Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse expert-level tasks, but they still struggle with fundamental abilities that humans naturally develop through continuous observation of the real world, such as spatial perception and dynamic reasoning. Recent studies have recognized this gap and introduced dedicated benchmarks to evaluate the spatial-temporal capabilities of MLLMs.
arXiv:2511. 17731v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has proven remarkably effective for eliciting complex reasoning in large language models (LLMs).
STRAND is a new benchmark that tests multimodal large language models’ ability to track objects, their states, and relationships over time in videos. It evaluates intermediate reasoning by breaking queries into sub‑questions and uses Faithful Accuracy to ensure all parts of an answer are correct. The authors also propose an object‑centric framework that builds structured trajectories and shows reduced hallucinations and better temporal consistency compared to existing models.
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...
SYNCR is a synthetic benchmark designed to evaluate multimodal large language models on cross‑video reasoning. It contains 4,000 question‑answer pairs across 4,827 unique videos, covering tasks in temporal alignment, spatial tracking, comparative reasoning, and holistic synthesis. The benchmark reveals a significant performance gap between current models and humans, with models excelling at temporal ordering but struggling with precise physical and spatial reasoning.
arXiv:2512. 10359v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Video Question Answering (VideoQA) task serves as a critical playground for evaluating whether foundation models can effectively perceive, understand, and reason about dynamic real-world scenarios.
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.
arXiv:2606. 02522v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Video multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made rapid progress on general and long-form video understanding, yet their ability to preserve brief answer-critical visual evidence remains underexplored.
arXiv:2601. 19099v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision--language models (VLMs) achieve strong performance on many multimodal benchmarks but remain brittle on spatial reasoning tasks that require aligning abstract overhead representations with egocentric views.
arXiv:2603. 09731v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly considered as a foundation for embodied agents, yet it remains unclear whether they can reliably reason about the long-term physical consequences of actions from an egocentric viewpoint.
The paper introduces structured video prompting, a training‑free inference‑time technique that augments input videos with lightweight spatial and temporal structure to provide explicit anchors for evidence organization. By applying this method to two video benchmarks and two open video‑language models, the authors demonstrate performance improvements across several tasks, with gains varying by model and task. The study suggests that failures in video‑language models stem not only from reasoning capacity but also from how video evidence is presented during inference.
TimeBlind is a diagnostic benchmark designed to evaluate fine‑grained spatio‑temporal compositionality in video large language models (LLMs). It categorizes temporal understanding into three levels—atomic event recognition, event property characterization, and reasoning about event interdependencies—and uses a minimal‑pairs paradigm where video pairs share identical static content but differ only in temporal structure. Across 20 state‑of‑the‑art MLLMs tested on 600 curated instances, the best model achieved only 48.2% instance accuracy, far below human performance of 98.2%, highlighting a reliance on static visual shortcuts rather than true temporal reasoning.
Metric-Bench introduces a new benchmark for Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) that focuses on metric‑spatial reasoning in indoor scenes by using in‑image reference objects with known dimensions. The accompanying MetricReasoner fine‑tuning recipe employs structured prompts and numerical rewards to implicitly learn 2D‑to‑3D mapping without camera intrinsics. Experiments show that this approach improves spatial metric understanding by 43.1 % over existing models and boosts downstream embodied tasks, while also delivering gains on general VLM benchmarks.