# Towards Explainable 3D Grounded Visual Question Answering: A New Benchmark and Strong Baseline

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.12028 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.12028/

## Key facts

- Cited by 25 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Sep 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Server](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00325/) (2015)
- [Oscar: Object-Semantics Aligned Pre-training for Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06165/) (2020)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07280/) (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)
- [Visual Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08669/) (2016)
- [ScanQA: 3D Question Answering for Spatial Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10482/) (2021)
- [Deep Modular Co-Attention Networks for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.10770/) (2019)
- [Embodied Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11543/) (2017)
- [How Much Can CLIP Benefit Vision-and-Language Tasks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06383/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Question-Image Co-Attention for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00061/) (2016)
- [Scan2Cap: Context-aware Dense Captioning in RGB-D Scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02206/) (2020)
- [Learning 3D Semantic Scene Graphs from 3D Indoor Reconstructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03967/) (2020)
- [RIO: 3D Object Instance Re-Localization in Changing Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06109/) (2019)
- [InstanceRefer: Cooperative Holistic Understanding for Visual Grounding on Point Clouds through Instance Multi-level Contextual Referring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01128/) (2021)
- [SAT: 2D Semantics Assisted Training for 3D Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11450/) (2021)
- [A Multi-World Approach to Question Answering about Real-World Scenes based on Uncertain Input](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1410.0210/) (2014)
- [LanguageRefer: Spatial-Language Model for 3D Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03438/) (2021)
- [TransRefer3D: Entity-and-Relation Aware Transformer for Fine-Grained 3D Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02388/) (2021)
- [Free-form Description Guided 3D Visual Graph Network for Object Grounding in Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16381/) (2021)
- [Tips and Tricks for Visual Question Answering: Learnings from the 2017 Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02711/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [NuScenes-QA: A Multi-modal Visual Question Answering Benchmark for Autonomous Driving Scenario](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14836/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Unifying 3D Vision-Language Understanding via Promptable Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11442/) (2024)
- [Move to Understand a 3D Scene: Bridging Visual Grounding and Exploration for Efficient and Versatile Embodied Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04047/) (2025)
- [Single-view 3D Scene Reconstruction with High-fidelity Shape and Texture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00457/) (2023)
- [Vision-Language Pre-training with Object Contrastive Learning for 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10714/) (2023)
- [SpaCE-10: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models in Compositional Spatial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07966/) (2025)
- [Bridging the Gap between 2D and 3D Visual Question Answering: A Fusion Approach for 3D VQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15933/) (2024)
- [CityRefer: Geography-aware 3D Visual Grounding Dataset on City-scale Point Cloud Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18773/) (2023)
- [Embodied Intelligence for 3D Understanding: A Survey on 3D Scene Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00342/) (2025)
- [3D Question Answering for City Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17398/) (2024)
- [Task-oriented Sequential Grounding and Navigation in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04034/) (2024)
- [PerLA: Perceptive 3D Language Assistant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19774/) (2024)
- [SHMamba: Structured Hyperbolic State Space Model for Audio-Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09833/) (2024)
- [D3D-VLP: Dynamic 3D Vision-Language-Planning Model for Embodied Grounding and Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12622/) (2025)
- [From Objects to Anywhere: A Holistic Benchmark for Multi-level Visual Grounding in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04897/) (2025)
- [Multi-modal Large Language Model Enhanced Pseudo 3D Perception Framework for Visual Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13335/) (2023)
- [SeGPruner: Semantic-Geometric Visual Token Pruner for 3D Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.29437/) (2026)
- [Edge-Centric Relational Reasoning for 3D Scene Graph Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15288/) (2025)
- [Argus: Leveraging Multiview Images for Improved 3-D Scene Understanding With Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12916/) (2025)
- [NeuroVoxel-LM: Language-Aligned 3D Perception via Dynamic Voxelization and Meta-Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20110/) (2025)
- [Explanation-Guided Adversarial Training for Robust and Interpretable Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01938/) (2026)
- [CoVeR: Coverage-Based Token Pruning for Multi-View 3D Reasoning in VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.08345/) (2026)
- [From Alignment to Fusion in 3D Vision-Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.28222/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, 3D vision-and-language tasks have attracted increasing research interest. Compared to other vision-and-language tasks, the 3D visual question answering (VQA) task is less exploited and is more susceptible to language priors and co-reference ambiguity. Meanwhile, a couple of recently proposed 3D VQA datasets do not well support 3D VQA task due to their limited scale and annotation methods. In this work, we formally define and address a 3D grounded VQA task by collecting a new 3D VQA dataset, referred to as FE-3DGQA, with diverse and relatively free-form question-answer pairs, as well as dense and completely grounded bounding box annotations. To achieve more explainable answers, we labelled the objects appeared in the complex QA pairs with different semantic types, including answer-grounded objects (both appeared and not appeared in the questions), and contextual objects for answer-grounded objects. We also propose a new 3D VQA framework to effectively predict the completely visually grounded and explainable answer. Extensive experiments verify that our newly collected benchmark datasets can be effectively used to evaluate various 3D VQA methods from different aspects and our newly proposed framework also achieves state-of-the-art performance on the new benchmark dataset. Both the newly collected dataset and our codes will be publicly available at http://github.com/zlccccc/3DGQA.