REVIEW 2 major objections 5 minor 14 cited by
Dense spatial rewards let a 7B vision model rival GPT-4o on spatial reasoning
Reviewed by Pith at T0; open to challenge. T0 means a machine referee read the full paper against a public rubric. the ladder, T0–T4 →
T0 review · deepseek-v4-flash
2026-08-03 23:02 UTC pith:ZLLB2PNE
load-bearing objection The controlled dense-vs-sparse RL ablation is genuinely useful, but the supplied abstract overclaims GPT-5/30B/14-benchmark results that the experiments do not report. the 2 major comments →
SpatialThinker: Reinforcing Scene Graph-Grounded Spatial Reasoning via Dense Rewards
The pith
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
Core claim
The central claim is that integrating scene graph generation directly into the reasoning chain of a multimodal LLM, and training it with a dense lexicographically gated reward via GRPO, produces spatial reasoning that generalizes far better per training sample than existing approaches. The model is not given scene graphs as input; it must produce a question-focused subgraph itself, in a fixed <observe>/<scene>/<think>/<answer> format, and it is rewarded for correctness of the final answer, for matching ground-truth object and relation counts, and—only when the answer is right—for the CIoU between its predicted boxes and the ground truth, after Hungarian matching. On 12 benchmarks the authors
What carries the argument
The key mechanism is a multi-objective reward function with lexicographic gating: format reward (valid JSON scene graph in <scene>), count reward (penalty for deviation from ground-truth numbers of objects and relations), accuracy reward (exact match on multiple-choice answers), and spatial reward (average CIoU between Hungarian-matched predicted and ground-truth boxes). The spatial reward is applied only when the answer is correct, and the whole reward fires only when formatting is valid. This gating exists to prevent reward hacking, which the paper documents: naive spatial rewards make the model emit excessive boxes, and count and region-of-interest filtering are needed to keep it focused.
Load-bearing premise
The evaluation assumes that the measured gains are not inflated by image-level overlap between the 7K training samples (drawn from Visual Genome scene graphs) and the evaluation benchmarks, some of which use the same image sources.
What would settle it
Measure SpatialThinker-7B's accuracy on a subset of CV-Bench and MMVP excluding images that appear (or are near-duplicates of) Visual Genome images, and compare with the reported numbers; if gains over the base model shrink to near zero on the disjoint subset, the claim that dense rewards teach general spatial reasoning is weakened. Alternatively, train the same reward recipe on a scene-graph dataset built from entirely different imagery (e.g., photorealistic renders or indoor scans) and check whether the transfer gains on real-world VQA persist.
If this is right
- Dense spatial rewards nearly double the average gain of sparse-reward RL on the same 7K samples (+7.2% vs +4.0% for 7B), suggesting that process-level supervision is a more effective use of small data than final-answer rewards.
- Spatial grounding trained on synthetic scene-graph questions transfers to six real-world VQA benchmarks (+5.2% over base 7B), indicating that structured reasoning habits generalize beyond the training distribution.
- A 7B model trained on 7,587 samples outperforms specialized spatial models trained on 700K–2B samples and approaches or exceeds proprietary models on spatial benchmarks.
- The data pipeline scales to ~108K samples, so the same recipe can be applied to larger models or broader relation vocabularies without new architecture changes.
- Lexicographic gating, count penalties, and ROI filtering are jointly necessary; removing any one collapses validation accuracy, which pins down the conditions under which dense spatial rewards work.
Where Pith is reading between the lines
- Because the 7K training images come from Visual Genome and at least two of the spatial benchmarks (CV-Bench, MMVP) draw on the same image source, part of the in-domain gain could reflect Visual Genome-specific priors rather than general spatial competence. The out-of-distribution claim therefore rests on the six real-world benchmarks; a clean test would retrain on disjoint imagery (e.g., 3D render
- The reward design—format, count, accuracy, CIoU—is not tied to scene graphs in principle; the same lexicographic gating could supervise other structured outputs such as part hierarchies, layout plans, or action sequences, potentially transferring the data-efficiency benefit to embodied tasks like navigation and manipulation.
- If the central claim is right, a testable prediction follows: increasing the diversity of scene-graph relation types (e.g., adding temporal or causal relations) should produce corresponding jumps on benchmarks that test those relations, and removing count reward should reproduce the documented reward-hacking collapse even on other datasets.
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. The paper proposes SpatialThinker, an MLLM post-training method that integrates scene graph generation (SGG) with visual reasoning in a single autoregressive pass, trained with GRPO under a multi-objective dense reward (format, count, accuracy, spatial CIoU) with gating. A 7,587-sample synthetic dataset (STVQA-7K) is generated from Visual Genome scene graphs. The central empirical claim is that on 12 spatial and real-world VQA benchmarks, SpatialThinker-7B improves over the base Qwen2.5-VL-7B by +7.2% average, outperforming SFT (+1.2%) and sparse vanilla GRPO (+4.0%), and surpassing GPT-4o by +3.4% average; analogous gains are reported for the 3B variant. The paper also reports out-of-distribution gains on six real-world benchmarks.
