arXiv:2606. 04381v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent large language models (LLMs) often appear to exhibit spatial reasoning ability; however, this capability is largely \emph{symbolic}, arising from pattern matching over spatial language rather than true \emph{geometric} reasoning over space.
By Chen Chu, Bita Azarijoo, Li Xiong, Khurram Shafique, Cyrus Shahabi
Recent large language models (LLMs) often appear to exhibit spatial reasoning ability; however, this capability is largely \emph{symbolic}, arising from pattern matching over spatial language rather than true \emph{geometric} reasoning over space. Because LLMs operate on discrete tokens, they lack native support for continuous spatial representations, explicit geometric computation, and structured spatial operators.
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
CitySTAR introduces a training‑free framework that transforms billion‑scale urban point clouds into a query‑ready scene graph of open‑vocabulary 3D instances, using CodeLLM‑driven tools to supply multimodal evidence for node attributes and spatial relations. It models target‑context topology with paired hypergraphs and performs bidirectional topology verification for structural disambiguation, followed by a Reflective Cross‑modal Grounding module that integrates topology consistency and 2D visual evidence to decide over a metric‑aware 3D context graph. The authors also present CitySTAR‑3D, a benchmark that enhances semantic coverage, instance completeness, bounding‑box fidelity, and spatial‑relation complexity for city‑scale 3D grounding, and report extensive experiments showing consistent improvements in open‑world urban 3D grounding with strong interpretability and generalization.
By Shuai Zhang, Hongye Hou, Qinghe Liu, Zhuoxiao Li, Dongli Wu, Jing Ou, Yuan Liu, Wufan Zhao
arXiv:2606. 09669v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spatial reasoning is a foundational capability for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to perceive and operate within the physical world.
By Hongcheng Gao, Hailong Qu, Jingyi Tang, Jiahao Wang, Zihao Huang, Hengkang Qiao, Shihong Huang, Junming Yang, Yi Li, Hongyixuan Yuan, Wenjie Li, Bohan Zeng, Wenbo Li, Bo Wang, Jianhui Liu, Olive Huang, Haoyang Huang, Wentao Zhang, Guoqing Huang, Nan Duan, Yinpeng Dong
Although multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, understanding 3D spatial relationships from 2D images remains a critical challenge. Existing methods primarily rely on symbolic text tokens, which inherently lack the fidelity to represent continuous geometric information.
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
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:2511.14086v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Despite recent progress in 3D-LLMs, they remain limited in accurately grounding language to visual and spatial elements in 3D environments. T...
By Yue Zhang, Zun Wang, Han Lin, Jialu Li, Jianing Yang, Yonatan Bitton, Idan Szpektor, Mohit Bansal
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:2607. 13454v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Although multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, understanding 3D spatial relationships from 2D images remains a critical challenge.
By Hao Li, Han Fang, Zixin Pan, Xin Wei, Hongbo Sun, Jinglin Xu, Zhiyu Lin, Ye Yuan, Zhongjiang He, Yu Yu, Hao Sun
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