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: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
The paper investigates how visual presentation affects vision‑language models (VLMs) on the SPaRC spatial planning benchmark. By adding lightweight input‑side scaffolds that keep the visual modality but make spatial structure clearer, the authors achieve up to a 34.0‑percentage‑point accuracy boost across multiple VLMs, and an additional 4.6 points when combined with GRPO training. Analyses reveal that these improvements stem mainly from reduced grounding errors, while rule‑based reasoning remains difficult, highlighting visual presentation as a key determinant of whether VLM benchmarks test grounded perception, downstream reasoning, or both.
By Lars Benedikt Kaesberg, Tianyu Yang, Florian Valentin Wunderlich, Terry Ruas, Jan Philip Wahle, Daniel Kurzawe, Bela Gipp
arXiv:2608.22429v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) capable of thinking with images often rely on external tools for fine-grained perception. However, this relian...
By Changjiang Jiang, Qiannian Zhao, Lei Xin, Jinxiang Xie, Preslav Nakov, Zhuohan Xie
Pointing-based visual grounding requires models to precisely locate target objects by deciphering complex spatial relationships between the visual scene and pointing gestures. Traditional methods typically encode input images into static feature representations and perform reasoning primarily within the linguistic domain, often overlooking the rich perceptual cues and explicit spatial geometry inherent in images.
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: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:2608. 02833v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chart question answering (CQA) requires multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to integrate visual comprehension with logical reasoning, yet current models struggle with accurate visual grounding and coherent reasoning chains.
By Xuehang Guo, Pingyue Zhang, Ruiyi Zhang, Zhenhailong Wang, Hanrui Lyu, Heng Ji, Tong Sun, Qingyun Wang, Manling Li
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.
By Changye Li, Meng Lu, Yi Wu, Ligeng Zhu
arXiv:2606. 15753v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Embodied reasoning requires models to perceive task-relevant objects and spaces in physical environments and maintain consistent visual grounding throughout multi-step reasoning.
By Yaoting Huang, Yifu Yuan, Linqi Han, Chengwen Li, Shuoheng Zhang, Xianze Yao, Hongyao Tang, Yan Zheng, Jianye Hao
MultihopSpatial is a new benchmark for Vision‑Language Models that focuses on multi‑hop, compositional spatial reasoning with queries ranging from 1 to 3 hops across varied spatial perspectives. It introduces the Acc@50IoU metric, which jointly evaluates answer selection and precise bounding‑box prediction, and provides a large‑scale training corpus, MultihopSpatial‑Train, to improve spatial intelligence. Evaluation of 37 state‑of‑the‑art VLMs shows that compositional spatial reasoning remains a significant challenge, and reinforcement learning fine‑tuning on the corpus boosts both intrinsic spatial reasoning and downstream embodied manipulation performance.
By Youngwan Lee, Soojin Jang, Yoorhim Cho, Seunghwan Lee, Yong-Ju Lee, Sung Ju Hwang
VisionCoach is an input‑adaptive reinforcement learning framework that enhances spatio‑temporal grounding in video reasoning by using visual prompting during training. The system selectively applies visual prompts to challenging inputs, amplifying question‑relevant evidence and suppressing distractors, and then internalizes these improvements through self‑distillation so that inference can be performed on raw videos without prompts. Experiments on multiple benchmarks (V‑STAR, VideoMME, World‑Sense, VideoMMMU, PerceptionTest, and Charades‑STA) show that VisionCoach achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance while maintaining a single efficient inference pathway.
By Daeun Lee, Shoubin Yu, Yue Zhang, Mohit Bansal