mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

3D-RFT: Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Video-based 3D Scene Understanding

arXiv 2603.04976 ↗First posted 5 Mar 2026cs.CV cs.AIcited by 1

On the map: LLM reasoning → Multimodal reasoning

Abstract (arXiv)

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards ( RLVR ) has emerged as a transformative paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models ( LLMs), yet its potential in 3D scene understanding remains under-explored. Existing approaches largely rely on Supervised Fine-Tuning ( SFT), where the token-level cross-entropy loss acts as an indirect proxy for optimization, leading to a misalignment between training objectives and task performances. To bridge this gap, we present Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Video-based 3D Scene Understanding (3D-RFT ), the first framework to extend RLVR to video-based 3D perception and reasoning. 3D-RFT shifts the paradigm by directly optimizing the model towards evaluation metrics. 3D-RFT first activates 3D-aware Multi-modal Large Language Models ( MLLM s) via SFT, followed by reinforcement fine-tuning using Group Relative Policy Optimization ( GRPO) with strictly verifiable reward functions. We design task-specific reward functions directly from metrics like 3D IoU and F1-Score to provide more effective signals to guide model training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that 3D-RFT-4B achieves state-of-the-art performance on various video-based 3D scene understanding tasks. Notably, 3D-RFT-4B significantly outperforms larger models (e.g., VG LLM-8B) on 3D video detection, 3D visual grounding, and spatial reasoning benchmarks. We further reveal good properties of 3D-RFT such as robust efficacy, and valuable insights into training strategies and data impact. We hope 3D-RFT can serve as a robust and promising paradigm for future development of 3D scene understanding.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 102 of its 117 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 5 Mar 2026.

Builds on

102 of 117 references.

Closest ancestors · 9

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Rethinking Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Videos10 Dec
  2. 2025Grounded Reinforcement Learning for Visual Reasoning29 May
  3. 2025VideoRFT: Incentivizing Video Reasoning Capability in MLLMs via Reinforced Fine-Tuning18 May
  4. 2025VideoChat-R1: Enhancing Spatio-Temporal Perception via Reinforcement Fine-Tuning9 Apr
  5. 2025Video-R1: Reinforcing Video Reasoning in MLLMs27 Mar
  6. 2025Vision-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in Multimodal Large Language Models9 Mar
  7. 2025Visual-RFT: Visual Reinforcement Fine-Tuning3 Mar
  8. 2024Video-of-Thought: Step-by-Step Video Reasoning from Perception to Cognition7 May
  9. 2024Visual CoT: Advancing Multi-Modal Language Models with a Comprehensive Dataset and Benchmark for Chain-of-Thought Reasoning25 Mar

Other references · 93

  1. 2017Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithmscited by 15,215
  2. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 9,379
  3. 2023Visual Instruction Tuningcited by 7,869
  4. 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,587
  5. 2024GPT-4o System Cardcited by 4,588
  6. 2025Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilitiescited by 3,796
  7. 2017ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenescited by 3,117
  8. 2023RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Controlcited by 3,080
  9. 2025DAPO: An Open-Source LLM Reinforcement Learning System at Scalecited by 2,810
  10. 2025Qwen3-VL Technical Reportcited by 2,793
  11. 2023PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Modelcited by 2,071
  12. 2025InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Modelscited by 1,834
38 more
  1. 2025VGGT: Visual Geometry Grounded Transformercited by 1,539
  2. 2025Understanding R1-Zero-Like Training: A Critical Perspectivecited by 1,345
  3. 2025Kimi k1.5: Scaling Reinforcement Learning with LLMscited by 1,210
  4. 2025Does Reinforcement Learning Really Incentivize Reasoning Capacity in LLMs Beyond the Base Model?cited by 982
  5. 2025Group Sequence Policy Optimizationcited by 835
  6. 2023ScanNet++: A High-Fidelity Dataset of 3D Indoor Scenescited by 764
  7. 2024SpatialVLM: Endowing Vision-Language Models with Spatial Reasoning Capabilitiescited by 706
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  10. 2021ARKitScenes: A Diverse Real-World Dataset For 3D Indoor Scene Understanding Using Mobile RGB-D Datacited by 454
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  12. 2024LMMs-Eval: Reality Check on the Evaluation of Large Multimodal Modelscited by 353
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  15. 2024SpatialRGPT: Grounded Spatial Reasoning in Vision Language Modelscited by 311
  16. 2025Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards Implicitly Incentivizes Correct Reasoning in Base LLMscited by 289
  17. 2020Scan2Cap: Context-aware Dense Captioning in RGB-D Scanscited by 218
  18. 2025Spatial-MLLM: Boosting MLLM Capabilities in Visual-based Spatial Intelligencecited by 217
  19. 2024NaVILA: Legged Robot Vision-Language-Action Model for Navigationcited by 211
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  30. 2022Multi-View Transformer for 3D Visual Groundingcited by 140
  31. 2023Towards Learning a Generalist Model for Embodied Navigationcited by 138
  32. 2024Video-3D LLM: Learning Position-Aware Video Representation for 3D Scene Understandingcited by 138
  33. 2025From Flatland to Space: Teaching Vision-Language Models to Perceive and Reason in 3Dcited by 138
  34. 2024RoboSpatial: Teaching Spatial Understanding to 2D and 3D Vision-Language Models for Roboticscited by 136
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  38. 2025RoboRefer: Towards Spatial Referring with Reasoning in Vision-Language Models for Roboticscited by 127

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Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.

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  1. 2025Reason-RFT: Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Visual Reasoning of Vision Language Models
  2. 2026PointRFT: Explicit Reinforcement Fine-tuning for Point Cloud Few-shot Learning
  3. 2025Reinforcement Learning Tuning for VideoLLMs: Reward Design and Data Efficiency
  4. 20243DMIT: 3D Multi-modal Instruction Tuning for Scene Understanding
  5. 2025Exploring the Effect of Reinforcement Learning on Video Understanding: Insights from SEED-Bench-R1
  6. 20253D-Aware Vision-Language Models Fine-Tuning with Geometric Distillation
  7. 2025VIDEOP2R: Video Understanding from Perception to Reasoning
  8. 2025MetaSpatial: Reinforcing 3D Spatial Reasoning in VLMs for the Metaverse