Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Spatial Reasoning


HiPoNet: AMulti-View Simplicial Complex Network for High Dimensional Point-Cloud and Single-Cell data

Neural Information Processing Systems

In this paper, we propose HiPoNet, an end-to-end differentiable neural network for regression, classification, and representation learning on high-dimensional point clouds. Our work is motivated by single-cell data which can have very high-dimensionality - exceeding the capabilities of existing methods for point clouds which are mostly tailored for 3D data. Moreover, modern single-cell and spatial experiments now yield entire cohorts of datasets (i.e., one data set for every patient), necessitating models that can process large, high-dimensional point-clouds at scale. Most current approaches build a single nearest-neighbor graph, discarding important geometric and topological information. In contrast, HiPoNet models the point-cloud as a set of higher-order simplicial complexes, with each particular complex being created using a reweighting of features. This method thus generates multiple constructs corresponding to different views of high-dimensional data, which in biology offers the possibility of disentangling distinct cellular processes. It then employs simplicial wavelet transforms to extract multiscale features, capturing both local and global topology from each view. We show that geometric and topological information is preserved in this framework both theoretically and empirically.


Conditioning Matters: Training Diffusion Policies is Faster Than You Think

Neural Information Processing Systems

Diffusion policies have emerged as a mainstream paradigm for building visionlanguage-action (VLA) models. Although they demonstrate strong robot control capabilities, their training efficiency remains suboptimal. In this work, we identify a fundamental challenge in conditional diffusion policy training: when generative conditions are hard to distinguish, the training objective degenerates into modeling the marginal action distribution, a phenomenon we term loss collapse. To overcome this, we propose Cocos, a simple yet general solution that modifies the source distribution in the conditional flow matching to be condition-dependent. By anchoring the source distribution around semantics extracted from condition inputs, Cocos encourages stronger condition integration and prevents the loss collapse. We provide theoretical justification and extensive empirical results across simulation and real-world benchmarks. Our method achieves faster convergence and higher success rates than existing approaches, matching the performance of large-scale pre-trained VLAs using significantly fewer gradient steps and parameters. Cocos is lightweight, easy to implement, and compatible with diverse policy architectures, offering a general-purpose improvement to diffusion policy training.


SAINT: Sequence-Aware Integration for Spatial Transcriptomics Multi-View Clustering

Neural Information Processing Systems

Spatial transcriptomics (ST) technologies provide gene expression measurements with spatial resolution, enabling the dissection of tissue structure and function. A fundamental challenge in ST analysis is clustering spatial spots into coherent functional regions. While existing models effectively integrate expression and spatial signals, they largely overlook sequence-level biological priors encoded in the DNA sequences of expressed genes. To bridge this gap, we propose SAINT (Sequence-Aware Integration for Nucleotide-informed Transcriptomics), a unified framework that augments spatial representation learning with nucleotide-derived features. We construct sequence-augmented datasets across 14 tissue sections from three widely used ST benchmarks (DLPFC, HBC, and MBA), retrieving reference DNA sequences for each expressed gene and encoding them using a pretrained Nucleotide Transformer. For each spot, gene-level embeddings are aggregated via expression-weighted and attention-based pooling, then fused with spatial-expression representations through a late fusion module. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SAINT consistently improves clustering performance across multiple datasets.


Disentangled Concepts Speak Louder Than Words Explainable Video Action Recognition

Neural Information Processing Systems

Effective explanations of video action recognition models should disentangle how movements unfold over time from the surrounding spatial context. However, existing methods--based on saliency--produce entangled explanations, making it unclear whether predictions rely on motion or spatial context. Language-based approaches offer structure but often fail to explain motions due to their tacit nature--intuitively understood but difficult to verbalize. To address these challenges, we propose Disentangled Action aNd Context concept-based Explainable (DANCE) video action recognition, a framework that predicts actions through disentangled concept types: motion dynamics, objects, and scenes. We define motion dynamics concepts as human pose sequences. We employ a large language model to automatically extract object and scene concepts. Built on an ante-hoc concept bottleneck design, DANCE enforces prediction through these concepts. Experiments on four datasets--KTH, Penn Action, HAA500, and UCF101--demonstrate that DANCE significantly improves explanation clarity with competitive performance.


TransferTraj: AVehicle Trajectory Learning Model for Region and Task Transferability

Neural Information Processing Systems

Vehicle GPS trajectories provide valuable movement information that supports various downstream tasks and applications. A desirable trajectory learning model should be able to transfer across regions and tasks without retraining, avoiding the need to maintain multiple specialized models and subpar performance with limited training data. However, each region has its unique spatial features and contexts, which are reflected in vehicle movement patterns and are difficult to generalize. Additionally, transferring across different tasks faces technical challenges due to the varying input-output structures required for each task. Existing efforts towards transferability primarily involve learning embedding vectors for trajectories, which perform poorly in region transfer and require retraining of prediction modules for task transfer. To address these challenges, we propose TransferTraj, a vehicle GPS trajectory learning model that excels in both region and task transferability.


