Thinking with Visual Grounding
arXiv:2606. 16122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual thinking should not only sound right; it should show its evidence.
arXiv:2606. 16122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual thinking should not only sound right; it should show its evidence.
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.
arXiv:2606. 03988v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision language models (VLMs) excel at many tasks but still struggle with spatial reasoning when critical information is not directly observable.
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.
The paper investigates how visual presentation affects vision‑language models (VLMs) on the SPaRC spatial planning benchmark. By adding lightweight input‑side scaffolds that keep the visual modality but make spatial structure clearer, the authors achieve up to a 34.0‑percentage‑point accuracy boost across multiple VLMs, and an additional 4.6 points when combined with GRPO training. Analyses reveal that these improvements stem mainly from reduced grounding errors, while rule‑based reasoning remains difficult, highlighting visual presentation as a key determinant of whether VLM benchmarks test grounded perception, downstream reasoning, or both.
The paper introduces a progressive training strategy for embodied vision‑language models aimed at reducing spatio‑temporal hallucinations. It first creates a Chain‑of‑Thought dataset that breaks complex reasoning into detailed spatiotemporal steps, then uses supervised pre‑training on this dataset followed by fine‑tuning with weakly‑labeled data. Experiments show the method improves backbone accuracy and narrows the forward‑backward performance gap from over 70% to 6.53%, indicating stronger dynamic reasoning and fewer temporal biases.
arXiv:2602. 08236v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite rapid progress in MLLMs, visual spatial reasoning remains unreliable when correct answers depend on how a scene would appear under unseen or alternative viewpoints.
SpatialASM is a framework that teaches Large Vision‑Language Models (LVLMs) to perform Active Spatial Mentalization (ASM), enabling them to proactively plan and imagine viewpoints during spatial reasoning tasks. The method uses an allocentric novel‑view generator to create explicit ASM trajectories and perspective‑taking tasks, providing two forms of supervision that guide LVLMs in adaptive view planning and scene imagination. Experiments on seven spatial benchmarks show that SpatialASM improves performance across four LVLM backbones while preserving their general vision capabilities.
arXiv:2605.27310v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Cross-view spatial reasoning remains a weak spot for vision-language models (VLMs): they reason in language and discard the fine-grained geometry t...
CoWorld Reasoner is an agentic framework that leverages a Video World Model (VWM) as a unified visual reasoning engine for Vision‑Language Models (VLMs). It exposes multiple visual operations through tools and skills, allowing the VLM to decide when to imagine, select an operation, generate visual content, and interpret the resulting evidence. The framework includes a VLM‑VWM Harness Co‑Evolution mechanism that jointly refines tools, skills, and execution code based on feedback, while keeping model weights fixed. Across seven benchmarks covering spatial, temporal, causal, and perceptual reasoning, CoWorld Reasoner outperforms direct VLM reasoning and improves accuracy on all benchmarks, achieving notable gains on MMSI and ERQA.
arXiv:2607. 03530v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce MentalThink, a visual-symbolic reasoning paradigm that equips Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) with an executable mechanism for "mental" visualization.
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.