arXiv AI

Limits of Spatial Imagery Reasoning in Frontier LLM Models

arXiv:2603. 26779v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities, yet they struggle with spatial tasks that require mental simulation, such as mental rotation.

arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

Think3D: Thinking with Space for Spatial Reasoning

Think3D introduces a framework that endows Vision‑Language Models with interactive 3D chain‑of‑thought reasoning by integrating 3D manipulation tools for active spatial exploration. The approach improves performance on benchmarks such as BLINK Multi‑view, MindCube‑1K, and VSI‑Bench‑Tiny for proprietary models like GPT‑4.1 and Gemini 2.5 Pro, and a reinforcement‑learning variant, Think3D‑RL, enables open‑weight models such as Qwen3‑VL‑4B to autonomously learn effective 3D exploration strategies, yielding tool‑use patterns comparable to stronger models and turning a performance drop on MindCube‑1K into a substantial improvement.

By Zaibin Zhang, Yuhan Wu, Lianjie Jia, Yifan Wang, Zhongbo Zhang, Yijiang Li, Binghao Ran, Fuxi Zhang, Zhuohan Sun, Yizhuang Peng, Zhenfei Yin, Lijun Wang, Huchuan Lu
arXiv Computation and Language
4d ago

Imagine3D-LLM: Teaching MLLMs to Imagine 3D Scenes Before Answering

arXiv:2609.38177v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reasoning about the 3D world from multi-view images remains a fundamental challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). While modern MLLMs...

By Jaewoo Jung, Hyeonseo Yu, Honggyu An, Jisang Han, Mungyeom Kim, Minkyeong Jeon, Heeseong Shin, Wonjun Moon, Federico Tombari, Daniel Barath, Marc Pollefeys, Seungryong Kim, Sunghwan Hong
arXiv AI
Jun 11

MentisOculi: Revealing the Limits of Reasoning with Mental Imagery

arXiv:2602. 02465v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Frontier models are transitioning from multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that merely ingest visual information to unified multimodal models (UMMs) capable of native interleaved generation.

By Jana Zeller, Thadd\"aus Wiedemer, Fanfei Li, Thomas Klein, Prasanna Mayilvahanan, Matthias Bethge, Felix Wichmann, Ryan Cotterell, Wieland Brendel
arXiv AI
Sep 4

GraFT: A Training-Free Framework for Spatial Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models via 3D Scene Graphs

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 AI
Jun 2

Distilling Neuro-Symbolic Programs into 3D Multi-modal LLMs

arXiv:2606. 01215v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current 3D spatial reasoning methods face a fundamental trade-off: neuro-symbolic 3D (NS3D) concept learners achieve interpretable reasoning through compositional programs but are constrained to closed-set concept vocabularies and simple programs; end-to-end 3D multi-modal LLMs (3D MLLMs) could handle complex natural language and open-vocabulary concepts but suffer from black-box reasoning without explicit spatial verification.

By Wentao Mo, Yang Liu
arXiv AI
Sep 10

MV-STRIDE: Enabling MLLMs to Master Multi-View Spatial Reasoning via Hierarchical Capability Modeling

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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 5

Disentangling 3D Modeling from Spatial Reasoning

In this work, we explore an alternative paradigm for spatial reasoning by explicitly disentangling 3D perception from reasoning, rather than jointly acquiring implicit 3D perception and reasoning through large-scale training. Our key observation is that modern perception models excel at estimating continuous 3D geometry, whereas large language models (LLMs) are particularly effective at compositional and symbolic reasoning.