arXiv AI

Is Visual Prompting All You Need? Studying VLM Spatial Reasoning under Progressive Visual Scaffolds

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.

arXiv AI

Jun 16

Thinking with Visual Grounding

arXiv:2606. 16122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual thinking should not only sound right; it should show its evidence.

By Junkai Zhang, Yihe Deng, Kai-Wei Chang, Wei Wang

llms agents reinforcement-learning multimodal benchmarks

arXiv AI

Jul 14

The Ebb and Flow of Multimodal Focus: Scheduling Visual Relay Windows for Grounded VLM Reasoning

arXiv:2607. 11436v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language models increasingly succeed on multimodal reasoning benchmarks, yet their visual evidence often becomes unstable once it enters the language stack, weakening evidence-grounded reasoning.

By Wencheng Ye, Yi Bin, Yujuan Ding, Hongye Fang, Zheng Wang, Xing Xu, Jingkuan Song, Yun Zhang, Sirui Da, Heng Tao Shen

llms multimodal benchmarks

arXiv AI

Jul 7

SpatialThinker: Reinforcing Scene Graph-Grounded Spatial Reasoning via Dense Rewards

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

llms reinforcement-learning fine-tuning multimodal benchmarks

arXiv AI

2d ago

ViPlan: A Benchmark for Visual Planning with Symbolic Predicates and Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2505.13180v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Integrating Large Language Models with symbolic planners is a promising direction for obtaining verifiable and grounded plans, with recent works ex...

By Matteo Merler, Nicola Dainese, Minttu Alakuijala, Giovanni Bonetta, Pietro Ferrazzi, Yu Tian, Bernardo Magnini, Pekka Marttinen

llms robotics multimodal benchmarks

arXiv Machine Learning

Aug 21

Scaffolding Minds: Optimizing Latent Visual Target Representations for Multimodal Reasoning

arXiv:2608. 19669v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Latent reasoning has advanced multimodal reasoning through a two-stage training paradigm: (1) a helper image is encoded into latent tokens to teach visual chain-of-thought during a supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage, and (2) these latent tokens are further refined with reward feedback during a reinforcement learning (RL) stage.

By Haoqiang Kang, Yinpeng Chen, Luyang Liu, Jesper Sparre Andersen, Abhijit Ogale, Baochen Sun, Lichan Hong, Ed H. Chi

diffusion reinforcement-learning fine-tuning multimodal benchmarks

arXiv AI

Jun 12

Perceive, Interact, Reason: Building Tool-Augmented Visual Agents for Spatial Reasoning

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

llms agents multimodal benchmarks

arXiv AI

Aug 5

SpatialCLI: Learning to Reason With Spatial Tools, Then Without Them

arXiv:2607. 27703v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used in embodied agents to interpret visual inputs, reason about spatial relationships, and make task-level decisions based on that reasoning.

By Yang Zhou, Zixuan Huang, Sunzhu Li, Zhuo Yang, Chen Zhang, Shunian Chen, Caijun Yan, Jianyao Xu, Shunyu Liu, Weijie Fu, Peiliang Li, Xiaozhi Chen, Yuxiang Cai

llms agents computer-vision reinforcement-learning robotics fine-tuning multimodal benchmarks

arXiv AI

Jun 19

Vero: An Open RL Recipe for General Visual Reasoning

arXiv:2604. 04917v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: What does it take to build a visual reasoner that works across charts, science, spatial understanding, and open-ended tasks?

By Gabriel Sarch, Linrong Cai, Qunzhong Wang, Haoyang Wu, Danqi Chen, Zhuang Liu

llms reinforcement-learning efficiency multimodal benchmarks

arXiv AI

Jun 17

m2sv: A Scalable Benchmark for Map-to-Street-View Spatial Reasoning

arXiv:2601. 19099v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision--language models (VLMs) achieve strong performance on many multimodal benchmarks but remain brittle on spatial reasoning tasks that require aligning abstract overhead representations with egocentric views.

By Yosub Shin, Michael Buriek, Igor Molybog

llms reinforcement-learning fine-tuning multimodal benchmarks safety

arXiv Computer Vision

Aug 25

Grounding Isn't Knowing: Do VLMs Need Object Localization for Spatial Reasoning?

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

llms multimodal benchmarks safety

Hugging Face Trending Papers

Aug 20

Scaffolding Minds: Optimizing Latent Visual Target Representations for Multimodal Reasoning

Latent reasoning has advanced multimodal reasoning through a two-stage training paradigm: (1) a helper image is encoded into latent tokens to teach visual chain-of-thought during a supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage, and (2) these latent tokens are further refined with reward feedback during a reinforcement learning (RL) stage. In this paper, we identify two key limitations of this framework, one in each stage.

diffusion reinforcement-learning fine-tuning multimodal benchmarks

arXiv AI

Jun 10

V-REX: Benchmarking Exploratory Visual Reasoning via Chain-of-Questions

arXiv:2512. 11995v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While many vision-language models (VLMs) are developed to answer well-defined, straightforward questions with highly specified targets, as in most benchmarks, they often struggle in practice with complex open-ended tasks, which usually require multiple rounds of exploration and reasoning in the visual space.

By Chenrui Fan, Yijun Liang, Shweta Bhardwaj, Kwesi Cobbina, Ming Li, Tianyi Zhou

llms multimodal benchmarks

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