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
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
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
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
GraFT is a training‑free framework that enhances spatial reasoning in multimodal large language models by integrating a compact 3D scene graph (3DSG). It offers deterministic geometry via symbolic tools, allocentric layout through bird’s‑eye‑view rendering, and visual‑attribute grounding using egocentric frames. Experiments on ScanQA and VSI‑Bench show significant performance gains, with CIDEr increasing by 27% and improvements up to 65% over baseline models.
By Junqing Du, Fernando Ropero, Erkin Turkoz, Yanfeng Zhang, Lu Liu
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
The paper introduces TTL‑SR, a geometry‑aware Test‑Time Learning framework designed to improve quantitative spatial reasoning in visual‑language models. By augmenting queries with geometrically coupled auxiliary prompts, filtering unreliable predictions, and updating models with a geometry‑aware multi‑objective loss on unlabeled test data, TTL‑SR adapts models to new domains without additional 3D supervision. Experiments show substantial accuracy gains on the Q‑Spatial‑ScanNet dataset for two state‑of‑the‑art VLMs.
By Gege Zhang, Shuaicheng Niu, Gang Dai, Lei Sun, Shuangping 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
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
arXiv:2607. 06620v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle to bridge the representational gap between 2D semantic understanding and 3D spatial geometry.
By Haida Feng, Hao Wei, Haolin Wang, Shiwei Li, Chade Li, Yihong Wu
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