@inproceedings{li-etal-2026-mllms,
    title = "Do {MLLM}s Understand Pointing? Benchmarking and Enhancing Referential Reasoning in Egocentric Vision",
    author = "Li, Chentao  and
      Gao, Zirui  and
      Gao, Mingze  and
      Ren, Yinglian  and
      Feng, Jianjiang  and
      Zhou, Jie",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.838/",
    pages = "17000--17019",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "Egocentric AI agents, such as smart glasses, rely on pointing gestures to resolve referential ambiguities in natural language commands. However, despite advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), current systems often fail to precisely ground the spatial semantics of pointing. Instead, they rely on spurious correlations with visual proximity or object saliency{---}a phenomenon we term ``Referential Hallucination.'' To address this gap, we introduce EgoPoint-Bench, a comprehensive question-answering benchmark designed to evaluate and enhance multimodal pointing reasoning in egocentric views. Comprising over 11k high-fidelity simulated and real-world samples, the benchmark spans five evaluation dimensions and three levels of referential complexity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that while state-of-the-art proprietary and open-source models struggle with egocentric pointing, models fine-tuned on our synthetic data achieve significant performance gains and robust Sim-to-Real generalization. This work highlights the importance of spatially-aware supervision and offers a scalable path toward precise egocentric AI assistants. The project website is available at \url{https://guyyyug.github.io/EgoPoint-Bench/}."
}