# Language-Guided 3D Object Detection in Point Cloud for Autonomous Driving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.15765 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15765/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 52 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [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)
- [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)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [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)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3555/) (2014)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [VoxelNet: End-to-End Learning for Point Cloud Based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06396/) (2017)
- [Center-based 3D Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11275/) (2020)
- [PV-RCNN: Point-Voxel Feature Set Abstraction for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13192/) (2019)
- [BEVFusion: Multi-Task Multi-Sensor Fusion with Unified Bird's-Eye View Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13542/) (2022)
- [Focal Loss for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02002/) (2017)
- [3D Semantic Segmentation with Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10275/) (2017)
- [CenterNet: Keypoint Triplets for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08189/) (2019)
- [Deep Hough Voting for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09664/) (2019)
- [TransFusion: Robust LiDAR-Camera Fusion for 3D Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11496/) (2022)
- [ScanRefer: 3D Object Localization in RGB-D Scans using Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08830/) (2019)
- [3DSSD: Point-based 3D Single Stage Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10187/) (2020)
- [MAttNet: Modular Attention Network for Referring Expression Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08186/) (2018)
- [Voxel R-CNN: Towards High Performance Voxel-based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15712/) (2020)
- [A Survey of Autonomous Driving: Common Practices and Emerging Technologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05113/) (2019)
- [From Points to Parts: 3D Object Detection from Point Cloud with Part-aware and Part-aggregation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03670/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Vision Language Models in Autonomous Driving: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14414/) (2023)
- [DME-Driver: Integrating Human Decision Logic and 3D Scene Perception in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03641/) (2024)
- [GPT-4 Enhanced Multimodal Grounding for Autonomous Driving: Leveraging Cross-Modal Attention with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03543/) (2023)
- [Language-Image Models with 3D Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03685/) (2024)
- [Delving into Multi-modal Multi-task Foundation Models for Road Scene Understanding: From Learning Paradigm Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02968/) (2024)
- [Talk2Radar: Bridging Natural Language with 4D mmWave Radar for 3D Referring Expression Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12821/) (2024)
- [Applications of Large Scale Foundation Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12144/) (2023)
- [OLiDM: Object-aware LiDAR Diffusion Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17226/) (2024)
- [Talk to Parallel LiDARs: A Human-LiDAR Interaction Method Based on 3D Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15274/) (2024)
- [RepVF: A Unified Vector Fields Representation for Multi-task 3D Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10876/) (2024)
- [A Review of 3D Object Detection with Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18738/) (2025)
- [Image Segmentation with Large Language Models: A Survey with Perspectives for Intelligent Transportation Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14096/) (2025)
- [Towards Physics-informed Spatial Intelligence with Human Priors: An Autonomous Driving Pilot Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21160/) (2025)
- [LaGen: Towards Autoregressive LiDAR Scene Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21256/) (2025)
- [LidaRefer: Context-aware Outdoor 3D Visual Grounding for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04351/) (2024)
- [Unlock the Power of Unlabeled Data in Language Driving Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10586/) (2025)
- [A Hierarchical Test Platform for Vision Language Model (VLM)-Integrated Real-World Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14100/) (2025)
- [Talk2PC: Enhancing 3D Visual Grounding through LiDAR and Radar Point Clouds Fusion for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08336/) (2025)
- [Talk2Sensors: 3D Visual Grounding in Autonomous Driving via Sensor-Adaptive Physical Cue Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.04568/) (2026)
- [Urbex: Agentic Spatial Grounding for City-Scale 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.18356/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper addresses the problem of 3D referring expression comprehension (REC) in autonomous driving scenario, which aims to ground a natural language to the targeted region in LiDAR point clouds. Previous approaches for REC usually focus on the 2D or 3D-indoor domain, which is not suitable for accurately predicting the location of the queried 3D region in an autonomous driving scene. In addition, the upper-bound limitation and the heavy computation cost motivate us to explore a better solution. In this work, we propose a new multi-modal visual grounding task, termed LiDAR Grounding. Then we devise a Multi-modal Single Shot Grounding (MSSG) approach with an effective token fusion strategy. It jointly learns the LiDAR-based object detector with the language features and predicts the targeted region directly from the detector without any post-processing. Moreover, the image feature can be flexibly integrated into our approach to provide rich texture and color information. The cross-modal learning enforces the detector to concentrate on important regions in the point cloud by considering the informative language expressions, thus leading to much better accuracy and efficiency. Extensive experiments on the Talk2Car dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods. Our work offers a deeper insight into the LiDAR-based grounding task and we expect it presents a promising direction for the autonomous driving community.