arXiv:2607. 22864v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) excel at visual interpretation but fail on spatial reasoning tasks that humans solve reliably.
By Patrick Rim, Tom Long, Ekta Prashnani, Ruth Rosenholtz, Ben Boudaoud, Peter Xenopoulos, Alex Wong, Joohwan Kim, Jae-Hyun Jung
arXiv:2606. 16122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual thinking should not only sound right; it should show its evidence.
By Junkai Zhang, Yihe Deng, Kai-Wei Chang, Wei Wang
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
arXiv:2609.38716v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have made remarkable progress across visual perception tasks, yet spatial reasoning remains a persistent weaknes...
By Rafi Ibn Sultan, Xiangyu Zhou, Md. Sajid Alam Chowdhury, Chengyin Li, Prashant Khanduri, Marco Brocanelli, Dongxiao Zhu
Spatial-OPSD is a label‑free self‑improvement framework for vision‑language models that leverages spatial priors such as depth, 3D relations, and camera geometry to provide dense token‑level supervision. During training, a privileged teacher uses these priors while the student learns from only the original visual‑language input, and a recursive round‑wise scheme allows repeated self‑improvement without moving the teacher. Across four VLM families, one round of Spatial‑OPSD improves the five‑benchmark average, and three rounds push a strong spatially specialized model to the open‑source frontier, achieving the highest average among open models and best results on three of five spatial reasoning benchmarks.
By Zhenyu Liu, Zhangquan Chen, Keyi Chen, Mingze Sun, Xiang An, Haodong Jing, Ruqi Huang
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:2606. 17539v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spatial VLMs have made substantial progress in geometric perception, yet complex spatial reasoning requiring multi-step inference over depth, distance, and scene relations remains challenging.
By Yatai Ji, An-Chieh Cheng, Yang Fu, Yukang Chen, Han Zhang, Zhaojing Yang, Wei Huang, Ka Chun Cheung, Song Han, Vidya Nariyambut Murali, Pavlo Molchanov, Jan Kautz, Simon See, Hongxu Yin, Ping Luo, Sifei Liu
The paper introduces PCSR-Bench, a benchmark of 84,373 question‑answer pairs derived from 2,600 omnidirectional images across 26 indoor environments, designed to evaluate perspective‑conditioned spatial reasoning (PCSR) in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). It reports a significant perception–reasoning gap, with accuracy dropping from 57.59% on limited field‑of‑view reasoning to as low as 0.64% on open‑ended compositional directional chains. An RL‑based diagnostic study on a 7B‑scale model shows that reward shaping can improve performance to 60.06% on a controlled task, indicating partial plasticity of PCSR capabilities.
By Yuangong Chen, Wai Keung Wong, Jiaxing Li, Ioannis Patras, Xu Zheng
arXiv:2602. 08236v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite rapid progress in MLLMs, visual spatial reasoning remains unreliable when correct answers depend on how a scene would appear under unseen or alternative viewpoints.
By Shoubin Yu, Yue Zhang, Zun Wang, Jaehong Yoon, Huaxiu Yao, Mingyu Ding, Mohit Bansal
The paper introduces LIRSeg, a method that replaces explicit Chain-of-Thought reasoning in multimodal large language models with a compact set of learnable latent tokens for reasoning segmentation. LIRSeg is trained in two stages—spatial alignment and GRPO—while employing extreme-advantage sampling, decoupled exploration-stability updates, and latent diversity amplification to enhance token informativeness. Experiments show that LIRSeg improves segmentation accuracy and reasoning efficiency, achieving significant gIoU gains over the VisionReasoner baseline and reducing reasoning tokens by about 16×.
By Tianhang Guo, Yulin He, Wei Chen, Wenjuan Zhou, Yuhang Li, Xinbiao Gan
arXiv:2605.27310v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Cross-view spatial reasoning remains a weak spot for vision-language models (VLMs): they reason in language and discard the fine-grained geometry t...
By Qian Yang, Ankur Sikarwar, Huy Le, Le Zhang, Zhuan Shi, Perouz Taslakian, Aishwarya Agrawal
arXiv:2510.13394v4 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Spatial reasoning ability is crucial for Vision Language Models (VLMs) to support real-world applications in diverse domains including robotics, au...
By Xinmiao Huang, Qisong He, Zhenglin Huang, Boxuan Wang, Zhuoyun Li, Guangliang Cheng, Yi Dong, Xiaowei Huang