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:2606. 03988v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision language models (VLMs) excel at many tasks but still struggle with spatial reasoning when critical information is not directly observable.
By Mahtab Bigverdi, Lindsey Li, Weikai Huang, Yiming Liu, Jaemin Cho, Jieyu Zhang, Tuhin Kundu, Chris Dangjoo Kim, Zelun Luo, Linda Shapiro, Ranjay Krishna
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
arXiv:2605.17949v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Remote sensing vision-language models (RS-VLMs) commonly employ a pretrained vision encoder and a projection module to map image features into the...
By Xiao Yang, Ronghao Fu, Zhiwen Lin, Zhuoran Duan, Lang Sun, Jiaqi Liu, Jiashun Zhu, Jiasen Hu, Xu Na, Bo Yang
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:2601. 19099v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision--language models (VLMs) achieve strong performance on many multimodal benchmarks but remain brittle on spatial reasoning tasks that require aligning abstract overhead representations with egocentric views.
By Yosub Shin, Michael Buriek, Igor Molybog
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
Soft Spatial Reasoning introduces a post‑training framework for Large Vision‑Language Models that replaces hard, token‑by‑token chain‑of‑thought reasoning with a soft, continuous state formed by mixing token embeddings at each intermediate step. The method employs AdaptSoft, a controller that adjusts the degree of softness based on hidden states and predictive uncertainty, guided by a gradient‑alignment learning objective that requires no intermediate supervision. Experiments on diverse spatial benchmarks show that this approach outperforms both hard and fixed‑soft chain‑of‑thought baselines and several existing LVLMs.
By Rafi Ibn Sultan, Md. Sajid Alam Chowdhury, Saleh Zare Zade, Chengyin Li, Prashant Khanduri, Marco Brocanelli, Dongxiao Zhu
SpatialASM is a framework that teaches Large Vision‑Language Models (LVLMs) to perform Active Spatial Mentalization (ASM), enabling them to proactively plan and imagine viewpoints during spatial reasoning tasks. The method uses an allocentric novel‑view generator to create explicit ASM trajectories and perspective‑taking tasks, providing two forms of supervision that guide LVLMs in adaptive view planning and scene imagination. Experiments on seven spatial benchmarks show that SpatialASM improves performance across four LVLM backbones while preserving their general vision capabilities.
By Yuhong Liu, Shenxi Wu, Junyi Chi, Beichen Zhang, Xuanlang Dai, Jiaqi Wang, Yuhang Zang, Dahua Lin
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
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:2607. 15768v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Remote sensing offers an unparalleled vantage point for observing the Earth's long-term surface evolution, yet it demands that a model not only perceive land cover at isolated moments, but also track changes, memorize evolution histories, and reason across time and space.
By Yujie Li, Jiancheng Pan, Zhiwei Wei, Jiuniu Wang, Mugen Peng, Wenjia Xu