or indoor scenarios, scaling them to 3D city-scale environments remains a formidable challenge. To bridge this gap, we propose 3DCity-LLM, a unified framework designed for 3D city-scale vision-language perception and understanding. 3DCity-LLM employs a coarse-to-fine feature encoding strategy comprising three parallel branches for target object, inter-object relationship, and global scene. To facilitate large-scale training, we introduce 3DCity-LLM-1.2M dataset that comprises approximately 1.2 million high-quality samples across seven representative task categories, ranging from fine-grained object analysis to multi-faceted scene planning. This strictly quality-controlled dataset integrates explicit 3D numerical information and diverse user-oriented simulations, enriching the question-answering diversity and realism of urban scenarios. Furthermore, we apply a multi-dimensional protocol based on text-similarity metrics and LLM-based semantic assessment to ensure faithful and comprehensive evaluations for all methods. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks demonstrate that 3DCity-LLM significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, offering a promising and meaningful direction for advancing spatial reasoning and urban intelligence. The source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/SYSU-3DSTAILab/3D-City-LLM.
Mar 18, 2026

Loc3R-VLM: Language-based Localization and 3D Reasoning with Vision-Language Models

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made impressive progress in connecting vision and language, but they still struggle with spatial understanding and viewpoint-aware reasoning. Recent efforts aim to augment the input representations with geometric cues rather than explicitly teaching models to reason in 3D space. We introduce Loc3R-VLM, a framework that equips 2D Vision-Language Models with advanced 3D understanding capabilities from monocular video input. Inspired by human spatial cognition, Loc3R-VLM relies on two joint objectives: global layout reconstruction to build a holistic representation of the scene structure, and explicit situation modeling to anchor egocentric perspective. These objectives provide direct spatial supervision that grounds both perception and language in a 3D context. To ensure geometric consistency and metric-scale alignment, we leverage lightweight camera pose priors extracted from a pre-trained 3D foundation model. Loc3R-VLM achieves state-of-the-art performance in language-based localization and outperforms existing 2D- and video-based approaches on situated and general 3D question-answering benchmarks, demonstrating that our spatial supervision framework enables strong 3D understanding. Project page: https://kevinqu7.github.io/loc3r-vlm
Mar 17, 2026

IOSVLM: A 3D Vision-Language Model for Unified Dental Diagnosis from Intraoral Scans

3D intraoral scans (IOS) are increasingly adopted in routine dentistry due to abundant geometric evidence, and unified multi-disease diagnosis is desirable for clinical documentation and communication. While recent works introduce dental vision-language models (VLMs) to enable unified diagnosis and report generation on 2D images or multi-view images rendered from IOS, they do not fully leverage native 3D geometry. Such work is necessary and also challenging, due to: (i) heterogeneous scan forms and the complex IOS topology, (ii) multi-disease co-occurrence with class imbalance and fine-grained morphological ambiguity, (iii) limited paired 3D IOS-text data. Thus, we present IOSVLM, an end-to-end 3D VLM that represents scans as point clouds and follows a 3D encoder-projector-LLM design for unified diagnosis and generative visual question-answering (VQA), together with IOSVQA, a large-scale multi-source IOS diagnosis VQA dataset comprising 19,002 cases and 249,055 VQA pairs over 23 oral diseases and heterogeneous scan types. To address the distribution gap between color-free IOS data and color-dependent 3D pre-training, we propose a geometry-to-chromatic proxy that stabilizes fine-grained geometric perception and cross-modal alignment. A two-stage curriculum training strategy further enhances robustness. IOSVLM consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving gains of at least +9.58% macro accuracy and +1.46% macro F1, indicating the effectiveness of direct 3D geometry modeling for IOS-based diagnosis.
Mar 10, 2026

