GVT3D: Gesture-Vision-Text Token Enrichment for 3D Embodied Reference Understanding
Vimarsh Shah, Dulanga Weerakoon, Ajinkya Deshpande, Saksham Agarwal, Nilesh Bhatia, Neel Kiran Naik, Parth Shah, Sravan Danda, Sanjay E. Sarma, Archan Misra, Vigneshwaran Subbaraju, Sougata Sen
Abstract
Natural human-robot interaction requires robots to interpret language and gestures within a 3D environment to support tasks such as pick-and-place and object retrieval. 3D Embodied Reference Understanding (3D-ERU) supports this by identifying the 3D location of a target object from a scene (point-cloud) containing a human pointing gesture and an accompanying language description. However, current 3D-ERU models lack alignment of cross-modal representations and incur high processing costs that increase with the point-cloud's size. To address this, we propose GVT3D, which employs an Embodied Fusion module that jointly models language, gesture, and vision inputs within a shared embedding space, promoting cross-modal alignment. We additionally introduce a foveation approach that selectively processes the point cloud within a coarse region around the estimated pointing direction to reduce computations. GVT3D achieves ~8% higher accuracy and foveation enables 2.95x faster execution while maintaining comparable accuracy, relative to prior 3D-ERU models.