# Reasoning Matters for 3D Visual Grounding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08811 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08811/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Spatial and embodied reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 28 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jan 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Spatial and embodied reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/spatial-and-embodied-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [OpenScene: 3D Scene Understanding with Open Vocabularies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15654/) (2022)
- [LERF: Language Embedded Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09553/) (2023)
- [ScanRefer: 3D Object Localization in RGB-D Scans using Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08830/) (2019)
- [LayoutGPT: Compositional Visual Planning and Generation with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15393/) (2023)
- [Mask3D: Mask Transformer for 3D Semantic Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03105/) (2022)
- [Holodeck: Language Guided Generation of 3D Embodied AI Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09067/) (2023)
- [Scan2Cap: Context-aware Dense Captioning in RGB-D Scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02206/) (2020)
- [3D-VisTA: Pre-trained Transformer for 3D Vision and Text Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04352/) (2023)
- [InstanceRefer: Cooperative Holistic Understanding for Visual Grounding on Point Clouds through Instance Multi-level Contextual Referring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01128/) (2021)
- [Multi-View Transformer for 3D Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02174/) (2022)
- [LLM-Grounder: Open-Vocabulary 3D Visual Grounding with Large Language Model as an Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12311/) (2023)
- [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)
- [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)
- [UniT3D: A Unified Transformer for 3D Dense Captioning and Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00836/) (2022)
- [SeeGround: See and Ground for Zero-Shot Open-Vocabulary 3D Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04383/) (2024)
- [Visual Programming for Zero-shot Open-Vocabulary 3D Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15383/) (2023)
- [3D-GRAND: A Million-Scale Dataset for 3D-LLMs with Better Grounding and Less Hallucination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05132/) (2024)
- [Four Ways to Improve Verbo-visual Fusion for Dense 3D Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04561/) (2023)
- [Multi-branch Collaborative Learning Network for 3D Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05363/) (2024)
- [Distilling Coarse-to-Fine Semantic Matching Knowledge for Weakly Supervised 3D Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09267/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The recent development of Large Language Models (LLMs) with strong reasoning ability has driven research in various domains such as mathematics, coding, and scientific discovery. Meanwhile, 3D visual grounding, as a fundamental task in 3D understanding, still remains challenging due to the limited reasoning ability of recent 3D visual grounding models. Most of the current methods incorporate a text encoder and visual feature encoder to generate cross-modal fuse features and predict the referring object. These models often require supervised training on extensive 3D annotation data. On the other hand, recent research also focus on scaling synthetic data to train stronger 3D visual grounding LLM, however, the performance gain remains limited and non-proportional to the data collection cost. In this work, we propose a 3D visual grounding data pipeline, which is capable of automatically synthesizing 3D visual grounding data along with corresponding reasoning process. Additionally, we leverage the generated data for LLM fine-tuning and introduce Reason3DVG-8B, a strong 3D visual grounding LLM that outperforms previous LLM-based method 3D-GRAND using only 1.6% of their training data, demonstrating the effectiveness of our data and the importance of reasoning in 3D visual grounding.