English

Towards Visuospatial Cognition via Hierarchical Fusion of Visual Experts

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2025-09-10 v4 Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language Machine Learning Robotics

Abstract

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at general vision-language tasks, visuospatial cognition - reasoning about spatial layouts, relations, and dynamics - remains a significant challenge. Existing models often lack the necessary architectural components and specialized training data for fine-grained spatial understanding. We introduce ViCA2 (Visuospatial Cognitive Assistant 2), a novel MLLM designed to enhance spatial reasoning. ViCA2 features a dual vision encoder architecture integrating SigLIP for semantics and Hiera for spatial structure, coupled with a token ratio control mechanism for efficiency. We also developed ViCA-322K, a new large-scale dataset with over 322,000 spatially grounded question-answer pairs for targeted instruction tuning. On the challenging VSI-Bench benchmark, our ViCA2-7B model achieves a state-of-the-art average score of 56.8, significantly surpassing larger open-source models (e.g., LLaVA-NeXT-Video-72B, 40.9) and leading proprietary models (Gemini-1.5 Pro, 45.4). This demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach in achieving strong visuospatial intelligence with a compact model. We release ViCA2, its codebase, and the ViCA-322K dataset to facilitate further research.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.12363,
  title  = {Towards Visuospatial Cognition via Hierarchical Fusion of Visual Experts},
  author = {Qi Feng},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.12363},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

26 pages, 19 figures, 4 tables