As Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed in decision-critical pipelines such as robotics, embodied AI, and safety monitoring, the opacity of their spatial judgments limits operator trust and auditability. MLLMs demonstrate strong reasoning but often struggle with fine-grained spatial understanding and object hallucination.
The paper introduces a tool‑augmented framework that enhances a small Vision‑Language Model (Qwen3.5‑4B) with geometric tools—3D object detection, metric depth estimation, and deterministic solvers for distance, size, and bearing—to improve metric spatial reasoning. By moving metric computation from the model’s weights into explicit solvers, the approach achieves significant gains on ReVSI‑Bench tasks, notably increasing absolute distance accuracy from 0.46 to 0.74 MRA and relative direction accuracy from 25.9% to 73.4%. The modular design allows swapping in different detectors, enabling a clear separation between perception and reasoning errors, and the model can autonomously sequence the tools to match a scripted pipeline on most tasks.
By Kai Glantz, Clemens Grange
DepthEvidence is a 4B multimodal language model that integrates dense metric depth predictions into language generation. It employs a camera‑conditioned decoder to produce full‑resolution depth maps and a dense‑to‑language interface that converts these predictions into object‑aligned geometry tokens. The model is trained with geometric supervision and instruction tuning, and it sets new state‑of‑the‑art results on a Depth‑VQA benchmark and on instance‑level metric depth estimation across nine datasets.
By Jiangning Wei, Yuan Yao, Miaomiao Cui, Mingsheng Li, Humen Zhong, Shuai Bai, Zhibo Yang
arXiv:2606. 27876v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spatial intelligence is essential for low-altitude unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) perception, collaboration, and navigation.
By Haoyu Zhang, Meng Liu, Qianlong Xiang, Kun Wang, Yaowei Wang, Liqiang Nie
arXiv:2607. 08970v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent benchmarks for VLMs largely assess single- or limited-view perception, leaving untested the core cognitive ability to integrate observations across viewpoints into a coherent, world-centric (allocentric) 3D mental model.
By Hantao Zhang, Jinru Sui, Ed Li, Dirk Bergemann, Zhuoran Yang
AnchorVLN is an open‑vocabulary vision‑language navigation system that separates semantic proposals from geometric metrics. It uses a VLM to generate semantics while a geometry module supplies reliable metric quantities such as range and bearing, all within a Model Context Protocol server. The system achieves 64.4% on instruction following and improves object‑reference accuracy, reducing median center error from 3.37 m to 2.48 m.
By Long Giang Vu, Chengkai Yao, Yuxin Liu, FNU Aryan, Rajath Chandrashekar Aralikatti
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
arXiv:2601. 22054v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Scaling has powered recent advances in vision foundation models, yet extending this paradigm to metric depth estimation remains challenging due to heterogeneous sensor noise, camera-dependent biases, and metric ambiguity in noisy cross-source 3D data.
By Baorui Ma, Jiahui Yang, Donglin Di, Xuancheng Zhang, Jianxun Cui, Hao Li, Yan Xie, Wei Chen
arXiv:2606. 31148v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: 3D Visual Grounding (3DVG) aims to localize target objects in 3D scenes given natural language descriptions.
By Duc Cao Dinh, Khai Le-Duc, Florent Draye, Chris Ngo, Terry Jingchen Zhang, Bernhard Sch\"olkopf, Zhijing Jin
arXiv:2603. 04976v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards ( RLVR ) has emerged as a transformative paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models ( LLMs), yet its potential in 3D scene understanding remains under-explored.
By Xiongkun Linghu, Jiangyong Huang, Baoxiong Jia, Siyuan Huang
OmniAct3D is a framework that adapts Vision Foundation Model (VFM) detectors trained on perspective images to equirectangular projection (ERP) panoramic images for 3D detection. It introduces the ERP-Ray Geometry Adapter (ERGA-Ray) to model spherical rays, the Visual-Action Reasoning Chain (VARC) to ground hypotheses in panoramic evidence, and the Appearance-Guided Heading Expert (AGHE) to recover high‑resolution heading cues. The method achieves a 2.96 NDS improvement on Spheriverse and a 24.87 mAP gain on PanoMMOcc, while preserving most of the baseline’s performance across configurations.
By Runtong Wu, Fei Teng, Di Wen, Guoqiang Zhao, Kunyu Peng, Kailun Yang
arXiv:2605. 20448v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-language models reliably name objects in a scene, but do they represent the 3D layout those objects inhabit?
By Animesh Maheshwari, Divyansh Sahu, Nishit Verma