Significance. If the controlled comparisons are reliable, the paper provides valuable evidence that dense, spatially grounded rewards and structured scene-graph reasoning can yield substantial spatial reasoning gains from a small synthetic dataset, and that these gains transfer to broader VQA benchmarks. The experimental design for the central comparison is a clear strength: SpatialThinker, SFT, and vanilla GRPO are trained on the same STVQA-7K data with the same base models and the same full-parameter RL budget, isolating the effect of the dense reward. The claimed release of code, models, and dataset would support reproducibility. However, the headline abstract claims (GPT-5/Claude 4 Sonnet/30B/14-benchmark results) are absent from the experiments, and the evaluation may be affected by train/eval image overlap, so the empirical claims currently outrun the evidence.
major comments (2)
- [Abstract vs. Section 4] The abstract states that SpatialThinker-7B matches GPT-5 and outperforms GPT-4o, while SpatialThinker-30B surpasses GPT-5 and Claude 4 Sonnet on average across 14 benchmarks, and reports 3.6× and 1.7× relative gains. Section 4 explicitly evaluates 12 benchmarks (Table 4), and Tables 1–4 contain no GPT-5, Claude 4 Sonnet, or 30B results. The 3.6× and 1.7× ratios are also unsupported: from Table 4, SFT gain ratios are 7.2/1.2=6.0 (7B) and 9.0/3.5≈2.6 (3B); from Table 6, dense-vs-sparse OOD ratios are 5.2/2.7≈1.9 (7B) and 8.5/6.0≈1.4 (3B). The manuscript's own page-1 abstract more modestly claims 'nearly doubling' and 'surpassing GPT-4o,' consistent with the body. This internal inconsistency materially changes the paper's stated contribution and must be resolved.
- [Section 3.3 / Section 4] STVQA-7K is synthesized from Visual Genome images, and several evaluation benchmarks (notably CV-Bench and MMVP, and potentially SpatialBench/3DSRBench) are constructed from Visual Genome/COCO imagery. The paper never analyzes whether evaluation images overlap with training images. If they do, the in-domain gains (e.g., CV-Bench 78.2%, MMVP 78.0% in Tables 1–2) may partially reflect image-level familiarity with VG objects and layouts rather than generalized spatial reasoning. Since Table 6's out-of-distribution claim rests on only six real-world benchmarks, an overlap analysis or exclusion of overlapping images is necessary to support the generalization conclusion.
minor comments (5)
- [Table 5] The table is labeled a reward ablation, but the last row (+ Filtered Dataset pass@2) changes the training data, not a reward component. Relabel to avoid confounding dataset filtering with reward design.
- [Section 3.1, Eq. (4)] The term 'lexicographic gating' is used, but the total reward is a weighted sum with hard gates; count and accuracy are combined additively with weights 0.2 and 0.5, so they are not strictly lexicographic. Please clarify the terminology.
- [General] No confidence intervals or multiple-seed results are reported for the main comparisons. Given the small training set (7K) and short training (75 steps), the stability of the +3.2% average gain over vanilla GRPO should be assessed or at least discussed.
- [Section 3.3] The dataset size is described inconsistently as 7,587, 'top 7.5K', and '7K'; clarify the final count after filtering.
- [Title / Section 1] The title says 'Reinforcing3D Reasoning' but the method uses 2D bounding boxes and RGB-only inputs; consider rewording to 'spatial reasoning' to avoid confusion.
Circularity Check
No circularity by construction; the headline numbers are measured on external benchmarks, though the abstract overclaims evidence and data-overlap risks remain.
full rationale
The load-bearing derivation chain is: STVQA-7K samples are synthesized from Visual Genome scene graphs (§3.3, App. A); the dense reward R_total is defined as a function of those ground-truth subgraphs and answers (§3.1); GRPO optimizes that reward (§3.2); and the paper's headline results are average accuracies on 12 external benchmarks (Tables 1–4). None of the reported equations define the evaluation metrics in terms of the training labels: R_total is a training objective, not a prediction target on the test benchmarks. The reward ablation in Table 5 is on STVQA-7Kval and is used for reward design only, not as evidence of external generalization. Reward hyperparameters (weights, λs, β) are tuned on the validation split, which is standard model selection and does not make the 12-benchmark gains fitted predictions. The only self-citations (e.g., VLAA-Thinker, Chen et al. 2025a) appear as baselines or as a supporting citation for sparse-reward RLVR; they are not load-bearing for the dense-reward claim. GRPO, CIoU, and lexicographic gating are cited to external standard references. Flagged as non-circular concerns: (1) the Abstract claims GPT-5/Claude 4/30B/14-benchmark results that are absent from Section 4's '12 diverse spatial understanding and real-world VQA benchmarks' and from Tables 1–3—an evidence gap, not a tautology; (2) STVQA-7K is built from Visual Genome while CV-Bench and MMVP may draw on Visual Genome/COCO imagery, a potential contamination/OOD confound the paper does not analyze; (3) the Abstract's '3.6× larger gains' ratio does not match Table 4 (+7.2/+1.2 = 6.0×). These are correctness and verifiability issues, not circularity by construction.
Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger
free parameters (5)
- Reward weights w_format=0.1, w_count=0.2, w_accuracy=0.5, w_spatial=0.2 =
0.1 / 0.2 / 0.5 / 0.2
- Count-reward mixing λ_obj=0.7, λ_rel=0.3 =
0.7 / 0.3
- Hungarian matching cost weights λ_spatial=1.0, λ_semantic=2.0 =
1.0 / 2.0
- KL penalty β = 10^-2 =
0.01
- Dataset filtering thresholds (top-10K rated, pass@2 consistency, 7.5K final) =
56,224 → 10,000 → 7,587
axioms (7)
- domain assumption Visual Genome human-annotated scene graphs (objects, boxes, predicates) are correct ground truth.
- domain assumption GPT-4o pass@2 consistency filtering identifies correct QA labels.
- domain assumption Exact string match on multiple-choice answers is a faithful accuracy reward.
- ad hoc to paper Scene-graph structure (objects + bounding boxes + relation triplets) is the right intermediate representation for spatial reasoning.
- standard math GRPO is a valid policy optimizer for this setting.
- standard math CIoU provides a dense, meaningful spatial gradient signal.
- domain assumption Evaluation images do not overlap the Visual Genome training distribution in a way that inflates gains.
invented entities (1)
-
Question-focused scene subgraph output (the <scene> JSON block with object IDs, pixel boxes, relation triplets inside the reasoning chain)
no independent evidence
read the original abstract
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in vision-language tasks, but continue to struggle with spatial reasoning. Existing spatial MLLMs rely on large-scale datasets, explicit 3D inputs, architecture-specific modifications, or sparse Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods that provide insufficient guidance for spatially-grounded reasoning. We introduce SpatialThinker. To our knowledge, it is the first MLLM unifying Scene Graph Generation (SGG) and visual reasoning in a single pass via online RL. The model simulates human-like spatial perception by constructing a mental scene graph of task-relevant objects and relations, and reasoning toward an answer via dense spatial rewards. Our contributions are threefold: (1) SGG-grounded reasoning: integrating SGG directly within the reasoning chain rather than as a disjoint preprocessing step; (2) STVQA-7K: a high-quality spatial VQA training dataset via a scalable synthesis pipeline; and (3) a dense spatial reward design that enforces structured grounding during RL and generalizes to improve broad visual perception. SpatialThinker-7B achieves 3.6$\times$ larger gains over SFT and $1.7\times$ better in- and out-of-distribution generalization than sparse RL. Trained on only 7K samples, SpatialThinker-7B matches GPT-5 and outperforms GPT-4o, while SpatialThinker-30B surpasses both GPT-5 and Claude 4 Sonnet on average across 14 spatial and real-world benchmarks, demonstrating that structured spatial grounding with reward-aligned reasoning enables robust spatial understanding with limited data.
Figures
Forward citations
Cited by 14 Pith papers
-
DRIVESPATIAL: A Benchmark for Spatiotemporal Intelligence in VLMs for Autonomous Driving
DriveSpatial benchmark shows the strongest of 15 VLMs trails humans by 28.4 points on spatiotemporal tasks, with cognitive scene construction as the primary weakness.
-
DRIVESPATIAL: A Benchmark for Spatiotemporal Intelligence in VLMs for Autonomous Driving
DriveSpatial benchmark shows the best of 15 VLMs trails humans by 28.4 points on spatiotemporal driving tasks, with cognitive scene construction as the main failure mode.
-
ViSRA: A Video-based Spatial Reasoning Agent for Multi-modal Large Language Models
ViSRA boosts MLLM 3D spatial reasoning performance by up to 28.9% on unseen tasks via a plug-and-play video-based agent that extracts explicit spatial cues from expert models without any post-training.
-
SpatialScore: Towards Comprehensive Evaluation for Spatial Intelligence
Presents SpatialScore benchmark for MLLM spatial reasoning, evaluates 49 models showing large human gap, and supplies SpatialCorpus plus SpatialAgent to improve performance.
-
GReFEM: Multimodal LLMs as Zero-Shot Semantic Assistants for Physics-Guided 3D Mesh Refinement
GReFEM shows MLLMs zero-shot isolate load-activated geometric features for volumetric mesh refinement with higher precision than matched-budget geometric heuristics.
-
VIEW2SPACE: Studying Multi-View Visual Reasoning from Sparse Observations
Sparse multi-view reasoning is largely unsolved for VLMs; grounded CoT with visual evidence improves moderate cases and transfers to real data, but deep multi-hop reasoning still scales poorly.
-
Geo3R: Mitigating Spatial Reasoning Hallucination in Multimodal Large Language Models
Augmenting MLLMs with structured 3D geometric cards from monocular depth, camera calibration, and object orientation reduces spatial reasoning errors on 18 tasks, with gains up to 10.9 points over unaugmented baselines.
-
GeoAnchor: Collaborative Reasoning via Latent Decomposition for 3D Spatial Understanding
GeoAnchor decomposes 3D spatial reasoning into position, direction, and geometry latent tokens and reports state-of-the-art scores on SPAR-Bench, SPBench, and ViewSpatial with a 2B model.
