GVT3D: Gesture-Vision-Text Token Enrichment for 3D Embodied Reference Understanding

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.