# CoRef-GS: Cooperative Referring Gaussian Splatting for Multi-Agent Scene Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20586 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.20586/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [Qwen3-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21631/) (2025)
- [SuperPoint: Self-Supervised Interest Point Detection and Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07629/) (2017)
- [SigLIP 2: Multilingual Vision-Language Encoders with Improved Semantic Understanding, Localization, and Dense Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14786/) (2025)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07280/) (2017)
- [NetVLAD: CNN architecture for weakly supervised place recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07247/) (2015)
- [ALFRED: A Benchmark for Interpreting Grounded Instructions for Everyday Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01734/) (2019)
- [Language-driven Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03546/) (2022)
- [LightGlue: Local Feature Matching at Light Speed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13643/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Beyond the Nav-Graph: Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02857/) (2020)
- [LangSplat: 3D Language Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16084/) (2023)
- [OpenGaussian: Towards Point-Level 3D Gaussian-based Open Vocabulary Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02058/) (2024)
- [Dr. Splat: Directly Referring 3D Gaussian Splatting via Direct Language Embedding Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16652/) (2025)
- [COHERENT: Collaboration of Heterogeneous Multi-Robot System with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15146/) (2024)
- [LangSplatV2: High-dimensional 3D Language Gaussian Splatting with 450+ FPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07136/) (2025)
- [FastLGS: Speeding up Language Embedded Gaussians with Feature Grid Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01916/) (2024)
- [SGFormer: Semantic Graph Transformer for Point Cloud-based 3D Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11048/) (2023)
- [LM-Gaussian: Boost Sparse-view 3D Gaussian Splatting with Large Model Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.03456/) (2024)
- [ReasonGrounder: LVLM-Guided Hierarchical Feature Splatting for Open-Vocabulary 3D Visual Grounding and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23297/) (2025)
- [ReferSplat: Referring Segmentation in 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08252/) (2025)
- [AirCopBench: A Benchmark for Multi-drone Collaborative Embodied Perception and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.11025/) (2025)
- [GaussReg: Fast 3D Registration with Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05254/) (2024)
- [SLGaussian: Fast Language Gaussian Splatting in Sparse Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08331/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Referring scene understanding for embodied robots requires grounding object- and relation-centric language queries from a designated viewpoint. While a local semantic Gaussian map can support such grounding within one agent's observations, cooperative settings require this ability to remain effective after independently reconstructed maps are aligned and fused. In this setting, the referred target or its contextual landmark may come from another agent's observations, while spatial relations must still be interpreted from the querying robot's viewpoint. We formulate this problem as cooperative referring Gaussian grounding over fused maps, which requires geometric alignability, instance-level semantic comparability, and view-conditioned relation reasoning. Existing language-aware Gaussian methods mainly focus on single-map querying, whereas Gaussian registration methods optimize geometric or photometric alignment without preserving language-grounding-oriented semantic compatibility. We propose CoRef-GS, a cooperative referring Gaussian splatting framework. CoRef-GS constructs local open-vocabulary instance-aware Gaussian maps, then aligns partially overlapping maps with a cross-agent alignment module by geometric and semantic consistency, and grounds queries using a view-conditioned mask relation graph. We further introduce CoQuad-Ref, a dual-quadruped benchmark spanning both real-world and simulated indoor scenes. Experiments show that, on simulated scenes, CoRef-GS reduces the rotation error from 2.58deg after coarse initialization to 0.15deg after refinement, and improves real-world referring mIoU over ReferSplat from 52.6% to 68.8%. The established benchmark and source code will be publicly released at https://github.com/ruojiruoli17/CoRef-GS.git.