A Multimodal Depth-Aware Method for Embodied Reference Understanding

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Authors: Fevziye İrem Eyiokur, Doğucan Yaman, Hazım Kemal Ekenel, Alexander H. Waibel
Cited by: 0
References: 28

Abstract

Embodied Reference Understanding requires identifying a target object in a visual scene based on both language instructions and pointing cues. While prior works have shown progress in open-vocabulary object detection, they often fail in ambiguous scenarios where multiple candidate objects exist in the scene. To address these challenges, we propose a novel ERU framework that jointly leverages LLM-based data augmentation, depth-map modality, and a depth-aware decision module. This design enables robust integration of linguistic and embodied cues, improving disambiguation in complex or cluttered environments. Experimental results on two datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing baselines, achieving more accurate and reliable referent detection.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Multimodal Machine Learning Applications Hand Gesture Recognition Systems Speech and dialogue systems

Publication details

Journal / source
ICASSP 2026 - 2026 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
Publisher
IEEE
Pages
11407–11411
Publication date
21 April 2026
Language
EN