MMCoT$^3$: Empowering 3D Scene Understanding with 3D-Text Interleaved Multi-Modal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Abstract

Understanding and reasoning over 3D scenes from point clouds is essential for a broad range of AI applications. Recent 3D large language models have shown promising results, yet they still face two fundamental limitations: (i) insufficient capability for grounded multi-step reasoning in complex 3D scenes, and (ii) a text-centric inference paradigm that lacks effective interaction between textual reasoning and visual evidence. As a result, these models often fail to verify intermediate inferences, disambiguate similar object instances, and avoid hallucinations. To address these limitations, we propose MMCoT$^3$, the first 3D-Text Interleaved Chain-of-Thought (CoT) framework for 3D scene understanding. The core idea is to explicitly interleave textual reasoning with task-relevant 3D evidence, enabling the model to consult scene observations throughout the reasoning process. In addition, since a textual mention in 3D scenes may correspond to multiple candidate objects, naive object-mention alignment can inject incorrect evidence and mislead subsequent reasoning. To mitigate this multi-instance ambiguity, we design an ambiguity-aware evidence aggregation mechanism that uses query-guided cross-attention to fuse candidate object tokens and inject both evidence and ambiguity cues into the reasoning process. To better equip the model with multi-step reasoning capability, we further develop PointCoT, a large-scale 3D-specific CoT instruction tuning dataset with approximately 176.2K instances spanning captioning, question answering, dialogue, and planning tasks. Extensive experiments on six benchmarks show that our method consistently improves performance and achieves state-of-the-art results, validating the effectiveness of our proposed ambiguity-aware 3D-text interleaved reasoning for 3D scene understanding.