Think, Act, Build: An Agentic Framework with Vision Language Models for Zero-Shot 3D Visual Grounding
On the map: LLM reasoning → Spatial and embodied reasoning
also in 2 more
Abstract (arXiv)
3D Visual Grounding (3D-VG) aims to localize objects in 3D scenes via natural language descriptions. While recent advancements leveraging Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have explored zero-shot possibilities, they typically suffer from a static workflow relying on preprocessed 3D point clouds, essentially degrading grounding into proposal matching. To bypass this reliance, our core motivation is to decouple the task: leveraging 2D VLMs to resolve complex spatial semantics, while relying on deterministic multi-view geometry to instantiate the 3D structure. Driven by this insight, we propose "Think, Act, Build (TAB)", a dynamic agentic framework that reformulates 3D-VG tasks as a generative 2D-to-3D reconstruction paradigm operating directly on raw RGB-D streams. Specifically, guided by a specialized 3D-VG skill, our VLM agent dynamically invokes visual tools to track and reconstruct the target across 2D frames. Crucially, to overcome the multi-view coverage deficit caused by strict VLM semantic tracking, we introduce the Semantic-Anchored Geometric Expansion, a mechanism that first anchors the target in a reference video clip and then leverages multi-view geometry to propagate its spatial location across unobserved frames. This enables the agent to "Build" the target's 3D representation by aggregating these multi-view features via camera parameters, directly mapping 2D visual cues to 3D coordinates. Furthermore, to ensure rigorous assessment, we identify flaws such as reference ambiguity and category errors in existing benchmarks and manually refine the incorrect queries. Extensive experiments on ScanRefer and Nr3D demonstrate that our framework, relying entirely on open-source models, significantly outperforms previous zero-shot methods and even surpasses fully supervised baselines.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Spatial and embodied reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 41 of its 58 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 1 Apr 2026.
Builds on
41 of 58 references.
Closest ancestors · 4
Same direction, newest first
- 2025SeqVLM: Proposal-Guided Multi-View Sequences Reasoning via VLM for Zero-Shot 3D Visual Grounding28 Aug
- 2025SPAZER: Spatial-Semantic Progressive Reasoning Agent for Zero-shot 3D Visual Grounding27 Jun
- 20253DRS: MLLMs Need 3D-Aware Representation Supervision for Scene Understanding2 Jun
- 2024ScanReason: Empowering 3D Visual Grounding with Reasoning Capabilities1 Jul
Other references · 37
- 2023LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Modelscited by 13,958
- 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
- 2023Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detectioncited by 3,274
- 2017ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenescited by 3,088
- 2024OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 2,777
- 2024LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfercited by 2,669
- 2025Qwen3-VL Technical Reportcited by 2,534
- 2017Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environmentscited by 1,013
- 2025SAM 3: Segment Anything with Conceptscited by 835
- 2019ScanRefer: 3D Object Localization in RGB-D Scans using Natural Languagecited by 446
- 2023PointLLM: Empowering Large Language Models to Understand Point Cloudscited by 326
- 2024Molmo and PixMo: Open Weights and Open Data for State-of-the-Art Vision-Language Modelscited by 321
25 more
- 2022Mask3D: Mask Transformer for 3D Semantic Instance Segmentationcited by 299
- 2024LLaVA-3D: A Simple yet Effective Pathway to Empowering LMMs with 3D-awarenesscited by 178
- 2023Chat-Scene: Bridging 3D Scene and Large Language Models with Object Identifierscited by 170
- 2021InstanceRefer: Cooperative Holistic Understanding for Visual Grounding on Point Clouds through Instance Multi-level Contextual Referringcited by 140
- 2023LLM-Grounder: Open-Vocabulary 3D Visual Grounding with Large Language Model as an Agentcited by 134
- 2024Video-3D LLM: Learning Position-Aware Video Representation for 3D Scene Understandingcited by 131
- 2024SceneVerse: Scaling 3D Vision-Language Learning for Grounded Scene Understandingcited by 130
- 2021Bottom Up Top Down Detection Transformers for Language Grounding in Images and Point Cloudscited by 128
- 2025From Flatland to Space: Teaching Vision-Language Models to Perceive and Reason in 3Dcited by 127
- 2025Learning from Videos for 3D World: Enhancing MLLMs with 3D Vision Geometry Priorscited by 111
- 2025GPT4Scene: Understand 3D Scenes from Videos with Vision-Language Modelscited by 106
- 2022EDA: Explicit Text-Decoupling and Dense Alignment for 3D Visual Groundingcited by 98
- 2021LanguageRefer: Spatial-Language Model for 3D Visual Groundingcited by 88
- 2024SeeGround: See and Ground for Zero-Shot Open-Vocabulary 3D Visual Groundingcited by 66
- 2023Visual Programming for Zero-shot Open-Vocabulary 3D Visual Groundingcited by 64
- 2025SpatialLM: Training Large Language Models for Structured Indoor Modelingcited by 63
- 2025Ross3D: Reconstructive Visual Instruction Tuning with 3D-Awarenesscited by 61
- 2024VLM-Grounder: A VLM Agent for Zero-Shot 3D Visual Groundingcited by 56
- 2025StreamBridge: Turning Your Offline Video Large Language Model into a Proactive Streaming Assistantcited by 56
- 2021D3Net: A Unified Speaker-Listener Architecture for 3D Dense Captioning and Visual Groundingcited by 52
- 2025SlowFast-LLaVA-1.5: A Family of Token-Efficient Video Large Language Models for Long-Form Video Understandingcited by 30
- 2024Agent3D-Zero: An Agent for Zero-shot 3D Understandingcited by 29
- 2024Multi-branch Collaborative Learning Network for 3D Visual Groundingcited by 20
- 2024Solving Zero-Shot 3D Visual Grounding as Constraint Satisfaction Problemscited by 7
- 2025Language-to-Space Programming for Training-Free 3D Visual Groundingcited by 7
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- 2026AgentGrounder: Zero-Shot 3D Visual Pointcloud Grounding using Multimodal Language Models
- 2025View-on-Graph: Zero-shot 3D Visual Grounding via Vision-Language Reasoning on Scene Graphs
- 2025Zero-Shot 3D Visual Grounding from Vision-Language Models
- 2026UniGround: Universal 3D Visual Grounding via Training-Free Scene Parsing
- 2026Scaling Diverse Language Generation for 3D Visual Grounding
- 2026SceneGraphGrounder: Zero-Shot 3D Visual Grounding via Structured Scene Graph Matching
- 2025OpenGround: Planning-based Online Perception for Open-World 3D Visual Grounding
- 2026Grounded 3D-Aware Spatial Vision-Language Modeling