-
OneCanvas: 3D Scene Understanding via Panoramic Reprojection
OneCanvas aggregates multi-view 3D patches onto one panoramic canvas with continuous angular placement and 3D embeddings, enabling pretrained VLMs to achieve SOTA on SQA3D and VSI-Bench with an order of magnitude less...
-
Uncovering and Shaping the Latent Representation of 3D Scene Topology in Vision-Language Models
VLMs possess a latent 3D scene topology subspace corresponding to Laplacian eigenmaps that can be causally shaped via Dirichlet energy regularization to improve spatial task performance by up to 12.1%.
-
SpatiO: Adaptive Test-Time Orchestration of Vision-Language Agents for Spatial Reasoning
SpatiO uses heterogeneous vision-language agents with test-time orchestration to dynamically weight their contributions for improved spatial reasoning on benchmarks like 3DSRBench and CV-Bench.
-
OmniView-Space: Reinforcing Spatial Reasoning via Multi-Perspective Spatial Mapping
OmniView-Space framework with MPSM, tool-guided reasoning, and distillation achieves SOTA on spatial reasoning benchmarks for MLLMs while reducing external geometry dependencies.
-
Rethinking VLM Representation for VLA Initialization
Experiments indicate original VLM representations are crucial for VLA performance, LoRA outperforms full finetuning, and staged robot-data pretraining yields the strongest initialization.
-
SpatiO: Adaptive Test-Time Orchestration of Vision-Language Agents for Spatial Reasoning
A heterogeneous multi-agent framework with Bayesian test-time orchestration improves spatial reasoning across four benchmarks without parameter updates.
Reference graph
Works this paper leans on
-
[2]
Wenxiao Cai, Iaroslav Ponomarenko, Jianhao Yuan, Xiaoqi Li, Wankou Yang, Hao Dong, and Bo Zhao. Spatialbot: Precise spatial understanding with vision language models.arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.13642,
-
[4]
The final set consists of 50% samples from the relation category, and the remaining 50% distributed across the eight other categories
Following consistency filtering, we retain 6,895 training samples and 692 validation samples ( 75%), indicating high label reliability. The final set consists of 50% samples from the relation category, and the remaining 50% distributed across the eight other categories. To prevent positional bias, answers are uniformly distributed across options A, B, C, ...
2025
-
[5]
Mm-spatial: Exploring 3d spatial understanding in multimodal llms.arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.13111,
Erik Daxberger, Nina Wenzel, David Griffiths, Haiming Gang, Justin Lazarow, Gefen Kohavi, Kai Kang, Marcin Eichner, Yinfei Yang, Afshin Dehghan, et al. Mm-spatial: Exploring 3d spatial understanding in multimodal llms.arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.13111,
-
[6]
DeepSeek-AI, Daya Guo, Dejian Yang, Haowei Zhang, Jun-Mei Song, Ruoyu Zhang, Runxin Xu, Qihao Zhu, Shirong Ma, Peiyi Wang, Xiaoling Bi, Xiaokang Zhang, Xingkai Yu, Yu Wu, Z. F. Wu, Zhibin Gou, Zhihong Shao, Zhuoshu Li, Ziyi Gao, Aixin Liu, Bing Xue, Bing-Li Wang, Bochao Wu, Bei Feng, Chengda Lu, Chenggang Zhao, Chengqi Deng, Chenyu Zhang, Chong Ruan, Dama...
-
[7]
Kimi Team Angang Du, Bohong Yin, Bowei Xing, Bowen Qu, Bowen Wang, Cheng Chen, Chenlin Zhang, Chenzhuang Du, Chu Wei, Congcong Wang, Dehao Zhang, Dikang Du, Dongliang Wang, Enming Yuan, Enzhe Lu, Fang Li, Flood Sung, Guangda Wei, Guokun Lai, Han Zhu, Hao 12 Ding, Hao-Xing Hu, Hao Yang, Hao Zhang, Haoning Wu, Haotian Yao, Haoyu Lu, Heng Wang, Hongcheng Gao...
-
[8]
Smith, Wei-Chiu Ma, and Ranjay Krishna
Xingyu Fu, Yushi Hu, Bangzheng Li, Yu Feng, Haoyu Wang, Xudong Lin, Dan Roth, Noah A. Smith, Wei-Chiu Ma, and Ranjay Krishna. Blink: Multimodal large language models can see but not perceive.ArXiv, abs/2404.12390,
-
[10]
Xia, Ted Xiao, Jiajun Wu, Brian Ichter, Anirudha Majumdar, and Dorsa Sadigh
Jensen Gao, Bidipta Sarkar, F. Xia, Ted Xiao, Jiajun Wu, Brian Ichter, Anirudha Majumdar, and Dorsa Sadigh. Physically grounded vision-language models for robotic manipulation.2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pp. 12462–12469,
2024
-
[11]
Tenenbaum, Antonio Torralba, Florian Shkurti, and Liam Paull
Qiao Gu, Ali Kuwajerwala, Sacha Morin, Krishna Murthy Jatavallabhula, Bipasha Sen, Aditya Agarwal, Corban Rivera, William Paul, Kirsty Ellis, Ramalingam Chellappa, Chuang Gan, Celso de Melo, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Antonio Torralba, Florian Shkurti, and Liam Paull. Concept- graphs: Open-vocabulary 3d scene graphs for perception and planning.2024 IEEE Interna...
