NVIDIA releases LocateAnything-3B vision-language model with 2.5× faster object detection via parallel box decoding

NVIDIA released LocateAnything-3B, a 3-billion parameter vision-language model designed for fast visual grounding tasks including object detection, GUI element localization, and robotics perception.

Technical specifications

The model uses Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct as its language backbone and MoonViT-SO-400M as its vision encoder. Training data spans 12 million images, 138 million queries, and 785 million bounding boxes across natural scenes, robotics, driving, GUI interaction, and document understanding domains.

Input supports images up to 2.5K resolution and text prompts up to 24K tokens. The model can generate up to 8,192 new tokens during inference and uses BF16 precision with KV cache.

Parallel Box Decoding innovation

LocateAnything's core technical contribution is Parallel Box Decoding (PBD), which predicts complete bounding box coordinates in a single parallel step instead of generating coordinates token-by-token autoregressively. According to NVIDIA, this approach delivers up to 2.5× higher throughput while preserving geometric consistency.

The architecture outputs structured coordinate tokens in fixed-length blocks of 6 tokens, including semantic labels, box coordinates, and control tokens. The model supports three decoding modes: Fast Mode (parallel prediction), Slow Mode (autoregressive), and Hybrid Mode (parallel with autoregressive fallback).

Supported use cases

NVIDIA lists these supported applications:

• Open-set and long-tail object detection
• Dense multi-object detection in cluttered scenes
• Phrase and referring-expression grounding
• Automated dataset labeling
• GUI element grounding for agentic systems
• Robotics and autonomous driving perception
• Document understanding and OCR localization
• Industrial inspection and surveillance

The model has been integrated into NVIDIA's Nemotron 3 Nano Omni production models for grounding and multimodal capabilities.

Availability and licensing

LocateAnything-3B is available on Hugging Face and GitHub as of May 26, 2026. The model is released under NVIDIA's non-commercial license, permitting use only for academic and non-profit research. Commercial use is prohibited except by NVIDIA and its affiliates.

The model runs on NVIDIA Ampere, Hopper, Blackwell, and Lovelace architectures. TensorRT and TensorRT-LLM support is not yet available. Deployment on embedded platforms like NVIDIA Thor requires additional optimization including quantization or distillation.

What this means

Parallel Box Decoding represents a practical efficiency gain for visual grounding tasks that require detecting multiple objects or UI elements in a single image. The 2.5× throughput improvement matters for real-time applications like robotics and GUI automation where latency compounds across multiple API calls. However, the non-commercial license limits this to research settings, and the model's integration into production Nemotron systems suggests NVIDIA views visual grounding as infrastructure for agentic AI systems rather than standalone capability. The 3B parameter size makes local deployment feasible on consumer GPUs while the multi-domain training data indicates this is positioned as a generalist localization model rather than domain-specific detector.