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. SR-Nav: Spatial Relationships Matter for Zero-shot Object Goal Navigation

    Mar 19, 2026Leyuan Fang, Zan Mao, Zijing Wang +1Object-Goal NavigationRobot Navigation

  2. 360° Image Perception with MLLMs: A Comprehensive Benchmark and a Training-Free Method

    Mar 17, 2026Huyen T. T. Tran, Van-Quang Nguyen, Farros Alferro +2Visual Question AnsweringVisual Spatial Reasoning

  3. RenderMem: Rendering as Spatial Memory Retrieval

    Mar 15, 2026JooHyun Park, HyeongYeop KangLong-Term Memory for Embodied AgentsAgent Memory

  4. GroundSet: A Cadastral-Grounded Dataset for Spatial Understanding with Vector Data

    Mar 15, 2026Roger Ferrod, Maël Lecene, Krishna Sapkota +4VLM EvaluationRemote Sensing Image Understanding

  5. Evaluating VLMs' Spatial Reasoning Over Robot Motion: A Step Towards Robot Planning with Motion Preferences

    Mar 13, 2026Wenxi Wu, Jingjing Zhang, Martim BrandãoVLM ReasoningVLMs for Robotics

  6. RoboStream: Weaving Spatio-Temporal Reasoning with Memory in Vision-Language Models for Robotics

    Mar 13, 2026Yuzhi Huang, Jie Wu, Weijue Bu +9Long-Horizon Robotic ManipulationRobot Task Planning

  7. Spatial Reasoning is Not a Free Lunch: A Controlled Study on LLaVA

    Mar 13, 2026Nahid Alam, Leema Krishna Murali, Siddhant Bharadwaj +7Spatial Reasoning in Language ModelsVisual Spatial Reasoning

  8. GeoSense: Internalizing Geometric Necessity Perception for Multimodal Reasoning

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

  9. SPAN-Nav: Generalized Spatial Awareness for Versatile Embodied Navigation

    Mar 10, 2026Jiahang Liu, Tianyu Xu, Jiawei Chen +9Embodied NavigationVision-Language Navigation

  10. Automating Crash Diagram Generation Using Vision-Language Models: A Case Study on Multi-Lane Roundabouts

    Mar 9, 2026Xiao Lu, Hao Zhen, Jidong J. YangVision-Language ModelsIntelligent Transportation Systems

  11. It's Time to Get It Right: Improving Analog Clock Reading and Clock-Hand Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language Models

    Mar 9, 2026Jaeha Choi, Jin Won Lee, Siwoo You +1Visual Spatial ReasoningVLM Robustness

  12. 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

  13. Perception-Aware Multimodal Spatial Reasoning from Monocular Images

    Mar 7, 2026Yanchun Cheng, Rundong Wang, Xulei Yang +4Visual Spatial ReasoningVLMs for Autonomous Driving

  14. What if? Emulative Simulation with World Models for Situated Reasoning

    Mar 6, 2026Ruiping Liu, Yufan Chen, Yuheng Zhang +8Visual Spatial ReasoningVideo Reasoning

  15. ViewFusion: Structured Spatial Thinking Chains for Multi-View Reasoning

    Mar 6, 2026Xingjian Tao, Yiwei Wang, Yujun Cai +2Visual Spatial ReasoningVLM Reasoning

  16. Thinking with Spatial Code for Physical-World Video Reasoning

    Mar 5, 2026Jieneng Chen, Wenxin Ma, Ruisheng Yuan +3Visual Spatial ReasoningPhysical Reasoning in Video

  17. Visuospatial Perspective Taking in Multimodal Language Models

    Mar 4, 2026Jonathan Prunty, Seraphina Zhang, Patrick Quinn +3Multimodal Large Language ModelsVisual Spatial Reasoning

  18. RAGNav: A Retrieval-Augmented Topological Reasoning Framework for Multi-Goal Visual-Language Navigation

    Mar 4, 2026Ling Luo, Qiangian BaiVision-Language NavigationVisual Spatial Reasoning

  19. Generative Visual Chain-of-Thought for Image Editing

    Mar 2, 2026Zijin Yin, Tiankai Hang, Yiji Cheng +9Text-Guided Image EditingVisual CoT

  20. InterCoG: Towards Spatially Precise Image Editing with Interleaved Chain-of-Grounding Reasoning

    Mar 2, 2026Yecong Wan, Fan Li, Chunwei Wang +3Image EditingText-Guided Image Editing

  21. Scale Can't Overcome Pragmatics: The Impact of Reporting Bias on Vision-Language Reasoning

    Feb 26, 2026Amita Kamath, Jack Hessel, Khyathi Chandu +3VLM ReasoningReasoning for VLMs

  22. When More Is Less: A Systematic Analysis of Spatial and Commonsense Information for Visual Spatial Reasoning

    Feb 25, 2026Muku Akasaka, Soyeon Caren HanVisual Spatial ReasoningVLM Reasoning

  23. From Perception to Action: An Interactive Benchmark for Vision Reasoning

    Feb 24, 2026Yuhao Wu, Maojia Song, Yihuai Lan +8Physical ReasoningVLM Reasoning

  24. SpatiaLQA: A Benchmark for Evaluating Spatial Logical Reasoning in Vision-Language Models

    Feb 24, 2026Yuechen Xie, Xiaoyan Zhang, Yicheng Shan +6VLM ReasoningSpatial Reasoning Benchmarks

  25. MentalBlackboard: Evaluating Spatial Visualization via Mathematical Transformations

    Feb 22, 2026Nilay Yilmaz, Maitreya Patel, Naga Sai Abhiram Kusumba +2Visual Spatial ReasoningSpatial Reasoning Benchmarks

  26. Keep it SymPL: Symbolic Projective Layout for Allocentric Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language Models

    Feb 22, 2026Jaeyun Jang, Seunghui Shin, Taeho Park +1Spatial ReasoningVisual Spatial Reasoning

  27. SAW-Bench: Learning Situated Awareness in the Real World

    Feb 18, 2026Chuhan Li, Rilyn Han, Joy Hsu +5Spatial Reasoning BenchmarksEgocentric Video Understanding

  28. ARK: A Dual-Axis Multimodal Retrieval Benchmark along Reasoning and Knowledge

    Feb 10, 2026Yijie Lin, Guofeng Ding, Haochen Zhou +3Multimodal IRVisual Spatial Reasoning

  29. Egocentric Bias in Vision-Language Models

    Feb 10, 2026Maijunxian Wang, Yijiang Li, Bingyang Wang +6VLM EvaluationVisual Spatial Reasoning