Human-Centric Image Captioning with Subject-Centered Spatial Understanding
Authors: Bozhou Li, Jiahang Zhang, Yue Ding, Yushuo Guan, Bohan Zeng, Yiyan Ji, Xinlong Chen, Yang Shi, +6 more
Abstract
While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) achieve remarkable performance on generic image captioning, they frequently suffer from structural hallucinations in human-centric scenarios. Accurately modeling human subjects is foundational for critical downstream applications, such as accurate avatar/video/image generation and fine-grained human action understanding. However, these tasks require highly precise subject-centered spatial grounding, such as distinguishing egocentric left/right laterality and maintaining correct anatomical-object bindings. Although catastrophic for structural integrity, these localized spatial inversions are often overshadowed by overall descriptive metrics in existing benchmarks. To systematically expose and quantify this bottleneck, we introduce SPACE (Subject-centric Poses, Appearance, and Characteristics Evaluation), a benchmark designed to evaluate subject-centered spatial understanding. On SPACE, we reveal that despite strong generic perception, current MLLMs consistently fail to ground descriptions in the subject's intrinsic frame of reference. To bridge this gap, we propose a specialized data construction and alignment pipeline. We first extract structured spatial hints from fine-grained body-part localization to guide a two-stage caption rewriting process, yielding highly spatially-faithful training data. Furthermore, we design a rubric-based reward for Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) that explicitly penalizes structurally critical spatial errors during alignment. Extensive experiments on SPACE demonstrate our framework significantly improves human-centric caption quality, particularly in subject-centered spatial reasoning, achieving performance competitive with strong closed-source models. Our benchmark and code are available at https://github.com/JHang2020/SPACE-Eval.
Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made substantial progress, their spatial reasoning may still produce intermediate judgments inconsistent with the input image, allowing errors to propagate through the reasoning chain and affect the final answer. Existing methods mainly improve spatial reasoning through training or additional spatial information, without considering whether the reasoning process itself is faithful to the model input. Our study shows that unfaithful reasoning chains significantly reduce final-answer accuracy. To address this issue, we propose a modular and training-free framework for spatial reasoning verification and correction. The framework constructs a Spatial Evidence Graph (SEG), which associates atomic spatial evidence extracted from Chain-of-Thought reasoning with visual entities, spatial relations, source steps, and visual evidence. Spatial Evidence Reliability Assessment (SERA) evaluates the reliability of visual evidence based on object existence, localization, and geometric measurements. The framework then identifies the earliest spatial evidence unit contradicted by reliable visual evidence and guides the original MLLM to revise the subsequent reasoning and final answer. Across 15 model-dataset settings, our method achieves an average accuracy of 68.94%, outperforming the compared baselines by 8.55 percentage points on average. Our code will be open-sourced.
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) excel at visual interpretation but fail on spatial reasoning tasks that humans solve reliably. Existing benchmarks evaluate these models as black boxes, limiting their ability to identify the underlying causes of lower performance: when a model fails a spatial reasoning task, it remains difficult to ascertain whether the hurdle is perceptual, such as recognizing object boundaries, or cognitive, such as reasoning about occlusion to infer hidden geometry. We introduce Spatial-IQ, a hierarchical diagnostic framework that decomposes object counting in stacked 3D structures into 9 perceptual and cognitive sub-tasks organized by the developmental stages of human spatial cognition, with mental rotation as an additional target probe. Using NVIDIA Isaac Sim, we procedurally generated a diverse dataset of roughly 80,000 stacked 3D structures with per-task ground truth. We evaluate models across three output formats (free-response text, multiple-choice images, and image editing) alongside a human baseline. The Spatial-IQ framework shows that top-performing models often succeed at the target task (object counting) without succeeding on the lower-level sub-tasks intended to support it, and that models differ in how much of these hierarchical chains they preserve, often revealing shortcut behavior that raw target-task accuracy alone would obscure. Finally, we demonstrate that training models with chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision over our hierarchical sub-tasks, combined with reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, significantly improves both spatial consistency across sub-tasks and target-task accuracy, supporting the value of the proposed decomposition as both a diagnostic tool and a training signal.
Spatial intelligence remains a persistent challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), as it requires coherent spatial scene representations beyond basic object recognition. Existing methods typically build such representations through textual reasoning or 3D reconstruction. However, they often falter during multi-step reasoning, particularly when required to dynamically re-anchor evidence to the specific camera-, object-, or direction-centric reference frames demanded by complex queries. To address this, we propose OmniView-Space, a framework designed to maintain spatial consistency through multimodal egocentric evidence. Our approach consists of three core components: (1) Multi-Perspective Spatial Mapping (MPSM), which re-anchors reconstructed geometry into a query-aligned visual cognitive map and a textual spatial graph; (2) Tool-Guided Egocentric Reasoning, an interleaved policy trained to actively select the ego anchor required by the query and request the corresponding MPSM evidence; and (3) Cognitive-Map Distillation, which uses MPSM-generated trajectories and ego-frame rewards to train the model to reason with self-generated cognitive maps. Experiments on single- and multi-image spatial reasoning benchmarks show that OmniView-Space achieves state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, the distilled model maintains this performance while reducing reliance on external geometry pipelines.