Visual Spatial Reasoning

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19 papers in the last four weeks, up 171% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 165

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Mechanistic Diagnostics of Spatial Lexical Bias in Multimodal Large Language Model Spatial Reasoning
Jun 1, 2026Chuang Ma, Qianying Liu, Tomoyuki Obuchi +6VLM Robustness Visual Spatial Reasoning
Kyoto University · NII LLMC · RIKEN AIP +4
Perception First: A Frontier Native-Video Model with Self-Consistency for Implicit Video Question Answering
May 31, 2026Ali AlaviVisual Spatial Reasoning Video QA
The Ohio State University
Where to Look: Can Foundation Models Reach a Target Viewpoint Through Active Exploration?
May 31, 2026Liyang Li, Muzhi Zhu, Zhiyue Zhao +53D Foundation Models Visual Spatial Reasoning
Zhejiang University
Adaptive Dense Evidence Refinement for Video Relational Reasoning for VRR-QA Challenge
May 31, 2026Yuyang Sun, Yongliang Wu, Xingyu Zhu +8Visual Spatial Reasoning Inference-Time Optimization
Southeast University · National University of Singapore · Independent Researcher +2
Multi-Turn Multi-Agent Dialogue for Collaborative Reconstruction Improves VLM Performance on Spatial Reasoning, But Only Barely
May 29, 2026Chalamalasetti Kranti, Sherzod Hakimov, David SchlangenVisual Spatial Reasoning Multi-Agent Collaboration
Computational Linguistics, Department of Linguistics University of Potsdam, Germany · German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Berlin, Germany
ERGeoBench:A Comprehensive Benchmark for Embodied Reasoning and Geo-localization in Multimodal Large Language Models
May 29, 2026Kaiwen Xue, Tao Wei, Guoxin Zhang +5Spatial Reasoning Benchmarks Visual Spatial Reasoning
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China · State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China · School of Materials Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China +2
SpatialAct: Probing Spatial Reasoning-to-Action Capabilities of VLM Agents in 3D Scenes
May 29, 2026Tianhui Liu, Jie Feng, Zhiheng Zheng +6Spatial Reasoning Benchmarks Visual Spatial Reasoning
1The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · 2Zhongguancun Academy · 3Tsinghua University +1
Sample-Efficient Post-Training for LEGO Spatial-Physics Reasoning
May 29, 2026Yuhuan Yuan, Zhouliang Yu, Minghao Liu +2Physical Reasoning Visual Spatial Reasoning
HKUST(GZ) · CUHK · ZODA
MechVQA: Benchmarking and Enhancing Multimodal LLMs on Comprehensive Mechanical Drawing Understanding
May 29, 2026Qian Kou, Xiaofeng Shi, Yulin Li +4Visual Spatial Reasoning Multimodal Large Language Models
Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI), China · Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China · Beijing University of Technology, China
Why Far Looks Up: Probing Spatial Representation in Vision-Language Models
May 28, 2026Cheolhong Min, Jaeyun Jung, Daeun Lee +5VLM Evaluation Spatial Reasoning Benchmarks
Seoul National University · The Ohio State University · NVIDIA
Which Pretraining Paradigm Better Serves Spatial Intelligence? An Empirical Comparison of Vision-Language and Video Generation Models
May 27, 2026Haozhan Shen, Tiancheng Zhao, Kangjia Zhao +1Vision-Language Models Visual Spatial Reasoning
Zhejiang University · Om AI Research · Binjiang Institute of Zhejiang University
How and What to Imagine? Visual Thinking in Unified Multimodal Models for Cross-View Spatial Reasoning
May 26, 2026Qian Yang, Ankur Sikarwar, Huy Le +4Visual Spatial Reasoning Unified Multimodal Models
Mila - Québec AI Institute · Université de Montréal · McGill University +2
DRScaffold: Boosting Dense-Scene Reasoning in Lightweight Vision Language Models
May 25, 2026Xinrui Shi, Kai Liu, Ziqing Zhang +3Visual Spatial Reasoning Vision-Language Grounding
1Shanghai Jiao Tong University
ProSR: Process-Shaped Spatial Reasoning for Reliable Chain-of-Thought in VLMs
May 25, 2026Jiangyang Li, Cong Wan, Changjie Wu +8Visual Spatial Reasoning VLM Reasoning
1Xi’an Jiaotong University · 2Amap, Alibaba Group · 4Shenzhen University +1
Dual-Pathway Geometry-Aware MLLM for Spatial Intelligence
May 25, 2026Yufei Zheng, Xuhan Zhu, Zide Liu +9Visual Spatial Reasoning Metric Depth Estimation
University of Science and Technology of China · Li Auto Inc. · Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Afford-VLA: Action-Aligned Visual Planning via Internalized Affordance
May 22, 2026Runze Wang, Yuqian Fu, Yu Li +7Visual Spatial Reasoning Robotic Manipulation
1Fudan University · 2KAUST · 3SJTU +1
SPACENUM: Revisiting Spatial Numerical Understanding in VLMs
May 22, 2026Jianshu Zhang, Yijiang Li, Huifeixin Chen +4VLM Evaluation Visual Spatial Reasoning
Northwestern · UCSD · USC +1
PGT: Procedurally Generated Tasks for improving visual grounding in MLLMs
May 22, 2026Rim Assouel, Amir Bar, Michal Drozdzal +1Visual Spatial Reasoning Synthetic Data Generation
1Mila - Québec AI Institute · 4McGill University · 3FAIR at Meta Superintelligence Labs +2
GeoWeaver: Grounding Visual Tokens with Geometric Evidence before Scene Reasoning
May 21, 2026Deshui Miao, Xingsen Huang, Yameng Gu +3Visual Spatial Reasoning Spatiotemporal Reasoning
Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen · Hainan University · Pengcheng Laboratory +2
SpaceDG: Benchmarking Spatial Intelligence under Visual Degradation
May 21, 2026Xiaolong Zhou, Yifei Liu, Ziyang Gong +8VLM Robustness Spatial Reasoning Benchmarks
2Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory · University of Electronic Science and Technology of China · 6Beihang University +4
Flat-Pack Bench: Evaluating Spatio-Temporal Understanding in Large Vision-Language Models through Furniture Assembly
May 20, 2026Aditya Chetan, Eric Cai, Peeyush Kushwaha +5VLM Evaluation Temporal Video Grounding
Cornell University · Independent researcher · MBZUAI +2
ArchSIBench: Benchmarking the Architectural Spatial Intelligence of Vision-Language Models
May 20, 2026Qirui Shen, Wenda Wang, Jiachen Lu +5VLM Evaluation Spatial Reasoning Benchmarks
School of Architecture, Tsinghua University
EventPrune: Cascaded Event-Assisted Token Pruning for Efficient First-Person Dynamic Spatial Reasoning
May 19, 2026Pengtao Ma, Ziliang Zhou, Ciyu Ruan +7Visual Spatial Reasoning Efficient VLM Inference
Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University · Harbin Institute of Technology · Tsinghua University +1
Leveraging Latent Visual Reasoning in Silence
May 18, 2026Dongyao Zhu, Zhen Wang, Xi Xiao +7Visual Spatial Reasoning Latent Visual Reasoning
North Carolina State University · UC, San Diego · University of Alabama at Birmingham +4
Seeing Together: Multi-Robot Cooperative Egocentric Spatial Reasoning with Multimodal Large Language Models
May 18, 2026Kunyu Peng, Zhikun Zhou, Kailun Yang +9Visual Spatial Reasoning Multi-Robot Systems
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology · INSAIT, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” · Hunan University +4
SPATIOROUTE: Dynamic Prompt Routing for Zero-Shot Spatial Reasoning
May 18, 2026Pawat Chunhachatrachai, Gueter Josmy Faure, Hung-Ting Su +1Visual Spatial Reasoning 3D Spatial Reasoning
National Taiwan University · Delta Robotics Innovation Center
Beyond the Cartesian Illusion: Testing Two-Stage Multi-Modal Theory of Mind under Perceptual Bottlenecks
May 18, 2026Yajing Zhou, Xiangyu KongAudio-Visual Understanding Visual Spatial Reasoning
College of Computer Science, Beijing Information Science and Technology University, No.55 Taihang Road, Changping District, Beijing, 102206, China
Self-Evolving Spatial Reasoning in Vision Language Models via Geometric Logic Consistency
May 18, 2026Junming Liu, Yuqi Li, Yifei Sun +6VLM Robustness Vision-Language Models
Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory · The City University of New York · The Chinese University of Hong Kong +3
SEDualVLN: A Spatially-Enhanced Dual-System for Vision-Language Navigation
May 17, 2026Jingzhi Huang, Junkai Huang, Wenxuan Song +4Visual Spatial Reasoning Vision-Language Navigation
Hong Kong Polytechnic University · Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences · Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)
GeoWorld-VLM: Geometry from World Models for Vision-Language Models
May 15, 2026Renjie Gu, Kaichen Zhou, Yan Luo +1Visual Spatial Reasoning VLM Adaptation
Harvard AI and Robotics Lab · Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence · Harvard University

