# RefGuard: Identity-Aware Language-Guided Robot Manipulation via Joint Target-Anchor-Frame Grounding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06221 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06221/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in 3D and spatial-aware VLA, one of 13 directions in Vision-language-action models.
- Builds on 23 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- Vision-language-action models / [3D and spatial-aware VLA](https://mlsanity.com/vla/3d-and-spatial-aware-vla/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15818/) (2023)
- [OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09246/) (2024)
- [Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01691/) (2022)
- [π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16054/) (2025)
- [GR00T N1: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Humanoid Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14734/) (2025)
- [Code as Policies: Language Model Programs for Embodied Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07753/) (2022)
- [SAM 3: Segment Anything with Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16719/) (2025)
- [VoxPoser: Composable 3D Value Maps for Robotic Manipulation with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05973/) (2023)
- [CLIPort: What and Where Pathways for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12098/) (2021)
- [Ferret: Refer and Ground Anything Anywhere at Any Granularity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07704/) (2023)
- [ReKep: Spatio-Temporal Reasoning of Relational Keypoint Constraints for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01652/) (2024)
- [SpatialRGPT: Grounded Spatial Reasoning in Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01584/) (2024)
- [Robots That Ask For Help: Uncertainty Alignment for Large Language Model Planners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01928/) (2023)
- [RoboPoint: A Vision-Language Model for Spatial Affordance Prediction for Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10721/) (2024)
- [DexVLA: Vision-Language Model with Plug-In Diffusion Expert for General Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05855/) (2025)
- [RoboRefer: Towards Spatial Referring with Reasoning in Vision-Language Models for Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04308/) (2025)
- [SAMURAI: Adapting Segment Anything Model for Zero-Shot Visual Tracking with Motion-Aware Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11922/) (2024)
- [LeRobot: An Open-Source Library for End-to-End Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22818/) (2026)
- [CLARA: Classifying and Disambiguating User Commands for Reliable Interactive Robotic Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10376/) (2023)
- [What Foundation Models can Bring for Robot Learning in Manipulation : A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18201/) (2024)
- [HiFi-CS: Towards Open Vocabulary Visual Grounding For Robotic Grasping Using Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10419/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have substantially advanced language-guided robot manipulation, yet reliable execution still hinges on identifying which physical object an instruction refers to. In cluttered scenes containing repeated objects, ambiguous anchors, or frame-dependent spatial terms, a robot can execute a geometrically valid action on a semantically compatible but unintended instance; we call this failure an identity switch. The referent is jointly determined by three coupled latent variables: the target, the anchor, and the reference frame, so committing to any one of them before execution turns residual ambiguity into a silent and irreversible error. We propose RefGuard, an identity-aware grounding framework that delays commitment by maintaining a joint posterior over all three variables. RefGuard builds a frame-conditioned object-centric scene graph from RGB-D observations, separating frame-independent geometry from directional relations, and routes the posterior through a decision policy that executes, clarifies, reobserves, or aborts. On a real UF850 arm, RefGuard records no identity switch on any ambiguity-stress trial and executes correctly on 90.0% of them, whereas fine-tuned VLA and LLM (Large Language Model)-based baselines switch identity in 33-46% of the same trials, while retaining 93.3% success on unambiguous scenes and recovering from post-grounding scene changes in 86.7% of trials. On a 3200-episode procedural suite, it raises correct execution on solvable instructions from 56.6% to 80.5% over the ablation that commits to the anchor and frame before the target, while deferring less often (19.5% vs. 43.4%).