arXiv Machine Learning

Contextual Observer Grounding: Evaluating Situated Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language Models

arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 9

Seek-and-View Reasoning for Multi-View Spatial Understanding

The paper introduces Vantage, a training‑free, model‑agnostic framework that pairs a vision‑language model with a 3D foundation model to perform Seek‑and‑View reasoning for multi‑view spatial understanding. Vantage first analyzes a question to plan a relevant viewpoint, then augments reasoning with geometry‑grounded visual evidence from that viewpoint. Experiments across six VLMs on five benchmarks show consistent improvements without fine‑tuning, demonstrating that revealing spatial evidence through view‑grounded reasoning reduces reliance on language‑based cross‑view alignment.

By Qixiang Chen, Cheng Zhang, Fucai Ke, Chi-Wing Fu, Jianfei Cai, Jingwen Ye
arXiv AI
Sep 10

MV-STRIDE: Enabling MLLMs to Master Multi-View Spatial Reasoning via Hierarchical Capability Modeling

MV-STRIDE is a Multi‑View hierarchical Spatial Reasoning dataset that models dependencies among perception, scene understanding, and contextual reasoning to support 3D spatial cognition. It introduces a QA generation pipeline that enforces cross‑view constraints, producing multi‑level reasoning tasks with chain‑of‑thought supervision. Experiments show that training on MV‑STRIDE yields state‑of‑the‑art performance on multi‑view spatial benchmarks, enabling MLLMs to reason robustly across diverse viewpoints.

By Jin Xu, Xiaojian Huang, Zhuodong Luo, Zhihong Zhang, Xin Liu, Jiansheng Wei, Xinzhi Wang, Jie Zhao, Xuejin Chen
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 9

SpaceCast-Bench: Evaluating Predictive Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language Models

SpaceCast-Bench is a new benchmark that evaluates predictive spatial reasoning in vision‑language models, moving beyond simple spatial perception to tasks that require constructing scenes, anticipating interventions, and reasoning about unseen outcomes. It contains 3,862 questions from 182 real‑world scenes across 16 task types and three difficulty levels—static perception, local prediction, and global prediction—testing scene understanding, spatial state updating, and relational inference. Evaluation of 21 models shows a large performance gap, with the best model achieving only 58.0% versus 87.2% human accuracy, and fine‑tuning on the benchmark’s programmatically generated data can substantially improve model performance.

By Hongxing Li, Jinyue Su, Dingming Li, Wenqi Zhang, Weiming Lu, Jun Xiao, Yueting Zhuang, Yongliang Shen
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 12

S-Space: Exploring Spatial Workspace in Multimodal Language Models

The paper introduces S‑Space, a linear subspace within multimodal language models where object‑token representations encode continuous spatial coordinates along horizontal, vertical, and distance axes. This subspace is intrinsic, readable under non‑spatial queries, and serves as an internal spatial workspace: perception maps object locations into it, reasoning transforms it for viewpoint changes, and verbal responses selectively access it. Diagnostic experiments using S‑Space reveal that while models can form spatial representations, they struggle with spatial transformations needed for reliable reasoning across viewpoint changes.

By Zhiyuan Shi, Xiang Li, Xingzhuo Guo, Shangchen Miao, Weiliang Chen, Qiyu Dai, Jinshan Ren, Jiangran Lyu, Fangfu Liu, Mingsheng Long, Jialong Wu
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 23

Metric-Bench: Exploring In-context Spatial Metric Reasoning in VLMs for Indoor Scenes

Metric-Bench introduces a new benchmark for Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) that focuses on metric‑spatial reasoning in indoor scenes by using in‑image reference objects with known dimensions. The accompanying MetricReasoner fine‑tuning recipe employs structured prompts and numerical rewards to implicitly learn 2D‑to‑3D mapping without camera intrinsics. Experiments show that this approach improves spatial metric understanding by 43.1 % over existing models and boosts downstream embodied tasks, while also delivering gains on general VLM benchmarks.

By Yuling Xi, Haokai Zhang, Muzhi Zhu, Hao Zhong, Zongze Du, Hengyu Zhao, Chenchen Jing, Yufei Yin, Bin Qin, Yongjie Yang, Zhenbo Luo, Hao Chen, Chunhua Shen