Daichi Azuma

Koya Sakamoto, Taiki Miyanishi, Daichi Azuma et al.

Visual search in 3D environments requires embodied agents to actively explore their surroundings and acquire task-relevant evidence. However, existing visual search and embodied AI benchmarks, including EQA, typically rely on static observations or constrained egocentric motion, and thus do not explicitly evaluate fine-grained viewpoint-dependent phenomena that arise under unrestricted 5-DoF viewpoint control in real-world 3D environments, such as visibility changes caused by vertical viewpoint shifts, revealing contents inside containers, and disambiguating object attributes that are only observable from specific angles. To address this limitation, we introduce {E3VS-Bench}, a benchmark for embodied 3D visual search where agents must control their viewpoints in 5-DoF to gather viewpoint-dependent evidence for question answering. E3VS-Bench consists of 99 high-fidelity 3D scenes reconstructed using 3D Gaussian Splatting and 2,014 question-driven episodes. 3D Gaussian Splatting enables photorealistic free-viewpoint rendering that preserves fine-grained visual details (e.g., small text and subtle attributes) often degraded in mesh-based simulators, thereby allowing the construction of questions that cannot be answered from a single view and instead require active inspection across viewpoints in 5-DoF. We evaluate multiple state-of-the-art VLMs and compare their performance with humans. Despite strong 2D reasoning ability, all models exhibit a substantial gap from humans, highlighting limitations in active perception and coherent viewpoint planning specifically under full 5-DoF viewpoint changes.

Daichi Azuma, Taiki Miyanishi, Shuhei Kurita et al.

In an era characterized by advancements in artificial intelligence and robotics, enabling machines to interact with and understand their environment is a critical research endeavor. In this paper, we propose Answerability Fields, a novel approach to predicting answerability within complex indoor environments. Leveraging a 3D question answering dataset, we construct a comprehensive Answerability Fields dataset, encompassing diverse scenes and questions from ScanNet. Using a diffusion model, we successfully infer and evaluate these Answerability Fields, demonstrating the importance of objects and their locations in answering questions within a scene. Our results showcase the efficacy of Answerability Fields in guiding scene-understanding tasks, laying the foundation for their application in enhancing interactions between intelligent agents and their environments.

Shunsuke Yasuki, Taiki Miyanishi, Nakamasa Inoue et al.

The advancement of 3D language fields has enabled intuitive interactions with 3D scenes via natural language. However, existing approaches are typically limited to small-scale environments, lacking the scalability and compositional reasoning capabilities necessary for large, complex urban settings. To overcome these limitations, we propose GeoProg3D, a visual programming framework that enables natural language-driven interactions with city-scale high-fidelity 3D scenes. GeoProg3D consists of two key components: (i) a Geography-aware City-scale 3D Language Field (GCLF) that leverages a memory-efficient hierarchical 3D model to handle large-scale data, integrated with geographic information for efficiently filtering vast urban spaces using directional cues, distance measurements, elevation data, and landmark references; and (ii) Geographical Vision APIs (GV-APIs), specialized geographic vision tools such as area segmentation and object detection. Our framework employs large language models (LLMs) as reasoning engines to dynamically combine GV-APIs and operate GCLF, effectively supporting diverse geographic vision tasks. To assess performance in city-scale reasoning, we introduce GeoEval3D, a comprehensive benchmark dataset containing 952 query-answer pairs across five challenging tasks: grounding, spatial reasoning, comparison, counting, and measurement. Experiments demonstrate that GeoProg3D significantly outperforms existing 3D language fields and vision-language models across multiple tasks. To our knowledge, GeoProg3D is the first framework enabling compositional geographic reasoning in high-fidelity city-scale 3D environments via natural language. The code is available at https://snskysk.github.io/GeoProg3D/.

Jungdae Lee, Taiki Miyanishi, Shuhei Kurita et al.

Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) aims to develop agents capable of navigating in realistic environments. While recent cross-modal training approaches have significantly improved navigation performance in both indoor and outdoor scenarios, aerial navigation over real-world cities remains underexplored primarily due to limited datasets and the difficulty of integrating visual and geographic information. To fill this gap, we introduce CityNav, the first large-scale real-world dataset for aerial VLN. Our dataset consists of 32,637 human demonstration trajectories, each paired with a natural language description, covering 4.65 km$^2$ across two real cities: Cambridge and Birmingham. In contrast to existing datasets composed of synthetic scenes such as AerialVLN, our dataset presents a unique challenge because agents must interpret spatial relationships between real-world landmarks and the navigation destination, making CityNav an essential benchmark for advancing aerial VLN. Furthermore, as an initial step toward addressing this challenge, we provide a methodology of creating geographic semantic maps that can be used as an auxiliary modality input during navigation. In our experiments, we compare performance of three representative aerial VLN agents (Seq2seq, CMA and AerialVLN models) and demonstrate that the semantic map representation significantly improves their navigation performance.

Taiki Miyanishi, Daichi Azuma, Shuhei Kurita et al.

We present a novel task for cross-dataset visual grounding in 3D scenes (Cross3DVG), which overcomes limitations of existing 3D visual grounding models, specifically their restricted 3D resources and consequent tendencies of overfitting a specific 3D dataset. We created RIORefer, a large-scale 3D visual grounding dataset, to facilitate Cross3DVG. It includes more than 63k diverse descriptions of 3D objects within 1,380 indoor RGB-D scans from 3RScan, with human annotations. After training the Cross3DVG model using the source 3D visual grounding dataset, we evaluate it without target labels using the target dataset with, e.g., different sensors, 3D reconstruction methods, and language annotators. Comprehensive experiments are conducted using established visual grounding models and with CLIP-based multi-view 2D and 3D integration designed to bridge gaps among 3D datasets. For Cross3DVG tasks, (i) cross-dataset 3D visual grounding exhibits significantly worse performance than learning and evaluation with a single dataset because of the 3D data and language variants across datasets. Moreover, (ii) better object detector and localization modules and fusing 3D data and multi-view CLIP-based image features can alleviate this lower performance. Our Cross3DVG task can provide a benchmark for developing robust 3D visual grounding models to handle diverse 3D scenes while leveraging deep language understanding.

Daichi Azuma, Taiki Miyanishi, Shuhei Kurita et al.

We propose a new 3D spatial understanding task of 3D Question Answering (3D-QA). In the 3D-QA task, models receive visual information from the entire 3D scene of the rich RGB-D indoor scan and answer the given textual questions about the 3D scene. Unlike the 2D-question answering of VQA, the conventional 2D-QA models suffer from problems with spatial understanding of object alignment and directions and fail the object identification from the textual questions in 3D-QA. We propose a baseline model for 3D-QA, named ScanQA model, where the model learns a fused descriptor from 3D object proposals and encoded sentence embeddings. This learned descriptor correlates the language expressions with the underlying geometric features of the 3D scan and facilitates the regression of 3D bounding boxes to determine described objects in textual questions and outputs correct answers. We collected human-edited question-answer pairs with free-form answers that are grounded to 3D objects in each 3D scene. Our new ScanQA dataset contains over 40K question-answer pairs from the 800 indoor scenes drawn from the ScanNet dataset. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed 3D-QA task is the first large-scale effort to perform object-grounded question-answering in 3D environments.