arXiv:2605. 16713v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) achieve strong semantic recognition, yet remain brittle on elementary spatial relations such as left of, on, behind, and between.
By Renjie Gu, Kaichen Zhou, Yan Luo, Mengyu Wang
arXiv:2606. 04381v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: 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.
By Chen Chu, Bita Azarijoo, Li Xiong, Khurram Shafique, Cyrus Shahabi
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: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
Vision-language models (VLMs) achieve strong semantic understanding but remain unreliable in metric spatial reasoning, particularly when queries require comparing multiple instances of the same object category. We study this problem through the Closest-Instance Distance Query (CIDQ), where a model must identify the nearest visible candidate to a unique reference object and estimate their gravity-aligned floor-plane distance.