Overview

Visual spatial reasoning asks whether models can understand where things are, how they relate, and how scenes change across viewpoints or actions. Common approaches add explicit geometry such as depth, coordinates, bounding boxes, scene graphs, or maps, and combine these with structured reasoning, visual memory, tools, or imagined views. Benchmarks test static image relations and transformations, multi-view and video understanding, and embodied tasks such as navigation and manipulation. Models have improved with targeted data and training, but often rely on language priors rather than visual evidence and remain unreliable on cross-view, long-horizon, and action-grounded tasks.

Latest papers

CardsList

251 papers40 papers in the last four weeks, up 264% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

  1. SpaRRTa: A Synthetic Benchmark for Evaluating Spatial Intelligence in Visual Foundation Models

    Jan 16, 2026Turhan Can Kargin, Wojciech Jasiński, Adam Pardyl +2Spatial Reasoning BenchmarksVisual Spatial Reasoning

  2. StereoVLA: Enhancing Vision-Language-Action Models with Stereo Vision

    Dec 26, 2025Shengliang Deng, Mi Yan, Yixin Zheng +7Visual Spatial ReasoningRobotic Manipulation

  3. Vision-Language Memory for Spatial Reasoning

    Nov 25, 2025Zuntao Liu, Yi Du, Taimeng Fu +3Memory-Augmented VLMsVision-Language Models

  4. MonoSR: Open-Vocabulary Spatial Reasoning from Monocular Images

    Nov 24, 2025Qirui Wang, Jingyi He, Yining Pan +3Spatial Reasoning BenchmarksVisual Spatial Reasoning

  5. RoadBench: Benchmarking MLLMs on Fine-Grained Spatial Understanding and Reasoning under Urban Road Scenarios

    Nov 22, 2025Jun Zhang, Xin Zhang, Jie Feng +5VLM EvaluationSpatial Reasoning Benchmarks

  6. VisReason: A Large-Scale Dataset for Visual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

    Nov 21, 2025Lingxiao Li, Yifan Wang, Xinyan Gao +3Visual Spatial ReasoningVisual Reasoning

  7. IndustryNav: Evaluating Spatial Reasoning and Safety of Embodied Agents in Dynamic Industrial Navigation

    Nov 21, 2025Yifan Li, Lichi Li, Anh Dao +15Visual Spatial ReasoningEmbodied Navigation

  8. SpatialThinker: Reinforcing Scene Graph-Grounded Spatial Reasoning via Dense Rewards

    Nov 10, 2025Hunar Batra, Haoqin Tu, Hardy Chen +3Multimodal UnderstandingScene Graph Generation

  9. Seeing Isn't Orienting: A Cognitively Informed Hierarchical Benchmark for Object Orientation in MLLMs

    May 27, 2025Nazia Tasnim, Keanu Nichols, Yuting Yan +4VLM EvaluationVisual Spatial Reasoning

  10. Human Cognitive Benchmarks Reveal Foundational Visual Gaps in MLLMs

    Feb 23, 2025Jen-Tse Huang, Dasen Dai, Jen-Yuan Huang +7VLM EvaluationVision-Language Models