2024
-
[12]
Tianrui Guan, Fuxiao Liu, Xiyang Wu, Ruiqi Xian, Zongxia Li, Xiaoyu Liu, Xijun Wang, Lichang Chen, Furong Huang, Yaser Yacoob, Dinesh Manocha, and Tianyi Zhou. Hallusionbench: An advanced diagnostic suite for entangled language hallucination and visual illusion in large vision- language models.2024 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recogn...
2024
-
[13]
Scene graph reasoning for visual question answering.ArXiv, abs/2007.01072,
Marcel Hildebrandt, Hang Li, Rajat Koner, V olker Tresp, and Stephan Günnemann. Scene graph reasoning for visual question answering.ArXiv, abs/2007.01072,
Pith/arXiv arXiv 2007
-
[14]
Yining Hong, Chunru Lin, Yilun Du, Zhenfang Chen, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, and Chuang Gan. 3d concept learning and reasoning from multi-view images. InProceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 9202–9212, 2023a. Yining Hong, Haoyu Zhen, Peihao Chen, Shuhong Zheng, Yilun Du, Zhenfang Chen, and Chuang Gan. 3d-llm: Inj...
-
[15]
Visual language maps for robot navigation.2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pp
Chen Huang, Oier Mees, Andy Zeng, and Wolfram Burgard. Visual language maps for robot navigation.2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pp. 10608– 10615,
2023
-
[18]
Physical Intelligence, Kevin Black, Noah Brown, James Darpinian, Karan Dhabalia, Danny Driess, Adnan Esmail, Michael Equi, Chelsea Finn, Niccolo Fusai, Manuel Y . Galliker, Dibya Ghosh, Lachy Groom, Karol Hausman, Brian Ichter, Szymon Jakubczak, Tim Jones, Liyiming Ke, Devin LeBlanc, Sergey Levine, Adrian Li-Bell, Mohith Mothukuri, Suraj Nair, Karl Pertsc...
-
[19]
Amita Kamath, Jack Hessel, and Kai-Wei Chang. What’s" up" with vision-language models? investigating their struggle with spatial reasoning.arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.19785,
-
[20]
Vr-gpt: Visual language model for intelligent virtual reality applications.ArXiv, abs/2405.11537,
Mikhail Konenkov, Artem Lykov, Daria Trinitatova, and Dzmitry Tsetserukou. Vr-gpt: Visual language model for intelligent virtual reality applications.ArXiv, abs/2405.11537,
-
[22]
Lin Li, Wei Chen, Jiahui Li, Kwang-Ting Cheng, and Long Chen. Relation-r1: Progressively cognitive chain-of-thought guided reinforcement learning for unified relation comprehension. arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.14642,
-
[23]
Visual instruction tuning.ArXiv, abs/2304.08485,
Haotian Liu, Chunyuan Li, Qingyang Wu, and Yong Jae Lee. Visual instruction tuning.ArXiv, abs/2304.08485,
-
[24]
Yuqi Liu, Bohao Peng, Zhisheng Zhong, Zihao Yue, Fanbin Lu, Bei Yu, and Jiaya Jia. Seg-zero: Reasoning-chain guided segmentation via cognitive reinforcement.ArXiv, abs/2503.06520, 2025a. Ziyu Liu, Zeyi Sun, Yuhang Zang, Xiao wen Dong, Yuhang Cao, Haodong Duan, Dahua Lin, and Jiaqi Wang. Visual-rft: Visual reinforcement fine-tuning.ArXiv, abs/2503.01785, 2...
-
[25]
Roshanak Mirzaee, Hossein Rajaby Faghihi, Qiang Ning, and Parisa Kordjmashidi. Spartqa:: A textual question answering benchmark for spatial reasoning.arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.05832,
-
[27]
Michael Ogezi and Freda Shi. Spare: Enhancing spatial reasoning in vision-language models with synthetic data.arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.20648,
-
[28]
Yi Peng, Gongrui Zhang, Miaosen Zhang, Zhiyuan You, Jie Liu, Qipeng Zhu, Kai Yang, Xingzhong Xu, Xin Geng, and Xu Yang. Lmm-r1: Empowering 3b lmms with strong reasoning abilities through two-stage rule-based rl.ArXiv, abs/2503.07536,
-
[29]
Kosmos-2: Grounding multimodal large language models to the world.arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.14824,
Zhiliang Peng, Wenhui Wang, Li Dong, Yaru Hao, Shaohan Huang, Shuming Ma, and Furu Wei. Kosmos-2: Grounding multimodal large language models to the world.arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.14824,
-
[30]
Tuning computer vision models with task rewards.ArXiv, abs/2302.08242,
André Susano Pinto, Alexander Kolesnikov, Yuge Shi, Lucas Beyer, and Xiaohua Zhai. Tuning computer vision models with task rewards.ArXiv, abs/2302.08242,
-
[31]
Zhihong Shao, Peiyi Wang, Qihao Zhu, Runxin Xu, Jun-Mei Song, Mingchuan Zhang, Y . K. Li, Yu Wu, and Daya Guo. Deepseekmath: Pushing the limits of mathematical reasoning in open language models.ArXiv, abs/2402.03300,
-
[32]
Chuming Shen, Wei Wei, Xiaoye Qu, and Yu Cheng. Satori-r1: Incentivizing multimodal reasoning with spatial grounding and verifiable rewards.ArXiv, abs/2505.19094, 2025a. Haozhan Shen, Peng Liu, Jingcheng Li, Chunxin Fang, Yibo Ma, Jiajia Liao, Qiaoli Shen, Zilun Zhang, Kangjia Zhao, Qianqian Zhang, Ruochen Xu, and Tiancheng Zhao. Vlm-r1: A stable and gene...
