DEGround: An Effective Baseline for Ego-centric 3D Visual Grounding with a Homogeneous Framework

arXiv cs.CV / 4/29/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper addresses ego-centric 3D visual grounding, where existing approaches often use two-stage, heterogeneous pipelines combining separate detection and grounding models.
  • It proposes DEGround, a homogeneous framework that shares object-level representations by using a common set of queries decoded through the same transformer and bounding box head for both detection and grounding.
  • To improve instruction-aware grounding, DEGround adds two plug-in modules: Regional Activation Grounding for better spatial-textual alignment and Query-wise Modulation for sentence-conditioned query initialization.
  • Experiments across multiple benchmarks show DEGround delivers state-of-the-art results, including a substantial 7.52% improvement in overall precision on the EmbodiedScan dataset versus prior methods.

Abstract

A core task in embodied intelligence is ego-centric 3D visual grounding. Existing methods typically adopt two-stage, heterogeneous pipelines that pair a detector with a separate grounding model. Incompatible decoders and box heads hinder the transfer of object-level priors, and the split training causes redundant re-optimization. To overcome these limitations, we present DEGround, a straight, elegant, and effective framework that centers on object-level sharing over detection and grounding. It employs a set of queries that serves as the common object representation for both detection and grounding, which is decoded by a shared transformer and bounding box head. Building on this homogeneous framework, we further introduce two task-specific plug-in modules to enhance fine-grained instruction grounding. The Regional Activation Grounding module improves spatial-textual alignment by highlighting instruction-relevant regions, while the Query-wise Modulation module applies sentence-conditioned affine modulation to generate instruction-aware queries at initialization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DEGround achieves the best performance on multiple benchmarks. Remarkably, it significantly outperforms previous methods by 7.52% at overall precision on the EmbodiedScan dataset.