# Rethinking 3D Dense Caption and Visual Grounding in A Unified Framework through Prompt-based Localization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.11064 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11064/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [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)
- [PointGroup: Dual-Set Point Grouping for 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01658/) (2020)
- [Scan2Cap: Context-aware Dense Captioning in RGB-D Scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02206/) (2020)
- [Group-Free 3D Object Detection via Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00678/) (2021)
- [LAMM: Language-Assisted Multi-Modal Instruction-Tuning Dataset, Framework, and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06687/) (2023)
- [Multi3DRefer: Grounding Text Description to Multiple 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05251/) (2023)
- [InstanceRefer: Cooperative Holistic Understanding for Visual Grounding on Point Clouds through Instance Multi-level Contextual Referring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01128/) (2021)
- [Bottom Up Top Down Detection Transformers for Language Grounding in Images and Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08879/) (2021)
- [SAT: 2D Semantics Assisted Training for 3D Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11450/) (2021)
- [3D-SPS: Single-Stage 3D Visual Grounding via Referred Point Progressive Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06272/) (2022)
- [EDA: Explicit Text-Decoupling and Dense Alignment for 3D Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14941/) (2022)
- [LanguageRefer: Spatial-Language Model for 3D Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03438/) (2021)
- [End-to-End 3D Dense Captioning with Vote2Cap-DETR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02508/) (2023)
- [X-Trans2Cap: Cross-Modal Knowledge Transfer using Transformer for 3D Dense Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00843/) (2022)
- [ViewRefer: Grasp the Multi-view Knowledge for 3D Visual Grounding with GPT and Prototype Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16894/) (2023)
- [UniT3D: A Unified Transformer for 3D Dense Captioning and Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00836/) (2022)
- [NS3D: Neuro-Symbolic Grounding of 3D Objects and Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13483/) (2023)
- [MORE: Multi-Order RElation Mining for Dense Captioning in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05203/) (2022)
- [VoteNet: A Deep Learning Label Fusion Method for Multi-Atlas Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08963/) (2019)
- [Spatiality-guided Transformer for 3D Dense Captioning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10688/) (2022)
- [Meta Architecture for Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14462/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D Visual Grounding (3DVG) and 3D Dense Captioning (3DDC) are two crucial tasks in various 3D applications, which require both shared and complementary information in localization and visual-language relationships. Therefore, existing approaches adopt the two-stage "detect-then-describe/discriminate" pipeline, which relies heavily on the performance of the detector, resulting in suboptimal performance. Inspired by DETR, we propose a unified framework, 3DGCTR, to jointly solve these two distinct but closely related tasks in an end-to-end fashion. The key idea is to reconsider the prompt-based localization ability of the 3DVG model. In this way, the 3DVG model with a well-designed prompt as input can assist the 3DDC task by extracting localization information from the prompt. In terms of implementation, we integrate a Lightweight Caption Head into the existing 3DVG network with a Caption Text Prompt as a connection, effectively harnessing the existing 3DVG model's inherent localization capacity, thereby boosting 3DDC capability. This integration facilitates simultaneous multi-task training on both tasks, mutually enhancing their performance. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach. Specifically, on the ScanRefer dataset, 3DGCTR surpasses the state-of-the-art 3DDC method by 4.3% in CIDEr@0.5IoU in MLE training and improves upon the SOTA 3DVG method by 3.16% in Acc@0.25IoU. The codes are at https://github.com/Leon1207/3DGCTR.