This study investigates the spatial reasoning capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs) through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting and reinforcement learning. We begin by evaluating the impact of different prompting strategies and find that simple CoT formats, where the model generates a reasoning step before the answer, not only fail to help, but can even harm the model's original performance. In contrast, structured multi-stage prompting based on scene graphs (SceneGraph CoT) significantly improves spatial reasoning accuracy. Furthermore, to improve spatial reasoning ability, we fine-tune models using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) on the SAT dataset and evaluate their performance on CVBench. Compared to supervised fine-tuning (SFT), GRPO achieves higher accuracy on Pass@1 evaluations and demonstrates superior robustness under out-of-distribution (OOD) conditions. In particular, we find that SFT overfits to surface-level linguistic patterns and may degrade performance when test-time phrasing changes (e.g., from "closer to" to "farther from"). GRPO, on the other hand, generalizes more reliably and maintains stable performance under such shifts. Our findings provide insights into how reinforcement learning and structured prompting improve the spatial reasoning capabilities and generalization behavior of modern VLMs. All code is open source at: https://github.com/Yvonne511/spatial-vlm-investigator

Object-centric event logs expand the conventional single-case notion event log by considering multiple objects, allowing for the analysis of more complex and realistic process behavior. However, the number of real-world object-centric event logs remains limited, and further studies are needed to test their usefulness. The increasing availability of data from team sports can facilitate object-centric process mining, leveraging both real-world data and suitable use cases. In this paper, we present a framework for transforming football (soccer) data into an object-centric event log, further enhanced with a spatial dimension. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework by generating object-centric event logs based on real-world football data and discuss the results for varying process representations. With our paper, we provide the first example for object-centric event logs in football analytics. Future work should consider variant analysis and filtering techniques to better handle variability.

AI-enhanced Extended Reality (XR) aims to deliver adaptive, immersive experiences--yet current systems fall short due to shallow user modeling and limited cognitive context. We introduce Perspective-Aware AI in Extended Reality (PAiR), a foundational framework for integrating Perspective-Aware AI (PAi) with XR to enable interpretable, context-aware experiences grounded in user identity. PAi is built on Chronicles--reasoning-ready identity models learned from multimodal digital footprints that capture users' cognitive and experiential evolution. PAiR employs these models in a closed-loop system linking dynamic user states with immersive environments. We present PAiR's architecture, detailing its modules and system flow, and demonstrate its utility through two proof-of-concept scenarios implemented in the Unity-based Open-Dome engine. PAiR opens a new direction for human-AI interaction by embedding perspective-based identity models into immersive systems.

Accurate vehicle trajectory prediction is essential for ensuring safety and efficiency in fully autonomous driving systems. While existing methods primarily focus on modeling observed motion patterns and interactions with other vehicles, they often neglect the potential risks posed by the uncertain or aggressive behaviors of surrounding vehicles. In this paper, we propose a novel spatial-temporal risk-attentive trajectory prediction framework that incorporates a risk potential field to assess perceived risks arising from behaviors of nearby vehicles. The framework leverages a spatial-temporal encoder and a risk-attentive feature fusion decoder to embed the risk potential field into the extracted spatial-temporal feature representations for trajectory prediction. A risk-scaled loss function is further designed to improve the prediction accuracy of high-risk scenarios, such as short relative spacing. Experiments on the widely used NGSIM and HighD datasets demonstrate that our method reduces average prediction errors by 4.8% and 31.2% respectively compared to state-of-the-art approaches, especially in high-risk scenarios. The proposed framework provides interpretable, risk-aware predictions, contributing to more robust decision-making for autonomous driving systems.

Visual imitation learning is effective for robots to learn versatile tasks. However, many existing methods rely on behavior cloning with supervised historical trajectories, limiting their 3D spatial and 4D spatiotemporal awareness. Consequently, these methods struggle to capture the 3D structures and 4D spatiotemporal relationships necessary for real-world deployment. In this work, we propose 4D Diffusion Policy (DP4), a novel visual imitation learning method that incorporates spatiotemporal awareness into diffusion-based policies. Unlike traditional approaches that rely on trajectory cloning, DP4 leverages a dynamic Gaussian world model to guide the learning of 3D spatial and 4D spatiotemporal perceptions from interactive environments. Our method constructs the current 3D scene from a single-view RGB-D observation and predicts the future 3D scene, optimizing trajectory generation by explicitly modeling both spatial and temporal dependencies. Extensive experiments across 17 simulation tasks with 173 variants and 3 real-world robotic tasks demonstrate that the 4D Diffusion Policy (DP4) outperforms baseline methods, improving the average simulation task success rate by 16.4% (Adroit), 14% (DexArt), and 6.45% (RLBench), and the average real-world robotic task success rate by 8.6%.