Point Cloud as a Foreign Language for Multi-modal Large Language Model

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable progress in integrating visual and linguistic understanding. Recent efforts have extended these capabilities to 3D understanding through encoder-based architectures that rely on pre-trained 3D encoders to extract geometric features. However, such approaches suffer from semantic misalignment between geometric and linguistic spaces, resolution sensitivity, and substantial computational overhead. In this work, we present SAGE, the first end-to-end 3D MLLM that directly processes raw point clouds without relying on a pre-trained 3D encoder. Our approach introduces a lightweight 3D tokenizer that combines geometric sampling and neighbourhood aggregation with vector quantization to convert point clouds into discrete tokens--treating 3D data as a foreign language that naturally extends the LLM's vocabulary. Furthermore, to enhance the model's reasoning capability on complex 3D tasks, we propose a preference optimization training strategy with a semantic alignment-based reward, specifically designed for open-ended 3D question answering where responses are descriptive. Extensive experiments across diverse 3D understanding benchmarks demonstrate that our end-to-end approach outperforms existing encoder-based methods while offering significant advantages in computational efficiency, generalization across LLM backbones, and robustness to input resolution variations. Code is available at: github.com/snehaputul/SAGE3D.
Mar 8, 2026

Holi-Spatial: Evolving Video Streams into Holistic 3D Spatial Intelligence

The pursuit of spatial intelligence fundamentally relies on access to large-scale, fine-grained 3D data. However, existing approaches predominantly construct spatial understanding benchmarks by generating question-answer (QA) pairs from a limited number of manually annotated datasets, rather than systematically annotating new large-scale 3D scenes from raw web data. As a result, their scalability is severely constrained, and model performance is further hindered by domain gaps inherent in these narrowly curated datasets. In this work, we propose Holi-Spatial, the first fully automated, large-scale, spatially-aware multimodal dataset, constructed from raw video inputs without human intervention, using the proposed data curation pipeline. Holi-Spatial supports multi-level spatial supervision, ranging from geometrically accurate 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) reconstructions with rendered depth maps to object-level and relational semantic annotations, together with corresponding spatial Question-Answer (QA) pairs. Following a principled and systematic pipeline, we further construct Holi-Spatial-4M, the first large-scale, high-quality 3D semantic dataset, containing 12K optimized 3DGS scenes, 1.3M 2D masks, 320K 3D bounding boxes, 320K instance captions, 1.2M 3D grounding instances, and 1.2M spatial QA pairs spanning diverse geometric, relational, and semantic reasoning tasks. Holi-Spatial demonstrates exceptional performance in data curation quality, significantly outperforming existing feed-forward and per-scene optimized methods on datasets such as ScanNet, ScanNet++, and DL3DV. Furthermore, fine-tuning Vision-Language Models (VLMs) on spatial reasoning tasks using this dataset has also led to substantial improvements in model performance.
Mar 6, 2026

Do 3D Large Language Models Really Understand 3D Spatial Relationships?

Recent 3D Large-Language Models (3D-LLMs) claim to understand 3D worlds, especially spatial relationships among objects. Yet, we find that simply fine-tuning a language model on text-only question-answer pairs can perform comparably or even surpass these methods on the SQA3D benchmark without using any 3D input. This indicates that the SQA3D benchmark may not be able to detect if the model exploits textual shortcuts rather than engages in 3D-aware reasoning. To address this issue, we introduce Real-3DQA, a more rigorous evaluation benchmark that filters out easy-to-guess questions and introduces a structured taxonomy to assess various aspects of 3D reasoning. Experiments on Real-3DQA confirm that existing 3D-LLMs struggle with spatial relationships once simple cues are removed. We further propose a 3D-reweighted training objective that guides model to rely more on 3D visual clues, substantially enhancing 3D-LLMs performance in spatial reasoning tasks. Our findings underscore the need for robust benchmarks and tailored training strategies to advance genuine 3D vision-language understanding. Project page: https://real-3dqa.github.io/.
Mar 6, 2026

