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SpatialBench: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models for Spatial Cognition

11 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

11 Pith papers citing it
abstract

Spatial cognition is fundamental to real-world multimodal intelligence, allowing models to effectively interact with the physical environment. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made significant strides, existing benchmarks often oversimplify spatial cognition, reducing it to a single-dimensional metric, which fails to capture the hierarchical structure and interdependence of spatial abilities. To address this gap, we propose a hierarchical spatial cognition framework that decomposes spatial intelligence into five progressively complex levels from basic observation to high-level planning. Building upon this taxonomy, we construct SpatialBench, a large-scale, fine-grained benchmark covering 15 tasks aligned with these cognitive levels. To provide a unified evaluation across heterogeneous tasks, we further introduce a high-level capability-oriented metric that reliably assesses a model's overall spatial reasoning ability. Extensive experiments over massive MLLMs reveal distinct performance stratification across cognitive levels: models exhibit strong perceptual grounding yet remain limited in symbolic reasoning, causal inference, and planning. Additional human tests demonstrate that humans perform selective, goal-directed abstraction, while MLLMs tend to over-attend to surface details without coherent spatial intent. Our work establishes the first systematic framework for measuring hierarchical spatial cognition in MLLMs, laying the foundation for future spatially intelligent systems.

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years

2026 11

representative citing papers

3D Primitives are a Spatial Language for VLMs

cs.CV · 2026-05-12 · conditional · novelty 7.0

3D geometric primitives in executable code act as an effective intermediate spatial language that boosts VLMs on reconstruction and question-answering tasks.

ARGOS: Who, Where, and When in Agentic Multi-Camera Person Search

cs.CV · 2026-04-14 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

ARGOS is the first benchmark reformulating multi-camera person search as an agentic interactive reasoning task grounded in a spatio-temporal topology graph, with 2691 tasks across three tracks where current LLMs achieve low accuracy.

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