# Talk2Radar: Bridging Natural Language with 4D mmWave Radar for 3D Referring Expression Comprehension

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.12821 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12821/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 53 of its 77 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3555/) (2014)
- [HuggingFace's Transformers: State-of-the-art Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03771/) (2019)
- [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)
- [YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08430/) (2021)
- [DriveLM: Driving with Graph Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14150/) (2023)
- [DeepGCNs: Can GCNs Go as Deep as CNNs?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03751/) (2019)
- [InternImage: Exploring Large-Scale Vision Foundation Models with Deformable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05778/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Multimodal Large Language Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12320/) (2023)
- [GRES: Generalized Referring Expression Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00968/) (2023)
- [VoxelNeXt: Fully Sparse VoxelNet for 3D Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11301/) (2023)
- [Talk2Car: Taking Control of Your Self-Driving Car](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10838/) (2019)
- [Multi-View Transformer for 3D Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02174/) (2022)
- [SeqTR: A Simple yet Universal Network for Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16265/) (2022)
- [Vision Language Models in Autonomous Driving: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14414/) (2023)
- [Language Conditioned Spatial Relation Reasoning for 3D Object Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09646/) (2022)
- [Language Prompt for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04379/) (2023)
- [K-Radar: 4D Radar Object Detection for Autonomous Driving in Various Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08171/) (2022)
- [Large Multimodal Agents: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15116/) (2024)
- [CenterFormer: Center-based Transformer for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05588/) (2022)
- [EDA: Explicit Text-Decoupling and Dense Alignment for 3D Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14941/) (2022)
- [LiDAR-LLM: Exploring the Potential of Large Language Models for 3D LiDAR Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14074/) (2023)
- [Referring Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03366/) (2023)
- [LanguageRefer: Spatial-Language Model for 3D Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03438/) (2021)
- [CRN: Camera Radar Net for Accurate, Robust, Efficient 3D Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00670/) (2023)
- [RCBEVDet: Radar-camera Fusion in Bird's Eye View for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16440/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [A Survey on Text-guided 3D Visual Grounding: Elements, Recent Advances, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05785/) (2024)
- [Doracamom: Joint 3D Detection and Occupancy Prediction with Multi-view 4D Radars and Cameras for Omnidirectional Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15394/) (2025)
- [radarODE-MTL: A Multi-Task Learning Framework with Eccentric Gradient Alignment for Robust Radar-Based ECG Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08656/) (2024)
- [MITO: A Millimeter-Wave Dataset and Simulator for Non-Line-of-Sight Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10259/) (2025)
- [RoadSceneVQA: Benchmarking Visual Question Answering in Roadside Perception Systems for Intelligent Transportation System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18286/) (2025)
- [AerialMind: Towards Referring Multi-Object Tracking in UAV Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21053/) (2025)
- [MetaOcc: Spatio-Temporal Fusion of Surround-View 4D Radar and Camera for 3D Occupancy Prediction with Dual Training Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15384/) (2025)
- [DVLO4D: Deep Visual-Lidar Odometry with Sparse Spatial-temporal Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06023/) (2025)
- [AI2MMUM: AI-AI Oriented Multi-Modal Universal Model Leveraging Telecom Domain Large Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10003/) (2025)
- [RadarNeXt: Real-Time and Reliable 3D Object Detector Based On 4D mmWave Imaging Radar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02314/) (2025)
- [DNOI-4DRO: Deep 4D Radar Odometry with Differentiable Neural-Optimization Iterations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12310/) (2025)
- [A Coarse-to-Fine Approach to Multi-Modality 3D Occupancy Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01197/) (2025)
- [Weather-Robust Scene Semantics with Vision-Aligned 4D Radar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07367/) (2026)
- [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)
- [Retrieve-to-Localize: Bridging Large Language Models and LiDAR Geometry for Spatial Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.29835/) (2026)
- [RCVLA: 4D Radar-Grounded Semantic Reasoning and Trajectory Arbitration for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32681/) (2026)
- [Answer with Evidence: Consistency-Aware Grounded Visual Question Answering for Roadside Traffic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.05274/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Embodied perception is essential for intelligent vehicles and robots in interactive environmental understanding. However, these advancements primarily focus on vision, with limited attention given to using 3D modeling sensors, restricting a comprehensive understanding of objects in response to prompts containing qualitative and quantitative queries. Recently, as a promising automotive sensor with affordable cost, 4D millimeter-wave radars provide denser point clouds than conventional radars and perceive both semantic and physical characteristics of objects, thereby enhancing the reliability of perception systems. To foster the development of natural language-driven context understanding in radar scenes for 3D visual grounding, we construct the first dataset, Talk2Radar, which bridges these two modalities for 3D Referring Expression Comprehension (REC). Talk2Radar contains 8,682 referring prompt samples with 20,558 referred objects. Moreover, we propose a novel model, T-RadarNet, for 3D REC on point clouds, achieving State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) performance on the Talk2Radar dataset compared to counterparts. Deformable-FPN and Gated Graph Fusion are meticulously designed for efficient point cloud feature modeling and cross-modal fusion between radar and text features, respectively. Comprehensive experiments provide deep insights into radar-based 3D REC. We release our project at https://github.com/GuanRunwei/Talk2Radar.