Spatial Reasoning
UniFS: Unified Multi-Contrast MRI Reconstruction via Frequency-Spatial Fusion
Li, Jialin, Ren, Yiwei, Pan, Kai, Wei, Dong, Cheng, Pujin, Wu, Xian, Tang, Xiaoying
Recently, Multi-Contrast MR Reconstruction (MCMR) has emerged as a hot research topic that leverages high-quality auxiliary modalities to reconstruct undersampled target modalities of interest. However, existing methods often struggle to generalize across different k-space undersampling patterns, requiring the training of a separate model for each specific pattern, which limits their practical applicability. To address this challenge, we propose UniFS, a Unified Frequency-Spatial Fusion model designed to handle multiple k-space undersampling patterns for MCMR tasks without any need for retraining. UniFS integrates three key modules: a Cross-Modal Frequency Fusion module, an Adaptive Mask-Based Prompt Learning module, and a Dual-Branch Complementary Refinement module. These modules work together to extract domain-invariant features from diverse k-space undersampling patterns while dynamically adapt to their own variations. Another limitation of existing MCMR methods is their tendency to focus solely on spatial information while neglect frequency characteristics, or extract only shallow frequency features, thus failing to fully leverage complementary cross-modal frequency information. To relieve this issue, UniFS introduces an adaptive prompt-guided frequency fusion module for k-space learning, significantly enhancing the model's generalization performance. We evaluate our model on the BraTS and HCP datasets with various k-space undersampling patterns and acceleration factors, including previously unseen patterns, to comprehensively assess UniFS's generalizability. Experimental results across multiple scenarios demonstrate that UniFS achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/LIKP0/UniFS.
MOVE: A Simple Motion-Based Data Collection Paradigm for Spatial Generalization in Robotic Manipulation
Wang, Huanqian, Chen, Chi Bene, Yue, Yang, Tao, Danhua, Guo, Tong, Xie, Shaoxuan, Huang, Denghang, Song, Shiji, Yao, Guocai, Huang, Gao
Imitation learning method has shown immense promise for robotic manipulation, yet its practical deployment is fundamentally constrained by the data scarcity. Despite prior work on collecting large-scale datasets, there still remains a significant gap to robust spatial generalization. We identify a key limitation: individual trajectories, regardless of their length, are typically collected from a \emph{single, static spatial configuration} of the environment. This includes fixed object and target spatial positions as well as unchanging camera viewpoints, which significantly restricts the diversity of spatial information available for learning. To address this critical bottleneck in data efficiency, we propose \textbf{MOtion-Based Variability Enhancement} (\emph{MOVE}), a simple yet effective data collection paradigm that enables the acquisition of richer spatial information from dynamic demonstrations. Our core contribution is an augmentation strategy that injects motion into any movable objects within the environment for each demonstration. This process implicitly generates a dense and diverse set of spatial configurations within a single trajectory. We conduct extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world environments to validate our approach. For example, in simulation tasks requiring strong spatial generalization, \emph{MOVE} achieves an average success rate of 39.1\%, a 76.1\% relative improvement over the static data collection paradigm (22.2\%), and yields up to 2--5$\times$ gains in data efficiency on certain tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/lucywang720/MOVE.
OsmT: Bridging OpenStreetMap Queries and Natural Language with Open-source Tag-aware Language Models
Wan, Zhuoyue, Hu, Wentao, Zhang, Chen Jason, Song, Yuanfeng, Li, Shuaimin, Xiao, Ruiqiang, Wei, Xiao-Yong, Wong, Raymond Chi-Wing
Bridging natural language and structured query languages is a long-standing challenge in the database community. While recent advances in language models have shown promise in this direction, existing solutions often rely on large-scale closed-source models that suffer from high inference costs, limited transparency, and lack of adaptability for lightweight deployment. In this paper, we present OsmT, an open-source tag-aware language model specifically designed to bridge natural language and Overpass Query Language (OverpassQL), a structured query language for accessing large-scale OpenStreetMap (OSM) data. To enhance the accuracy and structural validity of generated queries, we introduce a Tag Retrieval Augmentation (TRA) mechanism that incorporates contextually relevant tag knowledge into the generation process. This mechanism is designed to capture the hierarchical and relational dependencies present in the OSM database, addressing the topological complexity inherent in geospatial query formulation. In addition, we define a reverse task, OverpassQL-to-Text, which translates structured queries into natural language explanations to support query interpretation and improve user accessibility. We evaluate OsmT on a public benchmark against strong baselines and observe consistent improvements in both query generation and interpretation. Despite using significantly fewer parameters, our model achieves competitive accuracy, demonstrating the effectiveness of open-source pre-trained language models in bridging natural language and structured query languages within schema-rich geospatial environments.
