RoboRefer: Towards Spatial Referring with Reasoning in Vision-Language
  Models for Robotics
Authors: name: Enshen Zhou; name: Jingkun An; name: Cheng Chi; name: Yi Han; name: Shanyu Rong; name: Chi Zhang; name: Pengwei Wang; name: Zhongyuan Wang; name: Tiejun Huang; name: Lu Sheng; name: Shanghang Zhang
Published: 2025-06-04 17:59:27

Abstract: Spatial referring is a fundamental capability of embodied robots to interact
with the 3D physical world. However, even with the powerful pretrained vision
language models (VLMs), recent approaches are still not qualified to accurately
understand the complex 3D scenes and dynamically reason about the
instruction-indicated locations for interaction. To this end, we propose
RoboRefer, a 3D-aware VLM that can first achieve precise spatial understanding
by integrating a disentangled but dedicated depth encoder via supervised
fine-tuning (SFT). Moreover, RoboRefer advances generalized multi-step spatial
reasoning via reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT), with metric-sensitive process
reward functions tailored for spatial referring tasks. To support SFT and RFT
training, we introduce RefSpatial, a large-scale dataset of 20M QA pairs (2x
prior), covering 31 spatial relations (vs. 15 prior) and supporting complex
reasoning processes (up to 5 steps). In addition, we introduce
RefSpatial-Bench, a challenging benchmark filling the gap in evaluating spatial
referring with multi-step reasoning. Experiments show that SFT-trained
RoboRefer achieves state-of-the-art spatial understanding, with an average
success rate of 89.6%. RFT-trained RoboRefer further outperforms all other
baselines by a large margin, even surpassing Gemini-2.5-Pro by 17.4% in average
accuracy on RefSpatial-Bench. Notably, RoboRefer can be integrated with various
control policies to execute long-horizon, dynamic tasks across diverse robots
(e,g., UR5, G1 humanoid) in cluttered real-world scenes.