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: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
CitySTAR introduces a training‑free framework that transforms billion‑scale urban point clouds into a query‑ready scene graph of open‑vocabulary 3D instances, using CodeLLM‑driven tools to supply multimodal evidence for node attributes and spatial relations. It models target‑context topology with paired hypergraphs and performs bidirectional topology verification for structural disambiguation, followed by a Reflective Cross‑modal Grounding module that integrates topology consistency and 2D visual evidence to decide over a metric‑aware 3D context graph. The authors also present CitySTAR‑3D, a benchmark that enhances semantic coverage, instance completeness, bounding‑box fidelity, and spatial‑relation complexity for city‑scale 3D grounding, and report extensive experiments showing consistent improvements in open‑world urban 3D grounding with strong interpretability and generalization.
By Shuai Zhang, Hongye Hou, Qinghe Liu, Zhuoxiao Li, Dongli Wu, Jing Ou, Yuan Liu, Wufan Zhao
arXiv:2606. 09669v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spatial reasoning is a foundational capability for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to perceive and operate within the physical world.
By Hongcheng Gao, Hailong Qu, Jingyi Tang, Jiahao Wang, Zihao Huang, Hengkang Qiao, Shihong Huang, Junming Yang, Yi Li, Hongyixuan Yuan, Wenjie Li, Bohan Zeng, Wenbo Li, Bo Wang, Jianhui Liu, Olive Huang, Haoyang Huang, Wentao Zhang, Guoqing Huang, Nan Duan, Yinpeng Dong
Although multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, understanding 3D spatial relationships from 2D images remains a critical challenge. Existing methods primarily rely on symbolic text tokens, which inherently lack the fidelity to represent continuous geometric information.