Maybe I missed the point in your question, but this works for me:

use strict;
use warnings;

my @v = (1, 2, 3);
my $r = \@v;

check();

@v = ();

check();


sub check
{
        print ((! $r) ? "Empty " : "Non-empty ", "reference\n");
        print ((! @$r) ? "Empty " : "Non-empty ", "array\n");
}
[download]

And this is the output:

Non-empty reference
Non-empty array
Non-empty reference
Empty array