DeepSight: Bridging Depth Maps and Language with a Depth-Driven Multimodal Model

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved impressive performance across various tasks such as image captioning and visual question answer(VQA); however, they often struggle to accurately interpret depth information inherent in visual data. In this work, we introduce DeepSight, the first dedicated depth MLLM designed to enhance three-dimensional scene understanding. Unlike conventional methods that align RGB image encodings with text, our approach takes advantage of the unique characteristics of depth images: single-channel grayscale images where the pixel values directly reflect depth cues to improve spatial reasoning. To address challenges associated with limited depth data and the inadequacy of simple channel replication, we construct a novel depth image-text pair dataset and a depth instruction dataset. Depth maps are generated from visual images using the GLPN model, and GPT-4 is employed to curate corresponding depth instructions, an approach validated by LLaVA. Additionally, we modify the ViT encoder in CLIP to incorporate local object information, thereby capturing the subtle continuous variations of depth more effectively. To evaluate the performance of our model, we develop a comprehensive depth question answer benchmark based on existing depth image datasets, which rigorously assesses understanding in typical depth map scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that DeepSight significantly enhances depth perception and downstream task performance, marking a substantial step forward in multimodal three-dimensional understanding.
Mar 5, 2026

Thinking with Spatial Code for Physical-World Video Reasoning

We introduce Thinking with Spatial Code, a framework that transforms RGB video into explicit, temporally coherent 3D representations for physical-world visual question answering. We highlight the empirical finding that our proposed spatial encoder can parse videos into structured spatial code with explicit 3D oriented bounding boxes and semantic labels, enabling large language models (LLMs) to reason directly over explicit spatial variables. Specifically, we propose the spatial encoder that encodes image and geometric features by unifying 6D object parsing and tracking backbones with geometric prediction, and we further finetuning LLMs with reinforcement learning using a spatial rubric reward that encourages perspective-aware, geometrically grounded inference. As a result, our model outperforms proprietary vision-language models on VSI-Bench, setting a new state-of-the-art. Code is available at https://github.com/Beckschen/spatialcode.
Feb 25, 2026

PanoEnv: Exploring 3D Spatial Intelligence in Panoramic Environments with Reinforcement Learning

360 panoramic images are increasingly used in virtual reality, autonomous driving, and robotics for holistic scene understanding. However, current Vision-Language Models (VLMs) struggle with 3D spatial reasoning on Equirectangular Projection (ERP) images due to geometric distortion and limited 3D supervision. We introduce PanoEnv, a large-scale VQA benchmark built from synthetic 3D environments, containing 14.8K questions across five categories (e.g., relative position, volume comparison) grounded in accurate 3D annotations including depth, segmentation, and bounding boxes. Benchmarking 14 state-of-the-art VLMs reveals limited 3D understanding, achieving only 49.34% overall accuracy and 8.36% on open-ended (OE) questions. To enhance 3D reasoning, we propose a reinforcement learning post-training framework based on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a ground-truth-guided reward that incorporates five geometry-aware strategies such as distance tolerance and spatial consistency. A two-stage curriculum further mitigates catastrophic forgetting: Stage 1 trains on structured tasks (true/false and multiple choice), and Stage 2 fine-tunes on mixed open-ended data to improve generalization. Our 7B model achieves new state-of-the-art performance, improving overall accuracy to 52.93% (+3.59%) and open-ended accuracy to 14.83% while maintaining structured-task performance. It also achieves top semantic evaluation scores (Q-Score 6.24, P-Score 5.95), surpassing 32B models. These results demonstrate that PanoEnv-QA and our curriculum-based RL framework effectively instill 3D spatial intelligence in VLMs for omnidirectional perception.
Feb 23, 2026

CT-Flow: Orchestrating CT Interpretation Workflow with Model Context Protocol Servers