-
[33]
Lego-puzzles: How good are mllms at multi-step spatial reasoning? ArXiv, abs/2503.19990,
Kexian Tang, Junyao Gao, Yanhong Zeng, Haodong Duan, Yanan Sun, Zhening Xing, Wenran Liu, Kaifeng Lyu, and Kai Chen. Lego-puzzles: How good are mllms at multi-step spatial reasoning? ArXiv, abs/2503.19990,
-
[34]
Alex Hofer, Jan Humplik, Atil Iscen, Mithun George Jacob, Deepali Jain, Ryan C
Gemini Robotics Team, Saminda Abeyruwan, Joshua Ainslie, Jean-Baptiste Alayrac, Montse Gonza- lez Arenas, Travis Armstrong, Ashwin Balakrishna, Robert Baruch, Maria Bauzá, Michiel Blokzijl, Steven Bohez, Konstantinos Bousmalis, Anthony Brohan, Thomas Buschmann, Arunkumar Byra- van, Serkan Cabi, Ken Caluwaerts, Federico Casarini, Os car Chang, José Enrique...
-
[35]
Cambrian-1: A fully open, vision-centric exploration of multimodal llms
Shengbang Tong, Ellis L Brown, Penghao Wu, Sanghyun Woo, Manoj Middepogu, Sai Charitha Akula, Jihan Yang, Shusheng Yang, Adithya Iyer, Xichen Pan, Austin Wang, Rob Fergus, Yann LeCun, and Saining Xie. Cambrian-1: A fully open, vision-centric exploration of multimodal llms. ArXiv, abs/2406.16860, 2024a. Shengbang Tong, Zhuang Liu, Yuexiang Zhai, Yi Ma, Yan...
-
[36]
Learning 3d semantic scene graphs from 3d indoor reconstructions.2020 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pp
Johanna Wald, Helisa Dhamo, Nassir Navab, and Federico Tombari. Learning 3d semantic scene graphs from 3d indoor reconstructions.2020 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pp. 3960–3969,
2020
-
[37]
Peiyao Wang and Haibin Ling. Svqa-r1: Reinforcing spatial reasoning in mllms via view-consistent reward optimization.ArXiv, abs/2506.01371,
-
[38]
Xingrui Wang, Wufei Ma, Angtian Wang, Shuo Chen, Adam Kortylewski, and Alan Yuille. Compo- sitional 4d dynamic scenes understanding with physics priors for video question answering.arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.00622,
-
[39]
Jason Wei, Xuezhi Wang, Dale Schuurmans, Maarten Bosma, Ed H. Chi, F. Xia, Quoc Le, and Denny Zhou. Chain of thought prompting elicits reasoning in large language models.ArXiv, abs/2201.11903,
-
[40]
V*: Guided visual search as a core mechanism in multimodal llms.2024 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pp
16 Penghao Wu and Saining Xie. V*: Guided visual search as a core mechanism in multimodal llms.2024 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pp. 13084–13094,
2024
-
[41]
Zang, Peng Gao, Yixuan Li, and Kaiyang Zhou
Jiaer Xia, Y .-F. Zang, Peng Gao, Yixuan Li, and Kaiyang Zhou. Visionary-r1: Mitigating shortcuts in visual reasoning with reinforcement learning.ArXiv, abs/2505.14677,
-
[42]
Tong Xiao, Xin Xu, Zhenya Huang, Hongyu Gao, Quan Liu, Qi Liu, and Enhong Chen. Advancing multimodal reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models via visual perception reward.ArXiv, abs/2506.07218,
-
[43]
Evaluating spatial understanding of large language models.arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.14540,
Yutaro Yamada, Yihan Bao, Andrew K Lampinen, Jungo Kasai, and Ilker Yildirim. Evaluating spatial understanding of large language models.arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.14540,
-
[45]
Dapo: An open-source llm reinforcement learning system at scale.ArXiv, abs/2503.14476,
Qiying Yu, Zheng Zhang, Ruofei Zhu, Yufeng Yuan, Xiaochen Zuo, Yu Yue, Tiantian Fan, Gaohong Liu, Lingjun Liu, Xin Liu, Haibin Lin, Zhiqi Lin, Bole Ma, Guangming Sheng, Yuxuan Tong, Chi Zhang, Mofan Zhang, Wang Zhang, Hang Zhu, Jinhua Zhu, Jiaze Chen, Jiangjie Chen, Chengyi Wang, Honglin Yu, Weinan Dai, Yuxuan Song, Xiang Wei, Haodong Zhou, Jingjing Liu, ...
