# 3D-SPS: Single-Stage 3D Visual Grounding via Referred Point Progressive Selection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.06272 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06272/

## Key facts

- Cited by 110 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [VoxelNet: End-to-End Learning for Point Cloud Based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06396/) (2017)
- [Modeling Context in Referring Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00272/) (2016)
- [3D Semantic Segmentation with Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10275/) (2017)
- [Deep Hough Voting for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09664/) (2019)
- [ScanRefer: 3D Object Localization in RGB-D Scans using Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08830/) (2019)
- [MAttNet: Modular Attention Network for Referring Expression Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08186/) (2018)
- [TransVG: End-to-End Visual Grounding with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08541/) (2021)
- [Modeling Context Between Objects for Referring Expression Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00525/) (2016)
- [Group-Free 3D Object Detection via Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00678/) (2021)
- [A Fast and Accurate One-Stage Approach to Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06354/) (2019)
- [InstanceRefer: Cooperative Holistic Understanding for Visual Grounding on Point Clouds through Instance Multi-level Contextual Referring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01128/) (2021)
- [Learning to Assemble Neural Module Tree Networks for Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03299/) (2018)
- [Improving One-stage Visual Grounding by Recursive Sub-query Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01059/) (2020)
- [Natural Language Object Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04164/) (2015)
- [SAT: 2D Semantics Assisted Training for 3D Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11450/) (2021)
- [Learning Two-Branch Neural Networks for Image-Text Matching Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03470/) (2017)
- [A Real-Time Cross-modality Correlation Filtering Method for Referring Expression Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07072/) (2019)
- [Dynamic Graph Attention for Referring Expression Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08164/) (2019)
- [Neighbourhood Watch: Referring Expression Comprehension via Language-guided Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04794/) (2018)
- [Learning to Compose and Reason with Language Tree Structures for Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01784/) (2019)
- [LanguageRefer: Spatial-Language Model for 3D Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03438/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 110)

- [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)
- [Chat-Scene: Bridging 3D Scene and Large Language Models with Object Identifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08168/) (2023)
- [Multi3DRefer: Grounding Text Description to Multiple 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05251/) (2023)
- [SceneVerse: Scaling 3D Vision-Language Learning for Grounded Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09340/) (2024)
- [Language Conditioned Spatial Relation Reasoning for 3D Object Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09646/) (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)
- [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)
- [UniT3D: A Unified Transformer for 3D Dense Captioning and Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00836/) (2022)
- [Ross3D: Reconstructive Visual Instruction Tuning with 3D-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01901/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Generating Human Motion in 3D Scenes from Text Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07784/) (2024)
- [ScanReason: Empowering 3D Visual Grounding with Reasoning Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01525/) (2024)
- [3D-R1: Enhancing Reasoning in 3D VLMs for Unified Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23478/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Four Ways to Improve Verbo-visual Fusion for Dense 3D Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04561/) (2023)
- [Reason3D: Searching and Reasoning 3D Segmentation via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17427/) (2024)
- [PoinTramba: A Hybrid Transformer-Mamba Framework for Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15463/) (2024)
- [Vision-Language Pre-training with Object Contrastive Learning for 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10714/) (2023)
- [3DRP-Net: 3D Relative Position-aware Network for 3D Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13363/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Locate 3D: Real-World Object Localization via Self-Supervised Learning in 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14151/) (2025)
- [3D Vision and Language Pretraining with Large-Scale Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06084/) (2024)
- [Multi-branch Collaborative Learning Network for 3D Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05363/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D visual grounding aims to locate the referred target object in 3D point cloud scenes according to a free-form language description. Previous methods mostly follow a two-stage paradigm, i.e., language-irrelevant detection and cross-modal matching, which is limited by the isolated architecture. In such a paradigm, the detector needs to sample keypoints from raw point clouds due to the inherent properties of 3D point clouds (irregular and large-scale), to generate the corresponding object proposal for each keypoint. However, sparse proposals may leave out the target in detection, while dense proposals may confuse the matching model. Moreover, the language-irrelevant detection stage can only sample a small proportion of keypoints on the target, deteriorating the target prediction. In this paper, we propose a 3D Single-Stage Referred Point Progressive Selection (3D-SPS) method, which progressively selects keypoints with the guidance of language and directly locates the target. Specifically, we propose a Description-aware Keypoint Sampling (DKS) module to coarsely focus on the points of language-relevant objects, which are significant clues for grounding. Besides, we devise a Target-oriented Progressive Mining (TPM) module to finely concentrate on the points of the target, which is enabled by progressive intra-modal relation modeling and inter-modal target mining. 3D-SPS bridges the gap between detection and matching in the 3D visual grounding task, localizing the target at a single stage. Experiments demonstrate that 3D-SPS achieves state-of-the-art performance on both ScanRefer and Nr3D/Sr3D datasets.