Recent advances in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown strong potential for multi-modal radiological reasoning, particularly in tasks like diagnostic visual question answering (VQA) and radiology report generation. However, most existing approaches for 3D CT analysis largely rely on static, single-pass inference. In practice, clinical interpretation is a dynamic, tool-mediated workflow where radiologists iteratively review slices and use measurement, radiomics, and segmentation tools to refine findings. To bridge this gap, we propose CT-Flow, an agentic framework designed for interoperable volumetric interpretation. By leveraging the Model Context Protocol (MCP), CT-Flow shifts from closed-box inference to an open, tool-aware paradigm. We curate CT-FlowBench, the first large-scale instruction-tuning benchmark tailored for 3D CT tool-use and multi-step reasoning. Built upon this, CT-Flow functions as a clinical orchestrator capable of decomposing complex natural language queries into automated tool-use sequences. Experimental evaluations on CT-FlowBench and standard 3D VQA datasets demonstrate that CT-Flow achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing baseline models by 41% in diagnostic accuracy and achieving a 95% success rate in autonomous tool invocation. This work provides a scalable foundation for integrating autonomous, agentic intelligence into real-world clinical radiology.
Feb 20, 2026

3DMedAgent: Unified Perception-to-Understanding for 3D Medical Analysis

3D CT analysis spans a continuum from low-level perception to high-level clinical understanding. Existing 3D-oriented analysis methods adopt either isolated task-specific modeling or task-agnostic end-to-end paradigms to produce one-hop outputs, impeding the systematic accumulation of perceptual evidence for downstream reasoning. In parallel, recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) exhibit improved visual perception and can integrate visual and textual information effectively, yet their predominantly 2D-oriented designs fundamentally limit their ability to perceive and analyze volumetric medical data. To bridge this gap, we propose 3DMedAgent, a unified agent that enables 2D MLLMs to perform general 3D CT analysis without 3D-specific fine-tuning. 3DMedAgent coordinates heterogeneous visual and textual tools through a flexible MLLM agent, progressively decomposing complex 3D analysis into tractable subtasks that transition from global to regional views, from 3D volumes to informative 2D slices, and from visual evidence to structured textual representations. Central to this design, 3DMedAgent maintains a long-term structured memory that aggregates intermediate tool outputs and supports query-adaptive, evidence-driven multi-step reasoning. We further introduce the DeepChestVQA benchmark for evaluating unified perception-to-understanding capabilities in 3D thoracic imaging. Experiments across over 40 tasks demonstrate that 3DMedAgent consistently outperforms general, medical, and 3D-specific MLLMs, highlighting a scalable path toward general-purpose 3D clinical assistants.Code and data are available at https://github.com/jinlab-imvr/3DMedAgent.
Jun 21, 2025

Scene-R1: Video-Grounded Large Language Models for 3D Scene Reasoning with Lightweight Annotations

Large language models are increasingly being applied to 3D scene understanding. However, existing 3D-aware LLMs largely operate as black boxes: they produce bounding boxes or textual responses without exposing the reasoning process, and they typically depend on pre-trained 3D detectors for object proposals. We present Scene-R1, a video-grounded framework for 3D scene reasoning that avoids both pre-trained 3D object detectors and dense point-cloud backbones. The framework combines reinforcement-learning-based reasoning with a two-stage grounding pipeline. In the first stage, Scene-R1 performs temporal grounding by identifying the video segments most relevant to an open-ended query. In the second stage, it grounds the target in image space by predicting a 2D bounding box. This prediction is then refined into a precise 3D localization using high-quality candidates from a zero-shot segmentation module, enabling fine-grained geometric reasoning without detector-based proposals. Scene-R1 can also be adapted to 3D visual question answering, generating free-form answers directly from RGB-D video. Our training pipeline uses lightweight 2D supervision projected from sparse scans, avoiding the computational overhead required to train 3D instance segmentation models. Across multiple datasets, Scene-R1 outperforms existing open-vocabulary baselines while also providing interpretable intermediate reasoning steps. These results suggest that reinforcement-learning-based reasoning over RGB-D video can support accurate 3D scene understanding with task-level supervision. The training, inference, and 3D refinement code is available at https://github.com/819346675/Scene-R1.