Spatial understanding is crucial for foundation models (FMs), and maps have long helped humans organize and reason about geographic information. This study examines whether choropleth maps remain useful for machine spatial understanding when models can directly process structured geodata.
arXiv:2608. 15736v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Foundation models (FMs) increasingly support multimodal and geospatial reasoning, yet it remains unclear whether cartographic principles designed for human perception are equally effective for machines.
By Yonghe Sun, Zhenjia Liu, Hua Liao, Wenjia Xu, Nai Yang, Weihua Dong, Zhiwei Wei
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:2606. 08952v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal Foundation Models (MFMs) have made substantial progress, yet remain fragile in spatial reasoning over the physical world.
By Shouwei Ruan, Bin Wang, Zhenyu Wu, Qihui Zhu, Yuxiang Zhang, Jingzhi Li, Yubin Wang, Xingxing Wei
Enabling Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to perform spatial reasoning remains challenging. Existing approaches treat VLMs as passive observers, which is difficult for real-world applications.
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
arXiv:2608. 07353v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding concepts is fundamental to generalization.
By Karim Radouane, Jose G Moreno, Lynda Tamine
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
Existing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) exhibits a critical bottleneck in robust spatial reasoning. Recent reinforcement learning (RL) methods aim to close this gap with verifiable outcomes, yet they suffer from poor credit assignment across intermediate reasoning steps.
arXiv:2606. 07172v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Geospatial understanding is a critical yet underexplored dimension in the development of machine learning systems for tasks such as image geolocation and spatial reasoning.
By Marcelo Sartori Locatelli, Fernando Tonucci, Jea Kwon, Luiz Felipe Vecchietti, Bryan Nathanael Wijaya, Cheng Yaw Low, Virgilio Almeida, Meeyoung Cha
arXiv:2601. 11729v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Visual Foundation Models (VFMs), such as DINO and CLIP, excel in semantic understanding of images but exhibit limited spatial reasoning capabilities, which limits their applicability to embodied systems.
By Turhan Can Kargin, Wojciech Jasi\'nski, Adam Pardyl, Bartosz Zieli\'nski, Marcin Przewi\k{e}\'zlikowski