While vision-language models excel at general multimodal understanding, they still struggle with visual spatial planning. We attribute this to a perception-reasoning modality gap: visual planning requires models to infer latent state structures from pixels and then reason over the recovered structure to produce valid actions, whereas symbolic planning directly leverages explicit objects and constraints.
Unified multimodal models (UMMs) interleave generated ''visual thoughts'' (VTs) with text reasoning to improve spatial tasks. This incurs roughly an order-of-magnitude inference cost from multi-step diffusion.
arXiv:2606. 12550v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open-world mapless navigation from sparse language instructions requires resolving underspecified goals and inferring which environmental cues are relevant for reaching the goal.
By Arthur Zhang, Carl Qi, Donne Su, Xiangyun Meng, Amy Zhang, Joydeep Biswas
arXiv:2605. 18740v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) still struggle with fine-grained visual understanding, where answers often depend on small but decisive evidence in the full image.
By Qianhao Yuan, Jie Lou, Xing Yu, Hongyu Lin, Le Sun, Xianpei Han, Yaojie Lu
arXiv:2606. 13156v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) achieve strong singleshot spatial grounding, yet lack any mechanism to observe and correct their own predictions.
By Animesh Tripathy, Aswanth Krishnan
Pointing-based visual grounding requires models to precisely locate target objects by deciphering complex spatial relationships between the visual scene and pointing gestures. Traditional methods typically encode input images into static feature representations and perform reasoning primarily within the linguistic domain, often overlooking the rich perceptual cues and explicit spatial geometry inherent in images.