SpaceMind: Camera-Guided Modality Fusion for Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language Models
Zhao, Ruosen, Zhang, Zhikang, Xu, Jialei, Chang, Jiahao, Chen, Dong, Li, Lingyun, Sun, Weijian, Wei, Zizhuang
Large vision-language models (VLMs) show strong multimodal understanding but still struggle with 3D spatial reasoning, such as distance estimation, size comparison, and cross-view consistency. Existing 3D-aware methods either depend on auxiliary 3D information or enhance RGB-only VLMs with geometry encoders through shallow feature fusion. We propose SpaceMind, a multimodal large language model explicitly designed for spatial reasoning solely from RGB inputs. The model adopts a dual-encoder architecture, integrating VGGT as a spatial understanding encoder and InternViT as a 2D visual encoder. The key idea is to treat the camera representation as an active guiding modality rather than passive metadata. Specifically, SpaceMind introduces a lightweight Camera-Guided Modality Fusion module before the language model to replace shallow fusion. It applies camera-conditioned biasing to spatial tokens, assigns query-independent weights reflecting their geometric importance, and uses the camera embedding to gate the fused representation. Empirically, SpaceMind establishes new state-of-the-art results on VSI-Bench, SQA3D and SPBench, surpassing both open and proprietary systems on VSI-Bench and SPBench by large margins and achieving state-of-the-art performance on SQA3D. These results demonstrate that camera-guided modality fusion is an effective and practical inductive bias for equipping VLMs with genuinely spatially grounded intelligence. We will release code and model checkpoints to support future research.
BOP-ASK: Object-Interaction Reasoning for Vision-Language Models
Bhat, Vineet, Kim, Sungsu, Blukis, Valts, Heinrich, Greg, Krishnamurthy, Prashanth, Karri, Ramesh, Birchfield, Stan, Khorrami, Farshad, Tremblay, Jonathan
Vision Language Models (VLMs) have achieved impressive performance on spatial reasoning benchmarks, yet these evaluations mask critical weaknesses in understanding object interactions. Current benchmarks test high level relationships ('left of,' 'behind', etc.) but ignore fine-grained spatial understanding needed for real world applications: precise 3D localization, physical compatibility between objects, object affordances and multi step spatial planning. In this work, we present BOP-ASK, a novel large scale dataset for object interaction reasoning for both training and benchmarking. Our data generation pipeline leverages 6D object poses from the Benchmark for Object Pose Estimation (BOP) datasets from which we derive fine grained annotations such as grasp poses, referred object poses, path planning trajectories, relative spatial and depth relationships, and object-to-object relationships. BOP-ASK comprises over 150k images and 33M question answer pairs spanning six tasks (four novel), providing a rich resource for training and evaluating VLMs. We evaluate proprietary and open sourced VLMs, and conduct human evaluations on BOP-ASK-core, a contributed test benchmark. We also release BOP-ASK-lab, an out-of-distribution benchmark with images not sourced from BOP, enabling testing of generalization. Our experiments demonstrate that models trained on BOP-ASK outperform baselines and exhibit emergent capabilities such as precise object and grasp pose estimation, trajectory planning, and fine-grained object-centric spatial reasoning in cluttered environments. We will publicly release our datasets and dataset generation pipeline.
Sharp Eyes and Memory for VideoLLMs: Information-Aware Visual Token Pruning for Efficient and Reliable VideoLLM Reasoning
Qin, Jialong, Zou, Xin, Lu, Di, Yan, Yibo, Hu, Xuming
Current Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) suffer from quadratic computational complexity and key-value cache scaling, due to their reliance on processing excessive redundant visual tokens. To address this problem, we propose SharpV, a minimalist and efficient method for adaptive pruning of visual tokens and KV cache. Different from most uniform compression approaches, SharpV dynamically adjusts pruning ratios based on spatial-temporal information. Remarkably, this adaptive mechanism occasionally achieves performance gains over dense models, offering a novel paradigm for adaptive pruning. During the KV cache pruning stage, based on observations of visual information degradation, SharpV prunes degraded visual features via a self-calibration manner, guided by similarity to original visual features. In this way, SharpV achieves hierarchical cache pruning from the perspective of information bottleneck, offering a new insight into VideoLLMs' information flow. Experiments on multiple public benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of SharpV . Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, SharpV is notably the first two-stage pruning framework that operates without requiring access to exposed attention scores, ensuring full compatibility with hardware acceleration techniques like Flash Attention.
