Spatial Reasoning
Logic-in-Frames: Dynamic Keyframe Search via Visual Semantic-Logical Verification for Long Video Understanding
Guo, Weiyu, Chen, Ziyang, Wang, Shaoguang, He, Jianxiang, Xu, Yijie, Ye, Jinhui, Sun, Ying, Xiong, Hui
Understanding long video content is a complex endeavor that often relies on densely sampled frame captions or end-to-end feature selectors, yet these techniques commonly overlook the logical relationships between textual queries and visual elements. In practice, computational constraints necessitate coarse frame subsampling, a challenge analogous to ``finding a needle in a haystack.'' To address this issue, we introduce a semantics-driven search framework that reformulates keyframe selection under the paradigm of Visual Semantic-Logical Search. Specifically, we systematically define four fundamental logical dependencies: 1) spatial co-occurrence, 2) temporal proximity, 3) attribute dependency, and 4) causal order. These relations dynamically update frame sampling distributions through an iterative refinement process, enabling context-aware identification of semantically critical frames tailored to specific query requirements. Our method establishes new SOTA performance on the manually annotated benchmark in key-frame selection metrics. Furthermore, when applied to downstream video question-answering tasks, the proposed approach demonstrates the best performance gains over existing methods on LongVideoBench and Video-MME, validating its effectiveness in bridging the logical gap between textual queries and visual-temporal reasoning. The code will be publicly available.
VISO-Grasp: Vision-Language Informed Spatial Object-centric 6-DoF Active View Planning and Grasping in Clutter and Invisibility
Shi, Yitian, Wen, Di, Chen, Guanqi, Welte, Edgar, Liu, Sheng, Peng, Kunyu, Stiefelhagen, Rainer, Rayyes, Rania
We propose VISO-Grasp, a novel vision-language-informed system designed to systematically address visibility constraints for grasping in severely occluded environments. By leveraging Foundation Models (FMs) for spatial reasoning and active view planning, our framework constructs and updates an instance-centric representation of spatial relationships, enhancing grasp success under challenging occlusions. Furthermore, this representation facilitates active Next-Best-View (NBV) planning and optimizes sequential grasping strategies when direct grasping is infeasible. Additionally, we introduce a multi-view uncertainty-driven grasp fusion mechanism that refines grasp confidence and directional uncertainty in real-time, ensuring robust and stable grasp execution. Extensive real-world experiments demonstrate that VISO-Grasp achieves a success rate of $87.5\%$ in target-oriented grasping with the fewest grasp attempts outperforming baselines. To the best of our knowledge, VISO-Grasp is the first unified framework integrating FMs into target-aware active view planning and 6-DoF grasping in environments with severe occlusions and entire invisibility constraints.
Integrating mobile and fixed monitoring data for high-resolution PM2.5 mapping using machine learning
Xu, Rui, Yao, Dawen, Pian, Yuzhuang, Cao, Ruhui, Fu, Yixin, Yang, Xinru, Gan, Ting, Liu, Yonghong
Constructing high resolution air pollution maps at lower cost is crucial for sustainable city management and public health risk assessment. However, traditional fixed-site monitoring lacks spatial coverage, while mobile low-cost sensors exhibit significant data instability. This study integrates PM2.5 data from 320 taxi-mounted mobile low-cost sensors and 52 fixed monitoring stations to address these limitations. By employing the machine learning methods, an appropriate mapping relationship was established between fixed and mobile monitoring concentration. The resulting pollution maps achieved 500-meter spatial and 5-minute temporal resolutions, showing close alignment with fixed monitoring data (+4.35% bias) but significant deviation from raw mobile data (-31.77%). The fused map exhibits the fine-scale spatial variability also observed in the mobile pollution map, while showing the stable temporal variability closer to that of the fixed pollution map (fixed: 1.12 plus or minus 0.73%, mobile: 3.15 plus or minus 2.44%, mapped: 1.01 plus or minus 0.65%). These findings demonstrate the potential of large-scale mobile low-cost sensor networks for high-resolution air quality mapping, supporting targeted urban environmental governance and health risk mitigation.
