Overview

The field studies how AI can recover the structure of 3D scenes, track objects across viewpoints, and reason about distance, direction, movement, and possible actions. Common approaches add depth and camera cues to vision-language models, build explicit maps or scene graphs, or use geometric tools and active multi-view exploration; others train structured reasoning with supervised data or reinforcement learning. These methods support tasks such as visual grounding, navigation, scene editing, and robotic manipulation, and are tested on image, video, point-cloud, and embodied benchmarks. A central challenge is that strong question-answering scores can hide reliance on 2D or linguistic shortcuts: models still struggle with occlusion, changing viewpoints, metric accuracy, and carrying spatial beliefs reliably into action.

Latest papers

CardsList

201 papers25 papers in the last four weeks, up 47% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. VoxelCodeBench: Benchmarking 3D World Modeling Through Code Generation

    Apr 2, 2026Yan Zheng, Florian BordesCode Generation Benchmarks3D Spatial Reasoning

  2. Multimodal Language Models Cannot Spot Spatial Inconsistencies

    Apr 1, 2026Om Khangaonkar, Hadi J. Rad, Hamed PirsiavashMulti-View Consistency3D Spatial Reasoning

  3. SceneTeract: Probing and Improving Agent-Aware Activity Reasoning in 3D Indoor Scenes

    Mar 31, 2026Léopold Maillard, Francis Engelmann, Tom Durand +43D Spatial ReasoningEmbodied AI

  4. SpatialStack: Layered Geometry-Language Fusion for 3D VLM Spatial Reasoning

    Mar 28, 2026Jian Zhang, Shijie Zhou, Bangya Liu +23D Spatial Reasoning3D VLMs

  5. Make Geometry Matter for Spatial Reasoning

    Mar 27, 2026Shihua Zhang, Qiuhong Shen, Shizun Wang +2Visual Spatial Reasoning3D Spatial Reasoning

  6. HiSpatial: Taming Hierarchical 3D Spatial Understanding in Vision-Language Models

    Mar 26, 2026Huizhi Liang, Yichao Shen, Yu Deng +53D Spatial Reasoning3D VLMs

  7. Scalable Object Relation Encoding for Better 3D Spatial Reasoning in Large Language Models

    Mar 25, 2026Shengli Zhou, Minghang Zheng, Feng Zheng +13D Spatial ReasoningPositional Encoding

  8. Limits of Spatial Imagery Reasoning in Frontier LLM Models

    Mar 25, 2026Sergio Y. Hayashi, Nina S. T. HirataVisual Spatial Reasoning3D Spatial Reasoning

  9. Unleashing Spatial Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models via Textual Representation Guided Reasoning

    Mar 24, 2026Jiacheng Hua, Yishu Yin, Yuhang Wu +33D Spatial ReasoningMultimodal Large Language Models

  10. Cog3DMap: Multi-View Vision-Language Reasoning with 3D Cognitive Maps

    Mar 24, 2026Chanyoung Gwak, Yoonwoo Jeong, Byungwoo Jeon +3Multimodal Spatial Reasoning3D Spatial Reasoning

  11. SpatialBoost: Enhancing Visual Representation through Language-Guided Reasoning

    Mar 23, 2026Byungwoo Jeon, Dongyoung Kim, Huiwon Jang +2Visual Representation Learning3D Spatial Reasoning

  12. SpatialFly: Implicit 3D Prior-Guided Visual Reparameterization for Continuous UAV Vision-and-Language Navigation

    Mar 22, 2026Wen Jiang, Kangyao Huang, Li Wang +9Visual Representation Learning3D Spatial Reasoning

  13. Generation Models Know Space: Unleashing Implicit 3D Priors for Scene Understanding

    Mar 19, 2026Xianjin Wu, Dingkang Liang, Tianrui Feng +53D Spatial Reasoning3D Scene Understanding

  14. Loc3R-VLM: Language-based Localization and 3D Reasoning with Vision-Language Models

    Mar 18, 2026Kevin Qu, Haozhe Qi, Mihai Dusmanu +33D VLMs3D Spatial Reasoning

  15. Feeling the Space: Egomotion-Aware Video Representation for Efficient and Accurate 3D Scene Understanding

    Mar 18, 2026Shuyao Shi, Kang G. Shin3D Scene Understanding3D Spatial Reasoning

  16. RieMind: Geometry-Grounded Spatial Agent for Scene Understanding

    Mar 16, 2026Fernando Ropero, Erkin Turkoz, Daniel Matos +63D Spatial Reasoning3D Scene Understanding

  17. SpatialPoint: Spatial-aware Point Prediction for Embodied Localization

    Mar 16, 2026Qiming Zhu, Zhirui Fang, Tianming Zhang +3VLMs for Robotics3D VLMs

  18. Spatial-TTT: Streaming Visual-based Spatial Intelligence with Test-Time Training

    Mar 12, 2026Fangfu Liu, Diankun Wu, Jiawei Chi +7Streaming Video Understanding3D Spatial Reasoning

  19. GeoSense: Internalizing Geometric Necessity Perception for Multimodal Reasoning

    Mar 11, 2026Ruiheng Liu, Haihong Hao, Mingfei Han +4Visual Spatial ReasoningMultimodal Reasoning

  20. World2Mind: Cognition Toolkit for Allocentric Spatial Reasoning in Foundation Models

    Mar 10, 2026Shouwei Ruan, Bin Wang, Zhenyu Wu +4Spatial Reasoning3D Spatial Reasoning

  21. Context-Nav: Context-Driven Exploration and Viewpoint-Aware 3D Spatial Reasoning for Instance Navigation

    Mar 10, 2026Won Shik Jang, Ue-Hwan KimVision-Language Navigation3D Spatial Reasoning

  22. 3ViewSense: Spatial and Mental Perspective Reasoning from Orthographic Views in Vision-Language Models

    Mar 8, 2026Shaoxiong Zhan, Yanlin Lai, Zheng Liu +6Visual Spatial ReasoningSpatial Reasoning in Language Models

  23. PARSE: Part-Aware Relational Spatial Modeling

    Mar 8, 2026Yinuo Bai, Peijun Xu, Kuixiang Shao +5Spatial Reasoning3D Spatial Reasoning

  24. Holi-Spatial: Evolving Video Streams into Holistic 3D Spatial Intelligence

    Mar 8, 2026Yuanyuan Gao, Hao Li, Yifei Liu +143D Scene Understanding3D Spatial Reasoning

  25. Do 3D Large Language Models Really Understand 3D Spatial Relationships?

    Mar 6, 2026Xianzheng Ma, Tao Sun, Shuai Chen +73D Spatial Reasoning3D VQA

  26. Cog2Gen3D: Sculpturing 3D Semantic-Geometric Cognition for 3D Generation

    Mar 6, 2026Haonan Wang, Hanyu Zhou, Haoyue Liu +23D Scene Generation3D Diffusion Models