arXiv Computation and Language

MindTopo: Can Foundation Models Reason in Topological Space?

MindTopo is a benchmark that tests foundation models on topological reasoning, covering five cognitive properties—continuity, separation, order, enclosure, and knots—across two cognitive levels: reasoning and planning. It contains 11,030 instances from 13 procedurally generated task types, and evaluates 14 multimodal large language models, including agent configurations with image and video generation. Results show that models perform better on reasoning than planning, and even the best model lags far behind human performance, with fine‑tuning and reinforcement learning improving reasoning more than planning.

Microsoft Research
Aug 12

MindTopo reveals VLMs’ spatial reasoning abilities

A path, a fence, a knot. MindTopo sets a new benchmark for testing how AI understands topological relationships and highlights new opportunities to strengthen spatial reasoning and planning.

By Yunfei Ge, Anbang Liu, Qineng Wang, Johnalbert Garnica, Zihan Wang, Reuben Tan, Jianfeng Gao, Ruohan Zhang, Yining Hong, Jiajun Wu, Manling Li
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

Think3D: Thinking with Space for Spatial Reasoning

Think3D introduces a framework that endows Vision‑Language Models with interactive 3D chain‑of‑thought reasoning by integrating 3D manipulation tools for active spatial exploration. The approach improves performance on benchmarks such as BLINK Multi‑view, MindCube‑1K, and VSI‑Bench‑Tiny for proprietary models like GPT‑4.1 and Gemini 2.5 Pro, and a reinforcement‑learning variant, Think3D‑RL, enables open‑weight models such as Qwen3‑VL‑4B to autonomously learn effective 3D exploration strategies, yielding tool‑use patterns comparable to stronger models and turning a performance drop on MindCube‑1K into a substantial improvement.

By Zaibin Zhang, Yuhan Wu, Lianjie Jia, Yifan Wang, Zhongbo Zhang, Yijiang Li, Binghao Ran, Fuxi Zhang, Zhuohan Sun, Yizhuang Peng, Zhenfei Yin, Lijun Wang, Huchuan Lu
arXiv AI
Sep 1

Scaffolding Foundation Models into Physical-World Agents Pushes the Frontier of Long-Horizon Navigation

The paper introduces NavMCP, a scaffolding framework that couples vision‑language models (VLMs) with navigation foundation models (NFMs) to enable long‑horizon physical‑world agents. NavMCP orchestrates three communication channels—intent, observation, and memory—to allow the VLM to decide what evidence to seek and the NFM to ground semantic sub‑goals into closed‑loop navigation, without retraining either model. The approach achieves state‑of‑the‑art results on several embodied question‑answering benchmarks and significantly outperforms episodic interfaces on the Unitree Go2 robot as task horizons lengthen.

By Zixing Lei, Gengze Zhou, Xiong-Hui Chen, Jiazhao Zhang, Yiyang Huang, Hang Yin, Haoqi Yuan, Qi Wu, Weixin Li, Siheng Chen
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

PlanCraft: Sketch, Refine, and Furnish for Architect-Inspired Progressive 3D Residential Scene Generation

PlanCraft introduces a progressive approach to 3D residential scene generation that mirrors how architects design: starting with rough sketches and refining them over time. It leverages a large dataset of real floor plans to train a SketchPlan module that generates partial sketches at various completion levels, a PlanCraft‑Diff module that sharpens these sketches into precise vector floor plans, and a PlanCraft‑Agent that furnishes rooms within the established spatial contract. The method outperforms existing 2D and 3D baselines, achieving a 61.1% lower FID and a 15‑point lead in expert‑rated spatial rationality, even with only 25% sketch completion.

By Pengyu Zeng, Yuqin Dai, Jun Yin, Ziyang Han, Ng Cheuk Hei, Jing Zhong, Chaoyang Shi, ZhanXiang Jin, Maowei Jiang, Shuai Lu
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 4

Unfold The World: Factorize 4D Properties in Reinforcing Spatial Reasoning

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