Quantifying and extending the coverage of spatial categorization data sets

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have been widely applied in embodied agents and robotics for vision tasks. However, MLLMs suffer from limitations in spatial reasoning and perception. Post-training techniques have shown promise for improving these capabilities; yet, there are limited data-driven surveys of such approaches. In this survey, we consider approaches to fine-tuning pretrained MLLMs for spatial reasoning tasks, ranging from supervised to reinforcement learning, with an emphasis on the datasets used. We investigate themes of dataset construction, data modality and annotation, and evaluation of the resulting models. Based on these themes, we categorize research into three groups: dataset design, dataset construction and evaluation. We find four main methods for constructing fixed spatial annotations: rules and templates, LLM prompting, procedural generation, and human-in-the-loop. We also observe substantial variation in evaluation approaches, including different scoring methods, tolerance metrics, and benchmark types. Finally, we identify opportunities for future research in unified dynamic annotation, efficient spatial reasoning, standardization of evaluation, expanded spatial range, and human-centered spatial interactions.

Recent large language models (LLMs) often appear to exhibit spatial reasoning ability; however, this capability is largely symbolic, arising from pattern matching over spatial language rather than true 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. To address this limitation, we introduce the Spatial Language Model (SLM), the first multimodal LLM that treats location information as a first-class modality and enables geometric spatial reasoning within the model's inference process. SLM directly operates on learned spatial representations rather than textual descriptions of spatial relations. To support effective training, we construct a Spatial Instruction Dataset that aligns spatial representations, atomic geometric operations, and natural language instructions. We further propose a new benchmark named SpatialEval, which is designed to evaluate spatial reasoning across attributes, distance, topology, and relative-position tasks. Extensive experiments show that SLM significantly outperforms existing LLM-based approaches that rely on symbolic reasoning via prompt engineering or textual abstraction, demonstrating the benefits of integrating geometric spatial representations for robust spatial reasoning. Our instruction dataset, evaluation benchmark, model training codes, and models' checkpoints can be found at: \hyperlink{https://github.com/chuchen2017/SLM}{https://github.com/chuchen2017/SLM}.

Geospatial reasoning, i.e., computing distances, containment, and other spatial relations over real-world entities, is central to navigation and logistics, yet large language models (LLMs) struggle with the required geometric and topological computation despite storing considerable geographic knowledge. Existing benchmarks localize these failures only partially: they are synthetic or smallscale, largely monolingual, and offer limited control over geographic coverage. We introduce MultiGlobeQA, a multilingual benchmark of 46,060 question-answer pairs spanning 14 spatial-function families and 15 answer formats, with execution-based ground truth over three knowledge graphs. It covers 201 countries and territories via income- and density-stratified sampling, with parallel questions in English and 16 additional high- and low-resource languages. Across parametric, reasoning, and agentic settings, LLMs collapse on tasks requiring grid indexing and shape computation, while topological relations and directions fare best. Retrieval and tool use yield considerable gains, yet performance plateaus below two thirds even when gold facts are supplied, indicating that computation, not access to knowledge, is the bottleneck. Models also underperform on low-income regions, a gap that gold facts widen rather than close.