mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

CitySTAR: Structured and Topology-Aware Reasoning for Open-Vocabulary Urban 3D Grounding

arXiv 2609.19911 ↗First posted 17 Sep 2026cs.CVcited by 0

On the map: LLM reasoning → Spatial and embodied reasoning

Abstract (arXiv)

3D grounding aims to localize target entities in complex scenes from natural language and plays a fundamental role in embodied perception and spatial reasoning. However, existing approaches mostly rely on feature similarity or direct matching, making it difficult to connect natural-language intent with the implicit semantic and geometric structures hidden in billion-scale urban point clouds. We reformulate city-scale 3D grounding as structured constraint reasoning, where description semantics are organized into computable cross-modal constraints over open-vocabulary 3D entities, attributes, and spatial relations. We present CitySTAR, a training-free framework for reasoning-driven urban 3D grounding. CitySTAR lifts raw billion-scale urban point clouds into a query-ready scene graph of open-vocabulary 3D instances, with CodeLLM-driven tools supplying multimodal evidence for node attributes and 3D spatial relations. It then models target-context topology with paired hypergraphs and performs bidirectional topology verification for structural disambiguation. Finally, a Reflective Cross-modal Grounding module integrates topology consistency and candidate-centered 2D visual evidence to make decisions over a metric-aware 3D context graph. To further support this setting, we introduce CitySTAR-3D, an enhanced benchmark that improves semantic coverage, instance completeness, bounding-box fidelity, and spatial-relation complexity in city-scale 3D grounding. Extensive experiments show that CitySTAR consistently improves open-world urban 3D grounding while maintaining strong interpretability and generalization.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Spatial and embodied reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 30 of its 37 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 17 Sep 2026.

Builds on

30 of 37 references.

Closest ancestors · 4

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025View-on-Graph: Zero-shot 3D Visual Grounding via Vision-Language Reasoning on Scene Graphs10 Dec
  2. 2025ReasonGrounder: LVLM-Guided Hierarchical Feature Splatting for Open-Vocabulary 3D Visual Grounding and Reasoning30 Mar
  3. 2024Scene-LLM: Extending Language Model for 3D Visual Understanding and Reasoning18 Mar
  4. 2023LL3DA: Visual Interactive Instruction Tuning for Omni-3D Understanding, Reasoning, and Planning30 Nov

Other references · 26

  1. 2017ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenescited by 3,117
  2. 2019ScanRefer: 3D Object Localization in RGB-D Scans using Natural Languagecited by 452
  3. 2023ConceptGraphs: Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Graphs for Perception and Planningcited by 365
  4. 2021TransVG: End-to-End Visual Grounding with Transformerscited by 271
  5. 2018Touchdown: Natural Language Navigation and Spatial Reasoning in Visual Street Environmentscited by 239
  6. 2023Point-Bind & Point-LLM: Aligning Point Cloud with Multi-modality for 3D Understanding, Generation, and Instruction Followingcited by 194
  7. 2023LAMM: Language-Assisted Multi-Modal Instruction-Tuning Dataset, Framework, and Benchmarkcited by 169
  8. 2022Multi-View Transformer for 3D Visual Groundingcited by 140
  9. 2023LLM-Grounder: Open-Vocabulary 3D Visual Grounding with Large Language Model as an Agentcited by 135
  10. 2021SAT: 2D Semantics Assisted Training for 3D Visual Groundingcited by 124
  11. 2022RSVG: Exploring Data and Models for Visual Grounding on Remote Sensing Datacited by 123
  12. 2021LanguageRefer: Spatial-Language Model for 3D Visual Groundingcited by 89
14 more
  1. 2024SeeGround: See and Ground for Zero-Shot Open-Vocabulary 3D Visual Groundingcited by 67
  2. 2025Move to Understand a 3D Scene: Bridging Visual Grounding and Exploration for Efficient and Versatile Embodied Navigationcited by 51
  3. 2024MiniGPT-3D: Efficiently Aligning 3D Point Clouds with Large Language Models using 2D Priorscited by 49
  4. 2024Generative Gaussian Splatting for Unbounded 3D City Generationcited by 44
  5. 2022Text2Pos: Text-to-Point-Cloud Cross-Modal Localizationcited by 40
  6. 20243DMIT: 3D Multi-modal Instruction Tuning for Scene Understandingcited by 32
  7. 2024Agent3D-Zero: An Agent for Zero-shot 3D Understandingcited by 29
  8. 2024A Survey on Text-guided 3D Visual Grounding: Elements, Recent Advances, and Future Directionscited by 25
  9. 20253EED: Ground Everything Everywhere in 3Dcited by 12
  10. 2024Emergent Visual Grounding in Large Multimodal Models Without Grounding Supervisioncited by 9
  11. 2025SpatialLLM: From Multi-modality Data to Urban Spatial Intelligencecited by 8
  12. 2025ViewSRD: 3D Visual Grounding via Structured Multi-View Decompositioncited by 8
  13. 2025City-VLM: Towards Multidomain Perception Scene Understanding via Multimodal Incomplete Learningcited by 3
  14. 20263DCity-LLM: Empowering Multi-modality Large Language Models for 3D City-scale Perception and Understandingcited by 1

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  1. 2025S2-MLLM: Boosting Spatial Reasoning Capability of MLLMs for 3D Visual Grounding with Structural Guidance
  2. 2026SSR: Pushing the Limit of Spatial Intelligence with Structured Scene Reasoning
  3. 2025Reasoning in Space via Grounding in the World
  4. 2026SSR3D-LLM: Structured Spatial Reasoning via Latent Steps for Fine-Grained Grounding in Unified 3D-LLMs
  5. 2025A Neural Representation Framework with LLM-Driven Spatial Reasoning for Open-Vocabulary 3D Visual Grounding
  6. 2026UniGround: Universal 3D Visual Grounding via Training-Free Scene Parsing
  7. 2026Thinking in Structures: Evaluating Spatial Intelligence in Constraint-Governed Spaces
  8. 2026SceneGraphGrounder: Zero-Shot 3D Visual Grounding via Structured Scene Graph Matching