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
arXiv:2606. 16122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual thinking should not only sound right; it should show its evidence.
By Junkai Zhang, Yihe Deng, Kai-Wei Chang, Wei Wang
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: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.
By Yosub Shin, Michael Buriek, Igor Molybog
arXiv:2606. 11719v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spatial reasoning remains a persistent challenge for multimodal large language models (MLLMs).
By Enhan Zhao, Wei Wu, Yuanrui Zhang, Xueliang Zhao, Di He
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.
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
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:2607. 22864v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) excel at visual interpretation but fail on spatial reasoning tasks that humans solve reliably.
By Patrick Rim, Tom Long, Ekta Prashnani, Ruth Rosenholtz, Ben Boudaoud, Peter Xenopoulos, Alex Wong, Joohwan Kim, Jae-Hyun Jung
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.
By Mahtab Bigverdi, Lindsey Li, Weikai Huang, Yiming Liu, Jaemin Cho, Jieyu Zhang, Tuhin Kundu, Chris Dangjoo Kim, Zelun Luo, Linda Shapiro, Ranjay Krishna
arXiv:2606. 17539v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spatial VLMs have made substantial progress in geometric perception, yet complex spatial reasoning requiring multi-step inference over depth, distance, and scene relations remains challenging.
By Yatai Ji, An-Chieh Cheng, Yang Fu, Yukang Chen, Han Zhang, Zhaojing Yang, Wei Huang, Ka Chun Cheung, Song Han, Vidya Nariyambut Murali, Pavlo Molchanov, Jan Kautz, Simon See, Hongxu Yin, Ping Luo, Sifei Liu
arXiv:2606. 29579v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spatial reasoning remains a persistent challenge for many vision language models (VLMs), and improving it typically requires fine-tuning with substantial additional parameters.
By Rahul Chowdhury, Timothy A Rupprecht, Xuan Shen, Pu Zhao, Yanzhi Wang