Hyperspectral image classification plays a pivotal role in precision agriculture, providing accurate insights into crop health monitoring, disease detection, and soil analysis. However, traditional methods struggle with high-dimensional data, spectral-spatial redundancy, and the scarcity of labeled samples, often leading to suboptimal performance. To address these challenges, we propose the Self-Adaptive Tensor- Regularized Network (SDTN), which combines tensor decomposition with regularization mechanisms to dynamically adjust tensor ranks, ensuring optimal feature representation tailored to the complexity of the data. Building upon SDTN, we propose the Tensor-Regularized Network (TRN), which integrates the features extracted by SDTN into a lightweight network capable of capturing spectral-spatial features at multiple scales. This approach not only maintains high classification accuracy but also significantly reduces computational complexity, making the framework highly suitable for real-time deployment in resource-constrained environments. Experiments on PaviaU datasets demonstrate significant improvements in accuracy and reduced model parameters compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), particularly through Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), have significantly enhanced their reasoning abilities. However, a critical gap persists: these models struggle with dynamic spatial interactions, a capability essential for real-world applications. To bridge this gap, we introduce M2-Reasoning-7B, a model designed to excel in both general and spatial reasoning. Our approach integrates two key innovations: (1) a novel data pipeline that generates 294.2K high-quality data samples (168K for cold-start fine-tuning and 126.2K for RLVR), which feature logically coherent reasoning trajectories and have undergone comprehensive assessment; and (2) a dynamic multi-task training strategy with step-wise optimization to mitigate conflicts between data, and task-specific rewards for delivering tailored incentive signals. This combination of curated data and advanced training allows M2-Reasoning-7B to set a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) across 8 benchmarks, showcasing superior performance in both general and spatial reasoning domains.

Traffic accidents are rare, yet high-impact events that require long-context multimodal reasoning for accurate risk forecasting. In this paper, we introduce ALCo-FM, a unified adaptive long-context foundation model that computes a volatility pre-score to dynamically select context windows for input data and encodes and fuses these multimodal data via shallow cross attention. Following a local GAT layer and a BigBird-style sparse global transformer over H3 hexagonal grids, coupled with Monte Carlo dropout for confidence, the model yields superior, well-calibrated predictions. Trained on data from 15 US cities with a class-weighted loss to counter label imbalance, and fine-tuned with minimal data on held-out cities, ALCo-FM achieves 0.94 accuracy, 0.92 F1, and an ECE of 0.04, outperforming more than 20 state-of-the-art baselines in large-scale urban risk prediction. Code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/PinakiPrasad12/ALCo-FM

The integration of language and 3D perception is critical for embodied AI and robotic systems to perceive, understand, and interact with the physical world. Spatial reasoning, a key capability for understanding spatial relationships between objects, remains underexplored in current 3D vision-language research. Existing datasets often mix semantic cues (e.g., object name) with spatial context, leading models to rely on superficial shortcuts rather than genuinely interpreting spatial relationships. To address this gap, we introduce S\textsc{urprise}3D, a novel dataset designed to evaluate language-guided spatial reasoning segmentation in complex 3D scenes. S\textsc{urprise}3D consists of more than 200k vision language pairs across 900+ detailed indoor scenes from ScanNet++ v2, including more than 2.8k unique object classes. The dataset contains 89k+ human-annotated spatial queries deliberately crafted without object name, thereby mitigating shortcut biases in spatial understanding. These queries comprehensively cover various spatial reasoning skills, such as relative position, narrative perspective, parametric perspective, and absolute distance reasoning. Initial benchmarks demonstrate significant challenges for current state-of-the-art expert 3D visual grounding methods and 3D-LLMs, underscoring the necessity of our dataset and the accompanying 3D Spatial Reasoning Segmentation (3D-SRS) benchmark suite. S\textsc{urprise}3D and 3D-SRS aim to facilitate advancements in spatially aware AI, paving the way for effective embodied interaction and robotic planning. The code and datasets can be found in https://github.com/liziwennba/SUPRISE.

Spatial interpolation is a crucial task in geography. As perhaps the most widely used interpolation methods, geostatistical models -- such as Ordinary Kriging (OK) -- assume spatial stationarity, which makes it difficult to capture the nonstationary characteristics of geographic variables. A common solution is trend surface modeling (e.g., Regression Kriging, RK), which relies on external explanatory variables to model the trend and then applies geostatistical interpolation to the residuals. However, this approach requires high-quality and readily available explanatory variables, which are often lacking in many spatial interpolation scenarios -- such as estimating heavy metal concentrations underground. This study proposes a Feature-Free Regression Kriging (FFRK) method, which automatically extracts geospatial features -- including local dependence, local heterogeneity, and geosimilarity -- to construct a regression-based trend surface without requiring external explanatory variables. We conducted experiments on the spatial distribution prediction of three heavy metals in a mining area in Australia. In comparison with 17 classical interpolation methods, the results indicate that FFRK, which does not incorporate any explanatory variables and relies solely on extracted geospatial features, consistently outperforms both conventional Kriging techniques and machine learning models that depend on explanatory variables. This approach effectively addresses spatial nonstationarity while reducing the cost of acquiring explanatory variables, improving both prediction accuracy and generalization ability. This finding suggests that an accurate characterization of geospatial features based on domain knowledge can significantly enhance spatial prediction performance -- potentially yielding greater improvements than merely adopting more advanced statistical models.