-
[46]
Wentao Yuan, Jiafei Duan, Valts Blukis, Wilbert Pumacay, Ranjay Krishna, Adithyavairavan Murali, Arsalan Mousavian, and Dieter Fox. Robopoint: A vision-language model for spatial affordance prediction for robotics.ArXiv, abs/2406.10721,
-
[47]
Yi-Fan Zhang, Huanyu Zhang, Haochen Tian, Chaoyou Fu, Shuangqing Zhang, Jun Wu, Feng Li, Kun Wang, Qingsong Wen, Zhang Zhang, Liang Wang, Rong Jin, and Tien-Ping Tan. Mme-realworld: Could your multimodal llm challenge high-resolution real-world scenarios that are difficult for humans?ArXiv, abs/2408.13257,
-
[48]
Lla- mafactory: Unified efficient fine-tuning of 100+ language models.ArXiv, abs/2403.13372,
Yaowei Zheng, Richong Zhang, Junhao Zhang, Yanhan Ye, Zheyan Luo, and Yongqiang Ma. Lla- mafactory: Unified efficient fine-tuning of 100+ language models.ArXiv, abs/2403.13372,
-
[49]
Yaowei Zheng, Junting Lu, Shenzhi Wang, Zhangchi Feng, Dongdong Kuang, and Yuwen Xiong. Easyr1: An efficient, scalable, multi-modality rl training framework.arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.12345,
-
[50]
Hengguang Zhou, Xirui Li, Ruochen Wang, Minhao Cheng, Tianyi Zhou, and Cho-Jui Hsieh. R1-zero’s "aha moment" in visual reasoning on a 2b non-sft model.ArXiv, abs/2503.05132,
-
[51]
Fangrui Zhu, Hanhui Wang, Yiming Xie, Jing Gu, Tianye Ding, Jianwei Yang, and Huaizu Jiang. Struct2d: A perception-guided framework for spatial reasoning in large multimodal models.ArXiv, abs/2506.04220,
-
[52]
provides dense, human-annotated scene graphs that support strict grounding of both question gener- ation and answer verification within a unified representational framework. Using Visual Genome, we synthetically constructed a spatial visual question answering dataset called SPATIALTHINKER Visual Question Answering dataset i.e., STVQA-7K comprising 7,587 s...
2017
-
[53]
as an external validation model. For each generated question-answer pair, we assess agreement between the external model and 18 Figure 5: Examples of generated QA pairs across the nine spatial reasoning categories in STVQA-7K. Each category highlights distinct reasoning skills, ranging from relative spatial relations and depth ordering to distance, size, ...
2025
-
[56]
These serve as upper bounds for spatial generalization under non-public training regimes
and Claude 3.5 Sonnet (CLAUDE-3.5-SONNET-0620) (Anthropic, 2024), which represent the current state-of-the-art in commercial multimodal reasoning. These serve as upper bounds for spatial generalization under non-public training regimes. Open-Source Generalist MLLM Baselines.We compare against generalist open -source MLLMs including Qwen2.5-VL 3B and 7B mo...
2024
-
[57]
which instruction-tunes an MLLM to predict image key-point affordances for robotics and spatial affordance tasks, SpaceThinker (AI & Mayorquin, 2025c), a fine-tuned VLAA-Thinker model for spatial reasoning, and its improved successor SpaceOm (AI & Mayorquin, 2025b), which incorporates deeper chain-of-thought traces and Robo2VLM data (Chen et al., 2025b). ...
2024
-
[59]
with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) for parameter-efficient fine-tuning. The training configuration employs LoRA with rank 8 applied to all available modules within the model architecture, enabling comprehensive adaptation while maintaining computational efficiency. Models are trained for 3 epochs totaling 645 training steps, using a context window length of ...
2048
-
[60]
aha moment
as the advantage estimation method, configured with a rollout size of 8 samples per query at a sampling temperature of 1.0. This configuration balances exploration diversity with computational efficiency, allowing the model to discover multiple reasoning strategies while maintaining stable convergence. The training process utilizes a rollout batch size of...
2048
-
[61]
In contrast, Huang et al
argue that KL regularization can unnecessarily constrain policy updates and recommend removing the KL penalty entirely to allow freer exploration. In contrast, Huang et al. (2024) revisit divergence regularization and propose using a chi-squared penalty to better control overoptimization. Motivated by these findings, we ablate the effect of different dive...
2024
-
[128]
Training time totals around 13 hours for the 3B model and 15 hours for the 7B model
We train for 75 training steps i.e., 5 training episodes) on 4 × NVIDIA H100 80GB GPUs. Training time totals around 13 hours for the 3B model and 15 hours for the 7B model. The models are trained on high-resolution image inputs ranging from512×512 to 2048×2048 pixels, to preserve fine-grained spatial information. All model parameters, including the vision...
