Recent large language models (LLMs) often appear to exhibit spatial reasoning ability; however, this capability is largely \emph{symbolic}, arising from pattern matching over spatial language rather than true \emph{geometric} reasoning over space. Because LLMs operate on discrete tokens, they lack native support for continuous spatial representations, explicit geometric computation, and structured spatial operators.
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: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:2608. 07955v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large vision-language models have achieved strong performance in multimodal reasoning, but they remain unreliable on fine-grained spatial tasks that demand both precise spatial perception and fine-grained geometric computation beyond end-to-end generation.
By Shi-Yu Tian, Zhuo-Xia Wang, Xuan-Yi Zhu, Zhi Zhou, Xinwei Yang, Kun-Yang Yu, Ming Yang, Yang Chen, Yu-Feng Li
In this work, we explore an alternative paradigm for spatial reasoning by explicitly disentangling 3D perception from reasoning, rather than jointly acquiring implicit 3D perception and reasoning through large-scale training. Our key observation is that modern perception models excel at estimating continuous 3D geometry, whereas large language models (LLMs) are particularly effective at compositional and symbolic reasoning.
arXiv:2608. 05242v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, we explore an alternative paradigm for spatial reasoning by explicitly disentangling 3D perception from reasoning, rather than jointly acquiring implicit 3D perception and reasoning through large-scale training.
By Haoze Sun, Jiequan Cui, Qingshan Xu, Richang Hong