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 Spatial Reasoning


On the Integration of Spatial-Temporal Knowledge: A Lightweight Approach to Atmospheric Time Series Forecasting

Neural Information Processing Systems

Transformers have gained attention in atmospheric time series forecasting (ATSF) for their ability to capture global spatial-temporal correlations. However, their complex architectures lead to excessive parameter counts and extended training times, limiting their scalability to large-scale forecasting. In this paper, we revisit ATSF from a theoretical perspective of atmospheric dynamics and uncover a key insight: spatial-temporal position embedding (STPE) can inherently model spatialtemporal correlations even without attention mechanisms. Its effectiveness arises from the integration of geographical coordinates and temporal features, which are intrinsically linked to atmospheric dynamics. Based on this, we propose STELLA, a Spatial-Temporal knowledge Embedded Lightweight modeL for ASTF, utilizing only STPE and an MLP architecture in place of Transformer layers. With 10k parameters and one hour of training, STELLA achieves superior performance on five datasets compared to other advanced methods. The paper emphasizes the effectiveness of spatial-temporal knowledge integration over complex architectures, providing novel insights for ATSF. The code is available at https://github.



VisDiff: SDF-Guided Polygon Generation for Visibility Reconstruction, Characterization and Recognition

Neural Information Processing Systems

The ability to capture rich representations of combinatorial structures has enabled the application of machine learning to tasks such as analysis and generation of floorplans, terrains, images, and animations. Recent work has primarily focused on understanding structures with well-defined features, neighborhoods, or underlying distance metrics, while those lacking such characteristics remain largely unstudied. Examples of these combinatorial structures can be found in polygons, where a small change in the vertex locations causes a significant rearrangement of the combinatorial structure, expressed as a visibility or triangulation graphs. Current representation learning approaches fail to capture structures without well-defined features and distance metrics. In this paper, we study the open problem of Visibility Reconstruction: Given a visibility graph G, construct a polygon P whose visibility graph is G.


Hierarchical Semantic-Augmented Navigation: Optimal Transport and Graph-Driven Reasoning for Vision-Language Navigation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE) poses a formidable challenge for autonomous agents, requiring seamless integration of natural language instructions and visual observations to navigate complex 3D indoor spaces. Existing approaches often falter in long-horizon tasks due to limited scene understanding, inefficient planning, and lack of robust decision-making frameworks. We introduce the Hierarchical Semantic-Augmented Navigation (HSAN) framework, a groundbreaking approach that redefines VLN-CE through three synergistic innovations. First, HSAN constructs a dynamic hierarchical semantic scene graph, leveraging vision-language models to capture multi-level environmental representations--from objects to regions to zones--enabling nuanced spatial reasoning. Second, it employs an optimal transport-based topological planner, grounded in Kantorovich's duality, to select long-term goals by balancing semantic relevance and spatial accessibility with theoretical guarantees of optimality. Third, a graph-aware reinforcement learning policy ensures precise low-level control, navigating subgoals while robustly avoiding obstacles. By integrating spectral graph theory, optimal transport, and advanced multi-modal learning, HSAN addresses the shortcomings of static maps and heuristic planners prevalent in prior work. Extensive experiments on multiple challenging VLN-CE datasets demonstrate that HSAN achieves state-of-the-art performance, with significant improvements in navigation success and generalization to unseen environments.


Robust Cross-modal Alignment Learning for Cross-Scene Spatial Reasoning and Grounding

Neural Information Processing Systems

Grounding target objects in 3D environments via natural language is a fundamental capability for autonomous agents to successfully fulfill user requests. Almost all existing works typically assume that the target object lies within a known scene and focus solely on in-scene localization. In practice, however, agents often encounter unknown or previously visited environments and need to search across a large archive of scenes to ground the described object, thereby invalidating this assumption. To address this, we reveal a novel task called Cross-Scene Spatial Reasoning and Grounding (CSSRG), which aims to locate a described object anywhere across an entire collection of 3D scenes rather than predetermined scenes. Due to the difference from existing 3D visual grounding, CSSRG poses two challenges: the prohibitive cost of exhaustively traversing all scenes and more complex cross-modal spatial alignment. To address the challenges, we propose a Cross-Scene 3DObject Reasoning Framework (CoRe), which adopts a matching-then-grounding pipeline to reduce computational overhead. Specifically, CoRe consists of i) a Robust Text-Scene Aligning (RTSA) module that learns global scene representations for robust alignment between object descriptions and the corresponding 3D scenes, enabling efficient retrieval of candidate scenes; and ii) a Tailored Word-Object Associating (TWOA) module that establishes fine-grained alignment between words and target objects to filter out redundant context, supporting precise object-level reasoning and alignment. Additionally, to benchmark CSSRG, we construct a new CrossScene-RETR dataset and evaluation protocol tailored for cross-scene grounding. Extensive experiments across four multimodal datasets demonstrate that CoRe dramatically reduces computational overhead while showing superiority in both scene retrieval and object grounding.


