# SceneGraphGrounder: Zero-Shot 3D Visual Grounding via Structured Scene Graph Matching

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.21788 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.21788/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 May 2026.

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

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [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)
- [ConceptGraphs: Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Graphs for Perception and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16650/) (2023)
- [Learning 3D Semantic Scene Graphs from 3D Indoor Reconstructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03967/) (2020)
- [3D-VisTA: Pre-trained Transformer for 3D Vision and Text Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04352/) (2023)
- [SceneGraphFusion: Incremental 3D Scene Graph Prediction from RGB-D Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14898/) (2021)
- [InstanceRefer: Cooperative Holistic Understanding for Visual Grounding on Point Clouds through Instance Multi-level Contextual Referring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01128/) (2021)
- [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)
- [EDA: Explicit Text-Decoupling and Dense Alignment for 3D Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14941/) (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)
- [VLM-Grounder: A VLM Agent for Zero-Shot 3D Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13860/) (2024)
- [Exploiting Edge-Oriented Reasoning for 3D Point-based Scene Graph Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05558/) (2021)
- [VL-SAT: Visual-Linguistic Semantics Assisted Training for 3D Semantic Scene Graph Prediction in Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14408/) (2023)
- [Incremental 3D Semantic Scene Graph Prediction from RGB Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02743/) (2023)
- [Visually-Prompted Language Model for Fine-Grained Scene Graph Generation in an Open World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13233/) (2023)
- [Beyond Bare Queries: Open-Vocabulary Object Grounding with 3D Scene Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07113/) (2024)
- [Expanding Scene Graph Boundaries: Fully Open-vocabulary Scene Graph Generation via Visual-Concept Alignment and Retention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10988/) (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)
- [Scene Graph Generation with Role-Playing Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15364/) (2024)
- [LLaVA-SpaceSGG: Visual Instruct Tuning for Open-vocabulary Scene Graph Generation with Enhanced Spatial Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06322/) (2024)
- [Task and Motion Planning in Hierarchical 3D Scene Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08094/) (2024)
- [Relation-aware Hierarchical Prompt for Open-vocabulary Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19021/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Zero-shot 3D visual grounding requires localizing objects in unstructured environments from free-form natural language. Recent vision-language model (VLM) approaches achieve promising results but rely on view-dependent reasoning or implicit representations, limiting spatial consistency and interpretability for compositional queries. We propose SceneGraphGrounder, a framework that reformulates 3D grounding as structured graph matching over a reconstructed 3D scene graph. To enable this formulation, we introduce a visual marker prompting strategy that enables a VLM to infer object-object relationships from 2D views, which are subsequently lifted into a persistent 3D scene graph encoding both spatial and semantic relations. Given a query, we construct a query graph and perform constrained alignment with the scene graph, ensuring multi-view consistency and interpretable reasoning. Experiments on the ScanRefer benchmark demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance among zero-shot approaches, using only RGB-D inputs. We further validate our framework through real-world deployment on a mobile robot, demonstrating robust spatial reasoning in long-horizon physical environments. We will make our code publicly available upon acceptance.