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
MJev-Spatial is a multimodal decision model that unifies spatial intelligence tasks—choice, numerical, and point prediction—into a single classification framework. It treats each candidate as a class, scoring them with pretrained query and key projections without adding parameters, and achieves predictions in a single forward pass with no answer tokens. Trained on 12.3 M question‑answer pairs, it outperforms eight baseline models, ranks first on seven of twelve benchmarks, and runs 2.5× faster than the fastest autoregressive baseline.
By Luozheng Qin, Yuhan Zhu, Changhai Zhou, Qian Qiao, Jun Gao, Yuhua Zhou, Harry Zhang, Xiangyu Zeng, Yuxuan Liu, Kaijie Chen, Andrew Chen, Pony Ma
The paper investigates why multimodal large language models (MLLMs) struggle with vision‑centric tasks when visual evidence conflicts with pretrained language knowledge. Using image reconstruction and a new WhatIfVis benchmark, the authors show that MLLMs preserve coarse‑grained visual attributes but fail to consistently use them, and that supervised fine‑tuning and activation patching can improve controllability of visual context sensitivity. The study demonstrates that the main bottleneck lies in the models’ inability to reliably regulate their reliance on visual evidence rather than in visual perception itself.
By Jiaang Li, Chengzu Li, Zhaochong An, Yifei Yuan, Xi Liu, Serge Belongie, V\'esteinn Sn{\ae}bjarnarson
The paper introduces “SpaceConflict”, a benchmark of 23,196 multimodal inputs designed to test whether large language models can not only report spatial facts but also use them in reasoning. Experiments show a gap between a model’s ability to recover an initial spatial state from visual evidence and its ability to apply that state to perform transformations, with the gap narrowing but not closing as model size increases. To address this, the authors propose Operational State Supervision (OSS), which supervises task‑relevant spatial states and their transformation trajectories, improving accuracy on judgments that require state organization and use.
By Jinchang Zhang, Guoyu Lu
arXiv:2606. 11719v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spatial reasoning remains a persistent challenge for multimodal large language models (MLLMs).
By Enhan Zhao, Wei Wu, Yuanrui Zhang, Xueliang Zhao, Di He
The paper introduces PCSR-Bench, a benchmark of 84,373 question‑answer pairs derived from 2,600 omnidirectional images across 26 indoor environments, designed to evaluate perspective‑conditioned spatial reasoning (PCSR) in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). It reports a significant perception–reasoning gap, with accuracy dropping from 57.59% on limited field‑of‑view reasoning to as low as 0.64% on open‑ended compositional directional chains. An RL‑based diagnostic study on a 7B‑scale model shows that reward shaping can improve performance to 60.06% on a controlled task, indicating partial plasticity of PCSR capabilities.
By Yuangong Chen, Wai Keung Wong, Jiaxing Li, Ioannis Patras, Xu Zheng
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:2605.12413v4 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show strong visual perception, yet remain limited in reasoning about space under changing viewpoints. We s...
By Yuangong Chen, Wai Keung Wong, Jiaxing Li, Ioannis Patras, Xu Zheng
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: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
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...
By Xiwei Liu, Yulong Li, Xinlin Zhuang, Xuhui Li, Zhixiang Lu, Haolin Yang, Imran Razzak, Yutong Xie
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.
By Hongxing Li, Jinyue Su, Dingming Li, Wenqi Zhang, Weiming Lu, Jun Xiao, Yueting Zhuang, Yongliang Shen