Jun 1, 2026, cs.CLJ/K move · Enter open · S save

Mechanistic Diagnostics of Spatial Lexical Bias in Multimodal Large Language Model Spatial Reasoning

Chuang Ma, Qianying Liu, Tomoyuki Obuchi, Fei Cheng+5

Kyoto University · NII LLMC · RIKEN AIP+4

VLM Robustness Visual Spatial Reasoning Multimodal Large Language Models Linguistic Bias in Language Models Causal Interventions in Language Models

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Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) remain unreliable on spatial multiple-choice questions, and their failures are often attributed to poorly attended visual information. We identify a complementary failure mode, spatial lexical bias: a spatial relation word added to the answer options can act as a lexical-semantic distractor that draws the model's decision toward that option. Using nine open-weight MLLMs, we show that this phenomenon is widespread. We then isolate diagnostic cases in which a model answers a binary spatial question correctly yet consistently chooses a newly added third spatial option, which we call binary-stable but ternary-fragile cases. Leveraging mechanistic interpretability tools on these cases, we find that the failure arises on the language side rather than the visual side: visual attention analyses and residual-stream probes show the correct spatial relation remains internally available, while irrelevant-option controls, activation patching, and sparse component interventions trace the bias to specific LLM-side channels and neurons. Accordingly, we show that a lightweight LLM-only DPO update on tiny single-object-pair synthetic data mitigates the bias, lifting four-way robust accuracy by up to 100 points on synthetic data, and by 68.0, 32.6, and 20.1 points on broader evaluation datasets WhatsUp, SpatialMQA-Direct, and VSR.

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