# TempoGround: State-Aware Streaming Visual Grounding with Vision-Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02359 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.02359/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 28 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/vlm-benchmarks-and-visual-reasoning/)

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

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [Flickr30k Entities: Collecting Region-to-Phrase Correspondences for Richer Image-to-Sentence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04870/) (2015)
- [BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04687/) (2018)
- [LVIS: A Dataset for Large Vocabulary Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03195/) (2019)
- [Modeling Context in Referring Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00272/) (2016)
- [Shikra: Unleashing Multimodal LLM's Referential Dialogue Magic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15195/) (2023)
- [ScanNet++: A High-Fidelity Dataset of 3D Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11417/) (2023)
- [Hypersim: A Photorealistic Synthetic Dataset for Holistic Indoor Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02523/) (2020)
- [GLaMM: Pixel Grounding Large Multimodal Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03356/) (2023)
- [ARKitScenes: A Diverse Real-World Dataset For 3D Indoor Scene Understanding Using Mobile RGB-D Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08897/) (2021)
- [An Embodied Generalist Agent in 3D World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12871/) (2023)
- [SWIFT:A Scalable lightWeight Infrastructure for Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05517/) (2024)
- [Chat-Scene: Bridging 3D Scene and Large Language Models with Object Identifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08168/) (2023)
- [Aria Digital Twin: A New Benchmark Dataset for Egocentric 3D Machine Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06362/) (2023)
- [VLM-3R: Vision-Language Models Augmented with Instruction-Aligned 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20279/) (2025)
- [EmbodiedScan: A Holistic Multi-Modal 3D Perception Suite Towards Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16170/) (2023)
- [PACO: Parts and Attributes of Common Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01795/) (2023)
- [Learning from Videos for 3D World: Enhancing MLLMs with 3D Vision Geometry Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24625/) (2025)
- [SceneScript: Reconstructing Scenes With An Autoregressive Structured Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13064/) (2024)
- [V3Det: Vast Vocabulary Visual Detection Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03752/) (2023)
- [Detect Anything via Next Point Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12798/) (2025)
- [LocateAnything: Fast and High-Quality Vision-Language Grounding with Parallel Box Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.27365/) (2026)
- [LocateAnything3D: Vision-Language 3D Detection with Chain-of-Sight](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20648/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visual grounding maps language referents to spatial targets and is central to open-vocabulary perception with vision-language models. Existing methods have made substantial progress on single-frame and video-based visual grounding, yet under streaming inputs they still suffer from identity drift, cross-frame inconsistency, and fragile localization under partial occlusion. To address these issues, we present TempoGround, a VLM-native framework that detects cross-frame object correspondence and explicitly models object presence states, thereby enabling accurate and consistent visual grounding under streaming inputs. The key is a curriculum prediction mechanism guided by state-aware cross-frame correspondence: TempoGround resolves 2D instance association, predicts whether each object newly enters, continues in, or leaves the view, decodes the 2D box, and then lifts it to a camera-frame 3D box. As token-level supervision alone cannot capture the geometric objectives of streaming grounding, we further introduce Streaming Grounding Reinforcement (SGR), which optimizes TempoGround with verifiable Grounding, Identity, and Consistency rewards, jointly reinforcing persistent localization and temporally consistent predictions. We carefully design a three-stage training strategy and train TempoGround on large-scale data. We evaluate visual grounding under causally streaming inputs on multiple challenging benchmarks: TempoGround improves F1_2D@0.5 and F1_2D@0.95 by 4.4 and 0.5 on average, and F1_3D@0.25 and AP_3D by 6.2 and 7.5, respectively. These results demonstrate that TempoGround provides a practical foundation for visual grounding under streaming inputs.