The paper introduces FactoSR, a factorized reinforcement learning framework designed to improve spatial reasoning in Vision‑Language Models by addressing a dimensional mismatch between 2D visual inputs and the 3D+temporal nature of the physical world. FactoSR decomposes the reasoning task into three orthogonal geometric sub‑objectives—planar correspondence (XY), depth consistency (Z), and temporal reversibility (T)—and optimizes these constraints within a unified policy learning mechanism. Experiments on multi‑view and video benchmarks show that this decomposition yields significant performance gains, achieving a 5.9% improvement on VSI‑Bench and 4.5% on All‑Angles‑Bench.
By Yijun Yang, Shenghe Zheng, Wenbo Li, Jianhui Liu, Haoze Sun, Yanbing Zhang, Jiaxiu Jiang, Lin Song, Haoyang Huang, Nan Duan, Lei Zhu
arXiv:2606. 17539v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spatial VLMs have made substantial progress in geometric perception, yet complex spatial reasoning requiring multi-step inference over depth, distance, and scene relations remains challenging.
By Yatai Ji, An-Chieh Cheng, Yang Fu, Yukang Chen, Han Zhang, Zhaojing Yang, Wei Huang, Ka Chun Cheung, Song Han, Vidya Nariyambut Murali, Pavlo Molchanov, Jan Kautz, Simon See, Hongxu Yin, Ping Luo, Sifei Liu
MV-STRIDE is a Multi‑View hierarchical Spatial Reasoning dataset that models dependencies among perception, scene understanding, and contextual reasoning to support 3D spatial cognition. It introduces a QA generation pipeline that enforces cross‑view constraints, producing multi‑level reasoning tasks with chain‑of‑thought supervision. Experiments show that training on MV‑STRIDE yields state‑of‑the‑art performance on multi‑view spatial benchmarks, enabling MLLMs to reason robustly across diverse viewpoints.
By Jin Xu, Xiaojian Huang, Zhuodong Luo, Zhihong Zhang, Xin Liu, Jiansheng Wei, Xinzhi Wang, Jie Zhao, Xuejin Chen
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:2608. 12220v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) exhibits a critical bottleneck in robust spatial reasoning.
By Zile Zhou, Huining Yuan, Weichen Zhang, Xinlei Chen, Xiao-ping Zhang
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
The paper introduces Vantage, a training‑free, model‑agnostic framework that pairs a vision‑language model with a 3D foundation model to perform Seek‑and‑View reasoning for multi‑view spatial understanding. Vantage first analyzes a question to plan a relevant viewpoint, then augments reasoning with geometry‑grounded visual evidence from that viewpoint. Experiments across six VLMs on five benchmarks show consistent improvements without fine‑tuning, demonstrating that revealing spatial evidence through view‑grounded reasoning reduces reliance on language‑based cross‑view alignment.
By Qixiang Chen, Cheng Zhang, Fucai Ke, Chi-Wing Fu, Jianfei Cai, Jingwen Ye
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
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.
MVVBench is a new benchmark for multi‑view video reasoning that tests vision‑language models on tasks requiring integration of spatial and temporal evidence across multiple, often non‑overlapping camera streams. The benchmark contains questions that cannot be answered from any single view or single moment, forcing models to jointly reason across views and time. It evaluates six capabilities—including attribute identification, relative distance, camera pose, and compositional counting—and provides human‑authored QA, rigorous verification, and detailed error analysis.
"whyItMatters":"The benchmark offers a rigorous evaluation of 4D multi‑view reasoning and a foundation for future progress toward reliable embodied perception."
By Hyungjin Chung, Byeongjun Park, Joonseok Lee, Hojun Kim, Jaeho Choi, Byung-Hoon Kim
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...
By Jaewoo Jung, Hyeonseo Yu, Honggyu An, Jisang Han, Mungyeom Kim, Minkyeong Jeon, Heeseong Shin, Wonjun Moon, Federico Tombari, Daniel Barath, Marc Pollefeys, Seungryong Kim, Sunghwan Hong
Current VLM evaluations often conflate language priors with genuine spatial reasoning. To address this, we introduce CRISP, a novel structural-diagnostic evaluation paradigm that assesses visual spatial intelligence through consistency, the alignment between implicit perception and explicit reasoning.