Logic-RAG: Augmenting Large Multimodal Models with Visual-Spatial Knowledge for Road Scene Understanding
Kabir, Imran, Reza, Md Alimoor, Billah, Syed
Large multimodal models (LMMs) are increasingly integrated into autonomous driving systems for user interaction. However, their limitations in fine-grained spatial reasoning pose challenges for system interpretability and user trust. We introduce Logic-RAG, a novel Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework that improves LMMs' spatial understanding in driving scenarios. Logic-RAG constructs a dynamic knowledge base (KB) about object-object relationships in first-order logic (FOL) using a perception module, a query-to-logic embedder, and a logical inference engine. We evaluated Logic-RAG on visual-spatial queries using both synthetic and real-world driving videos. When using popular LMMs (GPT-4V, Claude 3.5) as proxies for an autonomous driving system, these models achieved only 55% accuracy on synthetic driving scenes and under 75% on real-world driving scenes. Augmenting them with Logic-RAG increased their accuracies to over 80% and 90%, respectively. An ablation study showed that even without logical inference, the fact-based context constructed by Logic-RAG alone improved accuracy by 15%. Logic-RAG is extensible: it allows seamless replacement of individual components with improved versions and enables domain experts to compose new knowledge in both FOL and natural language. In sum, Logic-RAG addresses critical spatial reasoning deficiencies in LMMs for autonomous driving applications. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Imran2205/LogicRAG.
Salient Temporal Encoding for Dynamic Scene Graph Generation
Representing a dynamic scene using a structured spatial-temporal scene graph is a novel and particularly challenging task. To tackle this task, it is crucial to learn the temporal interactions between objects in addition to their spatial relations. Due to the lack of explicitly annotated temporal relations in current benchmark datasets, most of the existing spatial-temporal scene graph generation methods build dense and abstract temporal connections among all objects across frames. However, not all temporal connections are encoding meaningful temporal dynamics. We propose a novel spatial-temporal scene graph generation method that selectively builds temporal connections only between temporal-relevant objects pairs and represents the temporal relations as explicit edges in the scene graph. The resulting sparse and explicit temporal representation allows us to improve upon strong scene graph generation baselines by up to $4.4\%$ in Scene Graph Detection. In addition, we show that our approach can be leveraged to improve downstream vision tasks. Particularly, applying our approach to action recognition, shows 0.6\% gain in mAP in comparison to the state-of-the-art
EmbodiedVSR: Dynamic Scene Graph-Guided Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Visual Spatial Tasks
Zhang, Yi, Zhang, Qiang, Ju, Xiaozhu, Liu, Zhaoyang, Mao, Jilei, Sun, Jingkai, Wu, Jintao, Gao, Shixiong, Cai, Shihan, Qin, Zhiyuan, Liang, Linkai, Wang, Jiaxu, Duan, Yiqun, Cao, Jiahang, Xu, Renjing, Tang, Jian
While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made groundbreaking progress in embodied intelligence, they still face significant challenges in spatial reasoning for complex long-horizon tasks. To address this gap, we propose EmbodiedVSR (Embodied Visual Spatial Reasoning), a novel framework that integrates dynamic scene graph-guided Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to enhance spatial understanding for embodied agents. By explicitly constructing structured knowledge representations through dynamic scene graphs, our method enables zero-shot spatial reasoning without task-specific fine-tuning. This approach not only disentangles intricate spatial relationships but also aligns reasoning steps with actionable environmental dynamics. To rigorously evaluate performance, we introduce the eSpatial-Benchmark, a comprehensive dataset including real-world embodied scenarios with fine-grained spatial annotations and adaptive task difficulty levels. Experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms existing MLLM-based methods in accuracy and reasoning coherence, particularly in long-horizon tasks requiring iterative environment interaction. The results reveal the untapped potential of MLLMs for embodied intelligence when equipped with structured, explainable reasoning mechanisms, paving the way for more reliable deployment in real-world spatial applications. The codes and datasets will be released soon.
MoMa-Kitchen: A 100K+ Benchmark for Affordance-Grounded Last-Mile Navigation in Mobile Manipulation
Zhang, Pingrui, Gao, Xianqiang, Wu, Yuhan, Liu, Kehui, Wang, Dong, Wang, Zhigang, Zhao, Bin, Ding, Yan, Li, Xuelong
In mobile manipulation, navigation and manipulation are often treated as separate problems, resulting in a significant gap between merely approaching an object and engaging with it effectively. Many navigation approaches primarily define success by proximity to the target, often overlooking the necessity for optimal positioning that facilitates subsequent manipulation. To address this, we introduce MoMa-Kitchen, a benchmark dataset comprising over 100k samples that provide training data for models to learn optimal final navigation positions for seamless transition to manipulation. Our dataset includes affordance-grounded floor labels collected from diverse kitchen environments, in which robotic mobile manipulators of different models attempt to grasp target objects amidst clutter. Using a fully automated pipeline, we simulate diverse real-world scenarios and generate affordance labels for optimal manipulation positions. Visual data are collected from RGB-D inputs captured by a first-person view camera mounted on the robotic arm, ensuring consistency in viewpoint during data collection. We also develop a lightweight baseline model, NavAff, for navigation affordance grounding that demonstrates promising performance on the MoMa-Kitchen benchmark. Our approach enables models to learn affordance-based final positioning that accommodates different arm types and platform heights, thereby paving the way for more robust and generalizable integration of navigation and manipulation in embodied AI. Project page: \href{https://momakitchen.github.io/}{https://momakitchen.github.io/}.