Spatial Understanding from Videos: Structured Prompts Meet Simulation Data

Neural Information Processing Systems

Visual-spatial understanding, the ability to infer object relationships and layouts from visual input, is fundamental to downstream tasks such as robotic navigation and embodied interaction. However, existing methods face spatial uncertainty and data scarcity, limiting the 3D spatial reasoning capability of pre-trained visionlanguage models (VLMs). To address these challenges, we present a unified framework for enhancing 3D spatial reasoning in pre-trained VLMs without modifying their architecture. This framework combines SpatialMind, a structured prompting strategy that decomposes complex scenes and questions into interpretable reasoning steps, with ScanForgeQA, a scalable question-answering dataset built from diverse 3D simulation scenes through an automated construction process designed for fine-tuning. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate the individual and combined effectiveness of our prompting and fine-tuning strategies, and yield insights that may inspire future research on visual-spatial understanding.


Maps Class Activation JAFAR Input Image ViTUpsampled Features Outputs Estimation DepthJAFAR DINOv2 Segmentation SemanticJAFAR CLIP JAFAR: Jack up Any Feature at Any Resolution

Neural Information Processing Systems

Foundation Vision Encoders have become essential for a wide range of dense vision tasks. However, their low-resolution spatial feature outputs necessitate feature upsampling to produce the high-resolution modalities required for downstream tasks. In this work, we introduce JAFAR, a lightweight and flexible feature upsampler that enhances the spatial resolution of visual features from any Foundation Vision Encoder to an arbitrary target resolution. JAFAR employs an attention-based module designed to promote semantic alignment between high-resolution queries, derived from low-level image features, and semantically enriched low-resolution keys, using Spatial Feature Transform (SFT) modulation. Notably, despite the absence of high-resolution supervision, we demonstrate that learning at low upsampling ratios and resolutions generalizes remarkably well to significantly higher output scales. Extensive experiments show that JAFAR effectively recovers fine-grained spatial details and consistently outperforms existing feature upsampling methods across a diverse set of downstream tasks.


MineAny Build: Benchmarking Spatial Planning for Open-world AIAgents

Neural Information Processing Systems

Spatial Planning is a crucial part in the field of spatial intelligence, which requires the understanding and planning about object arrangements in space perspective. AI agents with the spatial planning ability can better adapt to various real-world applications, including robotic manipulation, automatic assembly, urban planning etc. Recent works have attempted to construct benchmarks for evaluating the spatial intelligence of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Nevertheless, these benchmarks primarily focus on spatial reasoning based on typical Visual QuestionAnswering (VQA) forms, which suffers from the gap between abstract spatial understanding and concrete task execution. In this work, we take a step further to build a comprehensive benchmark called MineAnyBuild, aiming to evaluate the spatial planning ability of open-world AI agents in the Minecraft game. Specifically, MineAnyBuild requires an agent to generate executable architecture building plans based on the given multi-modal human instructions.


Learning to Factorize Spatio-Temporal Foundation Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Spatio-Temporal (ST) Foundation Models (STFMs) promise cross-dataset generalization, yet joint ST pretraining is computationally costly and struggles with domain-specific spatial correlations. To address this, we propose FactoST, a factorized STFM that decouples universal temporal pretraining from ST adaptation. The first stage trains a space-agnostic backbone via multi-task learning to capture multifrequency, cross-domain temporal patterns at low cost. The second stage attaches an lightweight adapter that rapidly adapts the backbone to specific ST domains via metadata fusion, interaction pruning, domain alignment, and memory replay. Extensive forecasting experiments show that in few-shot settings, FactoST reduces MAE by up to 46.4% versus UniST, uses 46.2% fewer parameters, achieves 68% faster inference than OpenCity, and remains competitive with expert models. This factorized view offers a practical, scalable path toward truly universal STFMs.


Actial: Activate Spatial Reasoning Ability of Multimodal Large Language Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have significantly improved 2D visual understanding, prompting interest in their application to complex 3D reasoning tasks. However, it remains unclear whether these models can effectively capture the detailed spatial information required for robust real-world performance, especially cross-view consistency, a key requirement for accurate 3D reasoning. Considering this issue, we introduce Viewpoint Learning, a task designed to evaluate and improve the spatial reasoning capabilities of MLLMs. We present the Viewpoint-100K dataset, consisting of 100K object-centric image pairs with diverse viewpoints and corresponding question-answer pairs. Our approach employs a two-stage fine-tuning strategy: first, foundational knowledge is injected to the baseline MLLM via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on Viewpoint-100K, resulting in significant improvements across multiple tasks; second, generalization is enhanced through Reinforcement Learning using the Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) algorithm on a broader set of questions. Additionally, we introduce a hybrid cold-start initialization method designed to simultaneously learn viewpoint representations and maintain coherent reasoning thinking. Experimental results show that our approach significantly activates the spatial reasoning ability of MLLM, improving performance on both in-domain and out-of-domain reasoning tasks. Our findings highlight the value of developing foundational spatial skills in MLLMs, supporting future progress in robotics, autonomous systems, and 3D scene understanding.