2048
-
[2016]
ISSN 2352-1546. Computational modeling. Yi Yang, Xiaoxuan He, Hongkun Pan, Xiyan Jiang, Yan Deng, Xingtao Yang, Haoyu Lu, Dacheng Yin, Fengyun Rao, Minfeng Zhu, Bo Zhang, and Wei Chen. R1-onevision: Advancing generalized multimodal reasoning through cross-modal formalization.ArXiv, abs/2503.10615, 2025b. Haoxuan You, Haotian Zhang, Zhe Gan, Xianzhi Du, Bo...
-
[2017]
Chengzu Li, Caiqi Zhang, Han Zhou, Nigel Collier, Anna Korhonen, and Ivan Vuli ´c. Topviewrs: Vision-language models as top-view spatial reasoners.arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.02537, 2024a. Feng Li, Renrui Zhang, Hao Zhang, Yuanhan Zhang, Bo Li, Wei Li, Zejun Ma, and Chunyuan Li. Llava-next-interleave: Tackling multi-image, video, and 3d in large multimodal ...
-
[2019]
Gpt-4o system card.arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.21276,
Aaron Hurst, Adam Lerer, Adam P Goucher, Adam Perelman, Aditya Ramesh, Aidan Clark, AJ Os- trow, Akila Welihinda, Alan Hayes, Alec Radford, et al. Gpt-4o system card.arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.21276,
-
[2020]
Spatialvlm: Endowing vision-language models with spatial reasoning capabilities
Boyuan Chen, Zhuo Xu, Sean Kirmani, Brain Ichter, Dorsa Sadigh, Leonidas Guibas, and Fei Xia. Spatialvlm: Endowing vision-language models with spatial reasoning capabilities. InProceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 14455–14465, 2024a. Guikun Chen, Jin Li, and Wenguan Wang. Scene graph generation with role-p...
-
[2021]
Pivot: Iterative visual prompting elicits actionable knowledge for vlms.ArXiv, abs/2402.07872,
Soroush Nasiriany, Fei Xia, Wenhao Yu, Ted Xiao, Jacky Liang, Ishita Dasgupta, Annie Xie, Danny Driess, Ayzaan Wahid, Zhuo Xu, Quan Ho Vuong, Tingnan Zhang, Tsang-Wei Edward Lee, Kuang- Huei Lee, Peng Xu, Sean Kirmani, Yuke Zhu, Andy Zeng, Karol Hausman, Nicolas Manfred Otto Heess, Chelsea Finn, Sergey Levine, and Brian Ichter. Pivot: Iterative visual pro...
-
[2022]
Vision-r1: Incentivizing reasoning capability in multimodal large language models
Wenxuan Huang, Bohan Jia, Zijie Zhai, Shaoshen Cao, Zheyu Ye, Fei Zhao, Zhe Xu, Yao Hu, and Shaohui Lin. Vision-r1: Incentivizing reasoning capability in multimodal large language models. ArXiv, abs/2503.06749,
-
[2023]
Compile scene graphs with reinforcement learning.arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.13617, 2025c
11 Zuyao Chen, Jinlin Wu, Zhen Lei, Marc Pollefeys, and Chang Wen Chen. Compile scene graphs with reinforcement learning.arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.13617, 2025c. An-Chieh Cheng, Hongxu Yin, Yang Fu, Qiushan Guo, Ruihan Yang, Jan Kautz, Xiaolong Wang, and Sifei Liu. Spatialrgpt: Grounded spatial reasoning in vision-language models.Advances in Neural Informa...
-
[2024]
Kanishk Gandhi, Ayush Chakravarthy, Anikait Singh, nathan lile, and Noah D. Goodman. Cognitive behaviors that enable self-improving reasoners, or, four habits of highly effective stars.ArXiv, abs/2503.01307,
-
[2025]
Qwen2.5-vl technical report.ArXiv, abs/2502.13923,
Shuai Bai, Keqin Chen, Xuejing Liu, Jialin Wang, Wenbin Ge, Sibo Song, Kai Dang, Peng Wang, Shijie Wang, Jun Tang, Humen Zhong, Yuanzhi Zhu, Mingkun Yang, Zhaohai Li, Jianqiang Wan, Pengfei Wang, Wei Ding, Zheren Fu, Yiheng Xu, Jiabo Ye, Xi Zhang, Tianbao Xie, Zesen Cheng, Hang Zhang, Zhibo Yang, Haiyang Xu, and Junyang Lin. Qwen2.5-vl technical report.Ar...
-
[2048]
For models with spe- cific reasoning templates such as VLAA-Thinker, SpaceThinker, and SpaceOm, we utilize their corresponding structured prompts
to ensure deterministic and reproducible outputs. For models with spe- cific reasoning templates such as VLAA-Thinker, SpaceThinker, and SpaceOm, we utilize their corresponding structured prompts. In line with their original training setup, SpatialRGPT receives depth inputs, while all other models are evaluated using RGB images alone. Our evaluation pipel...
2025
discussion (0)
Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.