SpaceTools: Tool-Augmented Spatial Reasoning via Double Interactive RL
Chen, Siyi, Uy, Mikaela Angelina, Song, Chan Hee, Ladhak, Faisal, Murali, Adithyavairavan, Qu, Qing, Birchfield, Stan, Blukis, Valts, Tremblay, Jonathan
Vision Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate strong qualitative visual understanding, but struggle with metrically precise spatial reasoning required for embodied applications. The agentic paradigm promises that VLMs can use a wide variety of tools that could augment these capabilities, such as depth estimators, segmentation models, and pose estimators. Yet it remains an open challenge how to realize this vision without solely relying on handcrafted prompting strategies or enforcing fixed, predefined tool pipelines that limit VLMs' ability to discover optimal tool-use patterns. Reinforcement Learning could overcome this gap, but has so far been limited to reasoning with a single visual tool due to the large search space in multi-tool reasoning. We introduce Double Interactive Reinforcement Learning (DIRL), a two-phase training framework where VLMs learn to coordinate multiple tools through interactive exploration and feedback. In the teaching phase, we combine demonstrations from a single tool specialist trained via interactive RL with traces from a frontier model using all tools. In the exploration phase, the model further refines multi-tool coordination through continued RL. Our model, SpaceTools, with tool-augmented spatial reasoning ability, achieves state-of-the-art performance on spatial understanding benchmarks (RoboSpatial-Home, BLINK, BOP-ASK) and demonstrates reliable real-world manipulation using a 7-DOF robot as a tool. DIRL provides substantial improvements over the vanilla SFT (+12% on RoboSpatial) and RL (+16% on RoboSpatial) baselines. Project page: https://spacetools.github.io/.
Origin-Conditional Trajectory Encoding: Measuring Urban Configurational Asymmetries through Neural Decomposition
Law, Stephen, Yang, Tao, Chen, Nanjiang, Lin, Xuhui
Urban analytics increasingly relies on AI-driven trajectory analysis, yet current approaches suffer from methodological fragmentation: trajectory learning captures movement patterns but ignores spatial context, while spatial embedding methods encode street networks but miss temporal dynamics. Three gaps persist: (1) lack of joint training that integrates spatial and temporal representations, (2) origin-agnostic treatment that ignores directional asymmetries in navigation ($A \to B \ne B \to A$), and (3) over-reliance on auxiliary data (POIs, imagery) rather than fundamental geometric properties of urban space. We introduce a conditional trajectory encoder that jointly learns spatial and movement representations while preserving origin-dependent asymmetries using geometric features. This framework decomposes urban navigation into shared cognitive patterns and origin-specific spatial narratives, enabling quantitative measurement of cognitive asymmetries across starting locations. Our bidirectional LSTM processes visibility ratio and curvature features conditioned on learnable origin embeddings, decomposing representations into shared urban patterns and origin-specific signatures through contrastive learning. Results from six synthetic cities and real-world validation on Beijing's Xicheng District demonstrate that urban morphology creates systematic cognitive inequalities. This provides urban planners quantitative tools for assessing experiential equity, offers architects insights into layout decisions' cognitive impacts, and enables origin-aware analytics for navigation systems.
CartoMapQA: A Fundamental Benchmark Dataset Evaluating Vision-Language Models on Cartographic Map Understanding
Ung, Huy Quang, Habault, Guillaume, Nishimura, Yasutaka, Niu, Hao, Legaspi, Roberto, Oya, Tomoki, Kojima, Ryoichi, Taya, Masato, Ono, Chihiro, Minamikawa, Atsunori, Liu, Yan
The rise of Visual-Language Models (LVLMs) has unlocked new possibilities for seamlessly integrating visual and textual information. However, their ability to interpret cartographic maps remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce CartoMapQA, a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate LVLMs' understanding of cartographic maps through question-answering tasks. The dataset includes over 2000 samples, each composed of a cartographic map, a question (with open-ended or multiple-choice answers), and a ground-truth answer. These tasks span key low-, mid- and high-level map interpretation skills, including symbol recognition, embedded information extraction, scale interpretation, and route-based reasoning. Our evaluation of both open-source and proprietary LVLMs reveals persistent challenges: models frequently struggle with map-specific semantics, exhibit limited geospatial reasoning, and are prone to Optical Character Recognition (OCR)-related errors. By isolating these weaknesses, CartoMapQA offers a valuable tool for guiding future improvements in LVLM architectures. Ultimately, it supports the development of models better equipped for real-world applications that depend on robust and reliable map understanding, such as navigation, geographic search, and urban planning. Our source code and data are openly available to the research community at: https://github.com/ungquanghuy-kddi/CartoMapQA.git
Cell-cell communication inference and analysis: biological mechanisms, computational approaches, and future opportunities
Cheng, Xiangzheng, Huang, Haili, Su, Ye, Nie, Qing, Zou, Xiufen, Jin, Suoqin
In multicellular organisms, cells coordinate their activities through cell-cell communication (CCC), which are crucial for development, tissue homeostasis, and disease progression. Recent advances in single-cell and spatial omics technologies provide unprecedented opportunities to systematically infer and analyze CCC from these omics data, either by integrating prior knowledge of ligand-receptor interactions (LRIs) or through de novo approaches. A variety of computational methods have been developed, focusing on methodological innovations, accurate modeling of complex signaling mechanisms, and investigation of broader biological questions. These advances have greatly enhanced our ability to analyze CCC and generate biological hypotheses. Here, we introduce the biological mechanisms and modeling strategies of CCC, and provide a focused overview of more than 140 computational methods for inferring CCC from single-cell and spatial transcriptomic data, emphasizing the diversity in methodological frameworks and biological questions. Finally, we discuss the current challenges and future opportunities in this rapidly evolving field.