Junxian Li

Beining Xu, Siting Zhu, Zhao Jin et al.

3D Visual Grounding (3DVG) focuses on locating objects in 3D scenes based on natural language descriptions, serving as a fundamental task for embodied AI and robotics. Recent advances in Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have motivated research into extending them to 3DVG. However, MLLMs primarily process 2D visual inputs and struggle with understanding 3D spatial structure of scenes solely from these limited perspectives. Existing methods mainly utilize viewpoint-dependent rendering of reconstructed point clouds to provide explicit structural guidance for MLLMs in 3DVG tasks, leading to inefficiency and limited spatial reasoning. To address this issue, we propose S$^2$-MLLM, an efficient framework that enhances spatial reasoning in MLLMs through implicit spatial reasoning. We introduce a spatial guidance strategy that leverages the structure awareness of feed-forward 3D reconstruction. By acquiring 3D structural understanding during training, our model can implicitly reason about 3D scenes without relying on inefficient point cloud reconstruction. Moreover, we propose a structure-enhanced module (SE), which first employs intra-view and inter-view attention mechanisms to capture dependencies within views and correspondences across views. The module further integrates multi-level position encoding to associate visual representations with spatial positions and viewpoint information, enabling more accurate structural understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that S$^2$-MLLM unifies superior performance, generalization, and efficiency, achieving significant performance over existing methods across the ScanRefer, Nr3D, and Sr3D datasets. Code will be available upon acceptance.

Di Zhang, Junxian Li, Jingdi Lei et al.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have shown remarkable advancements in multimodal reasoning tasks. However, they still often generate inaccurate or irrelevant responses due to issues like hallucinated image understandings or unrefined reasoning paths. To address these challenges, we introduce Critic-V, a novel framework inspired by the Actor-Critic paradigm to boost the reasoning capability of VLMs. This framework decouples the reasoning process and critic process by integrating two independent components: the Reasoner, which generates reasoning paths based on visual and textual inputs, and the Critic, which provides constructive critique to refine these paths. In this approach, the Reasoner generates reasoning responses according to text prompts, which can evolve iteratively as a policy based on feedback from the Critic. This interaction process was theoretically driven by a reinforcement learning framework where the Critic offers natural language critiques instead of scalar rewards, enabling more nuanced feedback to boost the Reasoner's capability on complex reasoning tasks. The Critic model is trained using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), leveraging a preference dataset of critiques ranked by Rule-based Reward~(RBR) to enhance its critic capabilities. Evaluation results show that the Critic-V framework significantly outperforms existing methods, including GPT-4V, on 5 out of 8 benchmarks, especially regarding reasoning accuracy and efficiency. Combining a dynamic text-based policy for the Reasoner and constructive feedback from the preference-optimized Critic enables a more reliable and context-sensitive multimodal reasoning process. Our approach provides a promising solution to enhance the reliability of VLMs, improving their performance in real-world reasoning-heavy multimodal applications such as autonomous driving and embodied intelligence.