SD-VLM: Spatial Measuring and Understanding with Depth-Encoded Vision-Language Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

While vision language models (VLMs) excel in 2D semantic visual understanding, their ability to quantitatively reason about 3D spatial relationships remains underexplored due to the deficiency of spatial representation ability of 2D images. In this paper, we analyze the problem hindering VLMs' spatial understanding abilities and propose SD-VLM, a novel framework that significantly enhances fundamental spatial perception abilities of VLMs through two key contributions: (1) propose Massive Spatial Measuring and Understanding (MSMU) dataset with precise spatial annotations, and (2) introduce a simple depth positional encoding method strengthening VLMs' spatial awareness. MSMU dataset includes massive quantitative spatial tasks with 700KQA pairs, 2.5M physical numerical annotations, and 10K chain-of-thought augmented samples. We have trained SD-VLM, a strong generalist VLM which shows superior quantitative spatial measuring and understanding capability. SD-VLM not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on our proposed MSMU-Bench, but also shows spatial generalization abilities on other spatial understanding benchmarks including Q-Spatial and SpatialRGPTBench. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SD-VLM outperforms GPT-4o and Intern-VL3-78B by 26.91%and 25.56%respectively on MSMU-Bench. Code and models are released at https://github.com/cpystan/SD-VLM.


30b9c38b9ebeee281cd2bc41d39bf0e7-Paper-Conference.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

Additionally, we introduce memory bank sampling, a frame sampling strategy designed to extract informative frames from historical images, further improving effectiveness and efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that our pretraining method and architectural components substantially enhance model performance. In both simulated and real-world experiments, our model achieves a significant increase in success rate over OpenVLA [1]. To further assess spatial perception and generalization to novel views, we introduce MV-Bench, a multi-view simulation benchmark. Our model consistently outperforms existing methods, demonstrating stronger spatial understanding and adaptability.


Towards Physics-informed Spatial Intelligence with Human Priors: An Autonomous Driving Pilot Study

Neural Information Processing Systems

How to integrate and verify spatial intelligence in foundation models remains an open challenge. Current practice often proxies Visual-Spatial Intelligence (VSI) with purely textual prompts and VQA-style scoring, which obscures geometry, invites linguistic shortcuts, and weakens attribution to genuinely spatial skills. We introduce Spatial Intelligence Grid (SIG): a structured, grid-based schema that explicitly encodes object layouts, inter-object relations, and physically grounded priors. As a complementary channel to text, SIG provides a faithful, compositional representation of scene structure for foundation-model reasoning. Building on SIG, we derive SIG-informed evaluation metrics that quantify a model's intrinsic VSI, which separates spatial capability from language priors.


WorldEmbeddingVLAInstructionImageVLAActionImage/Video Generation InstructionImagePolicyVLAInstructionImageAction InstructionImageActionAction(a)(b)(c)(d)Dream Queries

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recent advances in vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown promise in integrating image generation with action prediction to improve generalization and reasoning in robot manipulation. However, existing methods are limited to challenging image-based forecasting, which suffers from redundant information and lacks comprehensive and critical world knowledge, including dynamic, spatial and semantic information. To address these limitations, we propose DreamVLA, a novel VLA framework that integrates comprehensive world knowledge forecasting to enable inverse dynamics modeling, thereby establishing a perceptionprediction-action loop for manipulation tasks. Specifically, DreamVLA introduces a dynamic-region-guided world knowledge prediction, integrated with the spatial and semantic cues, which provide compact yet comprehensive representations for action planning.


Topology-Aware Learning of Tubular Manifolds via SE(3)-Equivariant Network on Ball B-Spline Curve

Neural Information Processing Systems

Tubular-like system shape analysis is quite difficult in geometry and topology, while it is widely used in plants and organs analysis in practice. However, traditional discrete representations such as voxels and point clouds often require substantial storage and may lead to the loss of fine-grained geometric and topological details. To address these challenges, we propose SE(3)-BBSCformerGCN, a novel framework for learning shape-aware representations from continuous tubular topological manifolds with equivariance to rotations and translations. Our approach leverages Ball B-Spline Curve (BBSC) to define tubular manifolds and its functional space. We provide a formal mathematical definition and analysis of the resulting manifolds and the BBSC functional space, and incorporate an equivariant mapping that preserves geometric and topological stability. Compared to the point cloud and voxel based representations, our manifold-based formulation significantly reduces data complexity while preserving geometric attributes together with topological features.