The paper introduces FactoSR, a factorized reinforcement learning framework designed to improve spatial reasoning in Vision‑Language Models by addressing a dimensional mismatch between 2D visual inputs and the 3D+temporal nature of the physical world. FactoSR decomposes the reasoning task into three orthogonal geometric sub‑objectives—planar correspondence (XY), depth consistency (Z), and temporal reversibility (T)—and optimizes these constraints within a unified policy learning mechanism. Experiments on multi‑view and video benchmarks show that this decomposition yields significant performance gains, achieving a 5.9% improvement on VSI‑Bench and 4.5% on All‑Angles‑Bench.
By Yijun Yang, Shenghe Zheng, Wenbo Li, Jianhui Liu, Haoze Sun, Yanbing Zhang, Jiaxiu Jiang, Lin Song, Haoyang Huang, Nan Duan, Lei Zhu
Latent reasoning has advanced multimodal reasoning through a two-stage training paradigm: (1) a helper image is encoded into latent tokens to teach visual chain-of-thought during a supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage, and (2) these latent tokens are further refined with reward feedback during a reinforcement learning (RL) stage. In this paper, we identify two key limitations of this framework, one in each stage.
The paper introduces FactoSR, a factorized reinforcement learning framework designed to improve spatial reasoning in Vision‑Language Models (VLMs). By decomposing the problem into planar correspondence (XY), depth consistency (Z), and temporal reversibility (T), FactoSR addresses the dimensional mismatch between 2D visual inputs and 3D physical reasoning. Experiments on multi‑view and video benchmarks show significant performance gains, with a 5.9% improvement on VSI‑Bench and 4.5% on All‑Angles‑Bench.
arXiv:2606. 11770v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spatial reasoning remains a challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), as it requires reliable multi-hop inference over both intermediate states and state transitions.
By Chao Lei, Yanbei Jiang, Markus Hiller, Zhijian Zhou, Xunye Tian, Krista A. Ehinger, Nir Lipovetzky
arXiv:2608. 19669v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Latent reasoning has advanced multimodal reasoning through a two-stage training paradigm: (1) a helper image is encoded into latent tokens to teach visual chain-of-thought during a supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage, and (2) these latent tokens are further refined with reward feedback during a reinforcement learning (RL) stage.
By Haoqiang Kang, Yinpeng Chen, Luyang Liu, Jesper Sparre Andersen, Abhijit Ogale, Baochen Sun, Lichan Hong, Ed H. Chi
MultihopSpatial is a new benchmark for Vision‑Language Models that focuses on multi‑hop, compositional spatial reasoning with queries ranging from 1 to 3 hops across varied spatial perspectives. It introduces the Acc@50IoU metric, which jointly evaluates answer selection and precise bounding‑box prediction, and provides a large‑scale training corpus, MultihopSpatial‑Train, to improve spatial intelligence. Evaluation of 37 state‑of‑the‑art VLMs shows that compositional spatial reasoning remains a significant challenge, and reinforcement learning fine‑tuning on the corpus boosts both intrinsic spatial reasoning and downstream embodied manipulation performance.
By Youngwan Lee, Soojin Jang, Yoorhim Cho, Seunghwan Lee, Yong-Ju Lee, Sung Ju Hwang
The paper introduces PIVOT, a dual-level learning framework designed to improve visually-grounded multimodal reasoning in large vision-language models. PIVOT employs a self‑calibrated experience replay mechanism to selectively reuse valuable visual reasoning trajectories, and a vision‑guided advantage allocation scheme that assigns extra rewards to tokens with strong visual support. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show that PIVOT enhances the multimodal reasoning performance of these models.
By Xinxin Song, Siyuan Li, Tingxiong Xiao, Jinli Suo
arXiv:2512. 11995v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While many vision-language models (VLMs) are developed to answer well-defined, straightforward questions with highly specified targets, as in most benchmarks, they often struggle in practice with complex open-ended tasks, which usually require multiple rounds of exploration and reasoning in the visual space.
By Chenrui Fan, Yijun Liang, Shweta Bhardwaj, Kwesi Cobbina, Ming Li, Tianyi Zhou
Existing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) exhibits a critical bottleneck in robust spatial reasoning. Recent reinforcement learning (RL) methods aim to close this gap with verifiable outcomes, yet they suffer from poor credit assignment across intermediate reasoning steps.
arXiv:2608. 02833v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chart question answering (CQA) requires multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to integrate visual comprehension with logical reasoning, yet current models struggle with accurate visual grounding and coherent reasoning chains.
By Xuehang Guo, Pingyue Zhang, Ruiyi Zhang, Zhenhailong Wang, Hanrui Lyu, Heng Ji, Tong Sun, Qingyun Wang, Manling Li
arXiv:2510. 14828v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Improving the reasoning capabilities of embodied agents is crucial for robots to complete complex human instructions in long-view manipulation tasks successfully.
By Jinrui Liu, Bingyan Nie, Boyu Li, Yaran Chen, Yuze Wang, Shunsen He, Haoran Li
arXiv:2511. 07403v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in vision-language tasks, but continue to struggle with spatial reasoning.
By Hunar Batra, Haoqin Tu, Hardy Chen, Yuanze Lin, Cihang Xie, Ronald Clark