TacticExpert: Spatial-Temporal Graph Language Model for Basketball Tactics
Lingrui, Xu, Mandi, Liu, Lei, Zhang
The core challenge in basketball tactic modeling lies in efficiently extracting complex spatial-temporal dependencies from historical data and accurately predicting various in-game events. Existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, primarily based on graph neural networks (GNNs), encounter difficulties in capturing long-term, long-distance, and fine-grained interactions among heterogeneous player nodes, as well as in recognizing interaction patterns. Additionally, they exhibit limited generalization to untrained downstream tasks and zero-shot scenarios. In this work, we propose a Spatial-Temporal Propagation Symmetry-Aware Graph Transformer for fine-grained game modeling. This architecture explicitly captures delay effects in the spatial space to enhance player node representations across discrete-time slices, employing symmetry-invariant priors to guide the attention mechanism. We also introduce an efficient contrastive learning strategy to train a Mixture of Tactics Experts module, facilitating differentiated modeling of offensive tactics. By integrating dense training with sparse inference, we achieve a 2.4x improvement in model efficiency. Moreover, the incorporation of Lightweight Graph Grounding for Large Language Models enables robust performance in open-ended downstream tasks and zero-shot scenarios, including novel teams or players. The proposed model, TacticExpert, delineates a vertically integrated large model framework for basketball, unifying pretraining across multiple datasets and downstream prediction tasks. Fine-grained modeling modules significantly enhance spatial-temporal representations, and visualization analyzes confirm the strong interpretability of the model.
Spatial-RAG: Spatial Retrieval Augmented Generation for Real-World Spatial Reasoning Questions
Yu, Dazhou, Bao, Riyang, Mai, Gengchen, Zhao, Liang
Spatial reasoning remains a challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs), which struggle with spatial data retrieval and reasoning. We propose Spatial Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Spatial-RAG), a framework that extends RAG to spatial tasks by integrating sparse spatial retrieval (spatial databases) and dense semantic retrieval (LLM-based similarity). A multi-objective ranking strategy balances spatial constraints and semantic relevance, while an LLM-guided generator ensures coherent responses. Experiments on a real-world tourism dataset show that Spatial-RAG significantly improves spatial question answering, bridging the gap between LLMs and spatial intelligence.
Spatial-Temporal Graph Diffusion Policy with Kinematic Modeling for Bimanual Robotic Manipulation
Lv, Qi, Li, Hao, Deng, Xiang, Shao, Rui, Li, Yinchuan, Hao, Jianye, Gao, Longxiang, Wang, Michael Yu, Nie, Liqiang
Despite the significant success of imitation learning in robotic manipulation, its application to bimanual tasks remains highly challenging. Existing approaches mainly learn a policy to predict a distant next-best end-effector pose (NBP) and then compute the corresponding joint rotation angles for motion using inverse kinematics. However, they suffer from two important issues: (1) rarely considering the physical robotic structure, which may cause self-collisions or interferences, and (2) overlooking the kinematics constraint, which may result in the predicted poses not conforming to the actual limitations of the robot joints. In this paper, we propose Kinematics enhanced Spatial-TemporAl gRaph Diffuser (KStar Diffuser). Specifically, (1) to incorporate the physical robot structure information into action prediction, KStar Diffuser maintains a dynamic spatial-temporal graph according to the physical bimanual joint motions at continuous timesteps. This dynamic graph serves as the robot-structure condition for denoising the actions; (2) to make the NBP learning objective consistent with kinematics, we introduce the differentiable kinematics to provide the reference for optimizing KStar Diffuser. This module regularizes the policy to predict more reliable and kinematics-aware next end-effector poses. Experimental results show that our method effectively leverages the physical structural information and generates kinematics-aware actions in both simulation and real-world