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
arXiv:2606. 13673v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spatial reasoning, the ability to determine where objects are, how they relate, and how they move in 3D, remains a fundamental challenge for vision-language models (VLMs).
By Seokju Cho, Ryo Hachiuma, Abhishek Badki, Hang Su, Byung-Kwan Lee, Chan Hee Song, Sifei Liu, Subhashree Radhakrishnan, Seungryong Kim, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang, Min-Hung Chen
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
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
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
arXiv:2606. 01215v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current 3D spatial reasoning methods face a fundamental trade-off: neuro-symbolic 3D (NS3D) concept learners achieve interpretable reasoning through compositional programs but are constrained to closed-set concept vocabularies and simple programs; end-to-end 3D multi-modal LLMs (3D MLLMs) could handle complex natural language and open-vocabulary concepts but suffer from black-box reasoning without explicit spatial verification.
By Wentao Mo, Yang Liu
arXiv:2603. 26779v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities, yet they struggle with spatial tasks that require mental simulation, such as mental rotation.
By Sergio Y. Hayashi, Nina S. T. Hirata
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
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: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
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.
GaussVLA is a Vision‑Language‑Action model that enhances spatial reasoning by converting flat 2D visual tokens into compact 3D Gaussian tokens using a Gaussian Spatial Tokenizer. It further employs a Depth‑Aware Chain‑of‑Thought module to perform structured, non‑autoregressive geometric reasoning conditioned on language and flow‑time. In both simulated and real‑world tests, GaussVLA achieves high spatial‑manipulation success rates—93.5% on LIBERO and 100% on the Spatial suite—while using only 200 M parameters, outperforming SpatialVLA by 19.7% relative success.
By Md Selim Sarowar, Md Tanvir Islam, Sungho Kim, Sangtae Ahn