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.
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.
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...
Vision-language models (VLMs) can answer spatial questions, yet the mechanisms connecting object grounding to spatial reasoning remain poorly understood. It is underexplored whether spatial reasoning...
arXiv:2606.01914v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) remain unreliable on spatial multiple-choice questions, and their failures are often attributed to poorly...
arXiv:2610.13832v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When solving complex spatial reasoning tasks, ordinary humans naturally revisit the scenes from task-relevant viewpoints and mentally reconstruct the...
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.
arXiv:2609.06880v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reasoning over language instructions in embodied tasks such as robotics often requires understanding spatial relations from a speaker's situated pers...
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.
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: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...
arXiv:2608. 01899v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) perform well on commonsense reasoning tasks but struggle with visual spatial reasoning.
arXiv:2603. 22278v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Many multimodal tasks, such as image captioning and visual question answering, require vision-language models (VLMs) to bind objects with their properties and spatial relations.