# TransRefer3D: Entity-and-Relation Aware Transformer for Fine-Grained 3D Visual Grounding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.02388 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02388/

## Key facts

- Cited by 86 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Aug 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07998/) (2017)
- [Pre-Trained Image Processing Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00364/) (2020)
- [Graph Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06455/) (2019)
- [ScanRefer: 3D Object Localization in RGB-D Scans using Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08830/) (2019)
- [Neural Motifs: Scene Graph Parsing with Global Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06640/) (2017)
- [Meshed-Memory Transformer for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08226/) (2019)
- [Deep Modular Co-Attention Networks for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.10770/) (2019)
- [Attention on Attention for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06954/) (2019)
- [Hierarchical Question-Image Co-Attention for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00061/) (2016)
- [Understanding the Difficulty of Training Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08249/) (2020)
- [A Fast and Accurate One-Stage Approach to Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06354/) (2019)
- [Visual Semantic Reasoning for Image-Text Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02701/) (2019)
- [InstanceRefer: Cooperative Holistic Understanding for Visual Grounding on Point Clouds through Instance Multi-level Contextual Referring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01128/) (2021)
- [Referring Image Segmentation via Cross-Modal Progressive Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00514/) (2020)
- [Deep Fragment Embeddings for Bidirectional Image Sentence Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.5679/) (2014)
- [Graph Structured Network for Image-Text Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00277/) (2020)
- [Beyond Bilinear: Generalized Multimodal Factorized High-order Pooling for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03619/) (2017)
- [Consensus-Aware Visual-Semantic Embedding for Image-Text Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08883/) (2020)
- [VoteNet: A Deep Learning Label Fusion Method for Multi-Atlas Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08963/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 86)

- [LL3DA: Visual Interactive Instruction Tuning for Omni-3D Understanding, Reasoning, and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18651/) (2023)
- [3D-VisTA: Pre-trained Transformer for 3D Vision and Text Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04352/) (2023)
- [Aligning Cyber Space with Physical World: A Comprehensive Survey on Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06886/) (2024)
- [Multi3DRefer: Grounding Text Description to Multiple 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05251/) (2023)
- [Multi-View Transformer for 3D Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02174/) (2022)
- [SceneVerse: Scaling 3D Vision-Language Learning for Grounded Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09340/) (2024)
- [Bottom Up Top Down Detection Transformers for Language Grounding in Images and Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08879/) (2021)
- [Language Conditioned Spatial Relation Reasoning for 3D Object Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09646/) (2022)
- [A Survey of Visual Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06091/) (2021)
- [3D-SPS: Single-Stage 3D Visual Grounding via Referred Point Progressive Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06272/) (2022)
- [GPT4Scene: Understand 3D Scenes from Videos with Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01428/) (2025)
- [EDA: Explicit Text-Decoupling and Dense Alignment for 3D Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14941/) (2022)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Deep Graph Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05055/) (2023)
- [ViewRefer: Grasp the Multi-view Knowledge for 3D Visual Grounding with GPT and Prototype Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16894/) (2023)
- [Unifying 3D Vision-Language Understanding via Promptable Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11442/) (2024)
- [Target-Driven Structured Transformer Planner for Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11201/) (2022)
- [NS3D: Neuro-Symbolic Grounding of 3D Objects and Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13483/) (2023)
- [Move to Understand a 3D Scene: Bridging Visual Grounding and Exploration for Efficient and Versatile Embodied Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04047/) (2025)
- [MORE: Multi-Order RElation Mining for Dense Captioning in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05203/) (2022)
- [VL-SAT: Visual-Linguistic Semantics Assisted Training for 3D Semantic Scene Graph Prediction in Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14408/) (2023)
- [When LLMs step into the 3D World: A Survey and Meta-Analysis of 3D Tasks via Multi-modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10255/) (2024)
- [Look Around and Refer: 2D Synthetic Semantics Knowledge Distillation for 3D Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14241/) (2022)
- [Vote2Cap-DETR++: Decoupling Localization and Describing for End-to-End 3D Dense Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02999/) (2023)
- [3D-STMN: Dependency-Driven Superpoint-Text Matching Network for End-to-End 3D Referring Expression Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16632/) (2023)
- [ScanEnts3D: Exploiting Phrase-to-3D-Object Correspondences for Improved Visio-Linguistic Models in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06250/) (2022)
- [MiKASA: Multi-Key-Anchor & Scene-Aware Transformer for 3D Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03077/) (2024)
- [Towards Explainable 3D Grounded Visual Question Answering: A New Benchmark and Strong Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.12028/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Text-guided 3D Visual Grounding: Elements, Recent Advances, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05785/) (2024)
- [RefMask3D: Language-Guided Transformer for 3D Referring Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18244/) (2024)
- [Object2Scene: Putting Objects in Context for Open-Vocabulary 3D Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09456/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently proposed fine-grained 3D visual grounding is an essential and challenging task, whose goal is to identify the 3D object referred by a natural language sentence from other distractive objects of the same category. Existing works usually adopt dynamic graph networks to indirectly model the intra/inter-modal interactions, making the model difficult to distinguish the referred object from distractors due to the monolithic representations of visual and linguistic contents. In this work, we exploit Transformer for its natural suitability on permutation-invariant 3D point clouds data and propose a TransRefer3D network to extract entity-and-relation aware multimodal context among objects for more discriminative feature learning. Concretely, we devise an Entity-aware Attention (EA) module and a Relation-aware Attention (RA) module to conduct fine-grained cross-modal feature matching. Facilitated by co-attention operation, our EA module matches visual entity features with linguistic entity features while RA module matches pair-wise visual relation features with linguistic relation features, respectively. We further integrate EA and RA modules into an Entity-and-Relation aware Contextual Block (ERCB) and stack several ERCBs to form our TransRefer3D for hierarchical multimodal context modeling. Extensive experiments on both Nr3D and Sr3D datasets demonstrate that our proposed model significantly outperforms existing approaches by up to 10.6% and claims the new state-of-the-art. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work investigating Transformer architecture for fine-grained 3D visual grounding task.