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For human cognitive process, spatial reasoning and perception are closely entangled, yet the nature of this interplay remains underexplored in the evaluation of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). While recent MLLM advancements show…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Chengzu Li , Wenshan Wu , Huanyu Zhang , Qingtao Li , Zeyu Gao , Yan Xia , José Hernández-Orallo , Ivan Vulić , Furu Wei

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved impressive performance on semantic tasks, their spatial intelligence--crucial for robust and grounded AI systems--remains underdeveloped. Existing benchmarks fall short of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Mingrui Wu , Zhaozhi Wang , Fangjinhua Wang , Jiaolong Yang , Marc Pollefeys , Tong Zhang

Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding and reasoning about visual content, but significant challenges persist in tasks requiring cross-viewpoint understanding and spatial reasoning. We…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Dingming Li , Hongxing Li , Zixuan Wang , Yuchen Yan , Hang Zhang , Siqi Chen , Guiyang Hou , Shengpei Jiang , Wenqi Zhang , Yongliang Shen , Weiming Lu , Yueting Zhuang

Vision-language models (VLMs) have advanced multimodal reasoning but still face challenges in spatial reasoning for 3D scenes and complex object configurations. To address this, we introduce SpatialViLT, an enhanced VLM that integrates…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Chashi Mahiul Islam , Oteo Mamo , Samuel Jacob Chacko , Xiuwen Liu , Weikuan Yu

Visual-spatial understanding, the ability to infer object relationships and layouts from visual input, is fundamental to downstream tasks such as robotic navigation and embodied interaction. However, existing methods face spatial…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Haoyu Zhang , Meng Liu , Zaijing Li , Haokun Wen , Weili Guan , Yaowei Wang , Liqiang Nie

Humans naturally understand 3D spatial relationships, enabling complex reasoning like predicting collisions of vehicles from different directions. Current large multimodal models (LMMs), however, lack of this capability of 3D spatial…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Wufei Ma , Luoxin Ye , Celso M de Melo , Jieneng Chen , Alan Yuille

Large Vision Language Models (VLMs) have long struggled with spatial reasoning tasks. Surprisingly, even simple spatial reasoning tasks, such as recognizing "under" or "behind" relationships between only two objects, pose significant…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Shiqi Chen , Tongyao Zhu , Ruochen Zhou , Jinghan Zhang , Siyang Gao , Juan Carlos Niebles , Mor Geva , Junxian He , Jiajun Wu , Manling Li

Spatial reasoning is a core aspect of human intelligence that allows perception, inference and planning in 3D environments. However, current vision-language models (VLMs) struggle to maintain geometric coherence and cross-view consistency…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Qiyao Xue , Weichen Liu , Shiqi Wang , Haoming Wang , Yuyang Wu , Wei Gao

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit impressive problem-solving abilities in various domains, but their visual comprehension and abstract reasoning skills remain under-evaluated. To this end, we present PolyMATH, a challenging…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Himanshu Gupta , Shreyas Verma , Ujjwala Anantheswaran , Kevin Scaria , Mihir Parmar , Swaroop Mishra , Chitta Baral

Vision language models (VLMs) are an exciting emerging class of language models (LMs) that have merged classic LM capabilities with those of image processing systems. However, the ways that these capabilities combine are not always…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-03 Qiucheng Wu , Handong Zhao , Michael Saxon , Trung Bui , William Yang Wang , Yang Zhang , Shiyu Chang

Vision-language models (VLMs) have advanced rapidly, but their ability to capture spatial relationships remains a blindspot. Current VLMs are typically built with contrastive language-image pretraining (CLIP) style image encoders. The…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Nahid Alam , Leema Krishna Murali , Siddhant Bharadwaj , Patrick Liu , Timothy Chung , Drishti Sharma , Akshata A , Kranthi Kiran , Wesley Tam , Bala Krishna S Vegesna

Genuine spatial reasoning relies on the capacity to construct and manipulate coherent internal spatial representations, often conceptualized as mental models, rather than merely processing surface linguistic associations. While large…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Peiyao Jiang , Zequn Qin , Xi Li

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved significant progress in image and language tasks due to the strong reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs). Nevertheless, most MLLMs suffer from limited spatial reasoning…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Jiajie Guo , Qingpeng Zhu , Jin Zeng , Xiaolong Wu , Changyong He , Weida Wang

Spatial reasoning has emerged as a critical capability for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), drawing increasing attention and rapid advancement. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on single-step perception-to-judgment…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Rui Zhu , Xin Shen , Shuchen Wu , Chenxi Miao , Xin Yu , Yang Li , Weikang Li , Deguo Xia , Jizhou Huang

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have recently emerged as powerful tools, excelling in tasks that integrate visual and textual comprehension, such as image captioning, visual question answering, and image-text retrieval. However, existing…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-26 Ilias Stogiannidis , Steven McDonagh , Sotirios A. Tsaftaris

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding and generating content across various modalities, such as images and text. However, their interpretability remains a challenge, hindering…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-05-29 Loris Giulivi , Giacomo Boracchi

Humans build viewpoint-independent cognitive maps through navigation, enabling intuitive reasoning about object permanence and spatial relations. We argue that multimodal large language models (MLLMs), despite extensive video training, lack…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Jacob Thompson , Emiliano Garcia-Lopez , Yonatan Bisk

As textual reasoning with large language models (LLMs) has advanced significantly, there has been growing interest in enhancing the multimodal reasoning capabilities of large vision-language models (LVLMs). However, existing methods…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Junfei Wu , Jian Guan , Kaituo Feng , Qiang Liu , Shu Wu , Liang Wang , Wei Wu , Tieniu Tan

Unlocking spatial reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) is crucial for enabling intelligent interaction with 3D environments. While prior efforts often rely on explicit 3D inputs or specialized model architectures, we ask:…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Fangrui Zhu , Hanhui Wang , Yiming Xie , Jing Gu , Tianye Ding , Jianwei Yang , Huaizu Jiang

Existing evaluations of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) on spatial intelligence are typically fragmented and limited in scope. In this work, we aim to conduct a holistic assessment of the spatial understanding capabilities of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Haoning Wu , Xiao Huang , Yaohui Chen , Ya Zhang , Yanfeng Wang , Weidi Xie