arXiv:2606.18974v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Unified multimodal models (UMMs) interleave generated ''visual thoughts'' (VTs) with text reasoning to improve spatial tasks. This incurs roughly a...
By Pengyu Li, Zhitao Gao, Lingling Zhang, Muye Huang, Yuanming Li, Fangzhi Xu, Jun Liu
EgoPathBench is a new dataset and benchmark that tests zero‑shot egocentric waypoint decision‑making in vision‑language models. Each task presents an egocentric RGB image, a natural‑language goal, and numbered visible waypoints, and models must return traversable candidates or an ordered route. The benchmark evaluates candidate feasibility, edge legality, and goal arrival under point‑agent or embodied geometry, covering 31,852 training, 1,345 validation, and 1,111 benchmark questions.
"whyItMatters":"The benchmark reveals that current VLMs perform poorly on integrated navigation tasks, highlighting a gap in spatial intelligence that can be addressed by fine‑tuning with the released training data."
By Yang Zhao, Zhuo Chen, Xubo Yang
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
Zero-shot waypoint navigation requires vision-language models to select, from the current first-person observation, a sequence of spatial actions that is feasible for the agent and reaches the goal, p...
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. 00229v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Natural language is a powerful reasoning medium for language and vision-language models, but it is mismatched to the granularity of continuous control.
By Yueh-Hua Wu, Tatsuya Matsushima, Kei Ota
Unified multimodal models (UMMs) interleave generated ''visual thoughts'' (VTs) with text reasoning to improve spatial tasks. This incurs roughly an order-of-magnitude inference cost from multi-step diffusion.
arXiv:2609.39195v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Spatial intelligence requires maintaining a coherent understanding of the world as the embodied agent moves. Like humans, the agent must use its own mo...
By Shichao Li, Meiqi Wang, Fei Su, Zhicheng Zhao
arXiv:2608. 11739v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The prevailing recipe for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models couples a pretrained VLM with a separately trained flow-matching action expert.
By Yicheng Liu, Zibin Dong, Baijun Ye, Tianyuan Yuan, Tao Jiang, Anqi Yang, Shicheng Cao, Haonan Liu, Yue Sun, Zihan Guo, Xiao Liu, Dong Ke, Changxun Pan, Chenru Wu, Tailai Cheng, Xiaoshu Ren, Xinlei Zhang, Jianning Cui, Zijie Zhao, Haoyu Zhang, Kaiming Xu, Haodong Yang, Bowen Zhang, Jiahui Niu, Shaoting Zhu, Shiduo Zhang, Hang Zhao
The paper introduces Geometry-Privileged Distillation (GPD), a method that incorporates depth, semantic, and bird’s-eye-view cues as compact text routed to a teacher model during on-policy self-distillation. By applying a privileged KL loss only to incorrect trajectories, GPD enhances spatial reasoning in vision‑language models while keeping the deployed model RGB‑only. Experiments on a 4B backbone show that GPD outperforms prior methods on multiple spatial reasoning benchmarks, with ablations confirming the benefits of 3D cues, question‑conditioned routing, and selective distillation.
By Hongxing Li, Yixin Li, Dingming Li, Zixuan Wang, Yuchen Yan, Wenqi Zhang, Weiming Lu, Yongliang Shen
arXiv:2606. 26443v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A robot working alongside people must reason about what they have done, in what order, and with what intent.
By Baiqi Li, Ce Zhang, Yu Fang, Yue Yang, Shangzhe Li, Mingyu Ding, Gedas Bertasius
While vision-language models excel at general multimodal understanding, they still struggle with visual spatial planning. We attribute this to a perception-reasoning modality gap: visual planning requires models to infer latent state structures from pixels and then reason over the recovered structure to produce valid actions, whereas symbolic planning directly leverages explicit objects and constraints.