arXiv:2608.23074v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) can answer spatial questions, yet the mechanisms connecting object grounding to spatial reasoning remain poorly understoo...
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.
arXiv:2609.06880v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reasoning over language instructions in embodied tasks such as robotics often requires understanding spatial relations from a speaker's situated pers...
arXiv:2606. 16122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual thinking should not only sound right; it should show its evidence.
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...
arXiv:2605. 20448v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-language models reliably name objects in a scene, but do they represent the 3D layout those objects inhabit?
arXiv:2608.22916v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language models are known to encode spatial information in their hidden states, yet often fail to use it when answering. However, it remains unc...
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.
arXiv:2606. 12830v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While recent vision-language models (VLMs) demonstrate strong multimodal understanding, they remain limited in spatial reasoning tasks that require active evidence acquisition and multi-step visual interaction.
arXiv:2603. 22278v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Many multimodal tasks, such as image captioning and visual question answering, require vision-language models (VLMs) to bind objects with their properties and spatial relations.
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.
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.