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
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
MultihopSpatial is a new benchmark for Vision‑Language Models that focuses on multi‑hop, compositional spatial reasoning with queries ranging from 1 to 3 hops across varied spatial perspectives. It introduces the Acc@50IoU metric, which jointly evaluates answer selection and precise bounding‑box prediction, and provides a large‑scale training corpus, MultihopSpatial‑Train, to improve spatial intelligence. Evaluation of 37 state‑of‑the‑art VLMs shows that compositional spatial reasoning remains a significant challenge, and reinforcement learning fine‑tuning on the corpus boosts both intrinsic spatial reasoning and downstream embodied manipulation performance.
By Youngwan Lee, Soojin Jang, Yoorhim Cho, Seunghwan Lee, Yong-Ju Lee, Sung Ju Hwang
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. 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: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
Spatial-OPSD is a label‑free self‑improvement framework for vision‑language models that leverages spatial priors such as depth, 3D relations, and camera geometry to provide dense token‑level supervision. During training, a privileged teacher uses these priors while the student learns from only the original visual‑language input, and a recursive round‑wise scheme allows repeated self‑improvement without moving the teacher. Across four VLM families, one round of Spatial‑OPSD improves the five‑benchmark average, and three rounds push a strong spatially specialized model to the open‑source frontier, achieving the highest average among open models and best results on three of five spatial reasoning benchmarks.
By Zhenyu Liu, Zhangquan Chen, Keyi Chen, Mingze Sun, Xiang An, Haodong Jing, Ruqi Huang
arXiv:2510.13394v4 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Spatial reasoning ability is crucial for Vision Language Models (VLMs) to support real-world applications in diverse domains including robotics, au...
By Xinmiao Huang, Qisong He, Zhenglin Huang, Boxuan Wang, Zhuoyun Li, Guangliang Cheng, Yi Dong, Xiaowei Huang
Soft Spatial Reasoning introduces a post‑training framework for Large Vision‑Language Models that replaces hard, token‑by‑token chain‑of‑thought reasoning with a soft, continuous state formed by mixing token embeddings at each intermediate step. The method employs AdaptSoft, a controller that adjusts the degree of softness based on hidden states and predictive uncertainty, guided by a gradient‑alignment learning objective that requires no intermediate supervision. Experiments on diverse spatial benchmarks show that this approach outperforms both hard and fixed‑soft chain‑of‑thought baselines and several existing LVLMs.
By Rafi Ibn Sultan, Md. Sajid Alam Chowdhury, Saleh Zare Zade, Chengyin Li, Prashant Khanduri, Marco Brocanelli, Dongxiao Zhu
The paper introduces TTL‑SR, a geometry‑aware Test‑Time Learning framework designed to improve quantitative spatial reasoning in visual‑language models. By augmenting queries with geometrically coupled auxiliary prompts, filtering unreliable predictions, and updating models with a geometry‑aware multi‑objective loss on unlabeled test data, TTL‑SR adapts models to new domains without additional 3D supervision. Experiments show substantial accuracy gains on the Q‑Spatial‑ScanNet dataset for two state‑of‑the‑art VLMs.
By Gege Zhang, Shuaicheng Niu, Gang Dai, Lei Sun, Shuangping Huang