Spatial Reasoning
SpatialDreamer: Self-supervised Stereo Video Synthesis from Monocular Input
Lv, Zhen, Long, Yangqi, Huang, Congzhentao, Li, Cao, Lv, Chengfei, Ren, Hao, Zheng, Dian
Stereo video synthesis from a monocular input is a demanding task in the fields of spatial computing and virtual reality. The main challenges of this task lie on the insufficiency of high-quality paired stereo videos for training and the difficulty of maintaining the spatio-temporal consistency between frames. Existing methods primarily address these issues by directly applying novel view synthesis (NVS) techniques to video, while facing limitations such as the inability to effectively represent dynamic scenes and the requirement for large amounts of training data. In this paper, we introduce a novel self-supervised stereo video synthesis paradigm via a video diffusion model, termed SpatialDreamer, which meets the challenges head-on. Firstly, to address the stereo video data insufficiency, we propose a Depth based Video Generation module DVG, which employs a forward-backward rendering mechanism to generate paired videos with geometric and temporal priors. Leveraging data generated by DVG, we propose RefinerNet along with a self-supervised synthetic framework designed to facilitate efficient and dedicated training. More importantly, we devise a consistency control module, which consists of a metric of stereo deviation strength and a Temporal Interaction Learning module TIL for geometric and temporal consistency ensurance respectively. We evaluated the proposed method against various benchmark methods, with the results showcasing its superior performance.
Learning Spatial Bimanual Action Models Based on Affordance Regions and Human Demonstrations
Plonka, Björn S., Dreher, Christian, Meixner, Andre, Kartmann, Rainer, Asfour, Tamim
In this paper, we present a novel approach for learning bimanual manipulation actions from human demonstration by extracting spatial constraints between affordance regions, termed affordance constraints, of the objects involved. Affordance regions are defined as object parts that provide interaction possibilities to an agent. For example, the bottom of a bottle affords the object to be placed on a surface, while its spout affords the contained liquid to be poured. We propose a novel approach to learn changes of affordance constraints in human demonstration to construct spatial bimanual action models representing object interactions. To exploit the information encoded in these spatial bimanual action models, we formulate an optimization problem to determine optimal object configurations across multiple execution keypoints while taking into account the initial scene, the learned affordance constraints, and the robot's kinematics. We evaluate the approach in simulation with two example tasks (pouring drinks and rolling dough) and compare three different definitions of affordance constraints: (i) component-wise distances between affordance regions in Cartesian space, (ii) component-wise distances between affordance regions in cylindrical space, and (iii) degrees of satisfaction of manually defined symbolic spatial affordance constraints.
Motion-Grounded Video Reasoning: Understanding and Perceiving Motion at Pixel Level
Deng, Andong, Chen, Tongjia, Yu, Shoubin, Yang, Taojiannan, Spencer, Lincoln, Tian, Yapeng, Mian, Ajmal Saeed, Bansal, Mohit, Chen, Chen
In this paper, we introduce Motion-Grounded Video Reasoning, a new motion understanding task that requires generating visual answers (video segmentation masks) according to the input question, and hence needs implicit spatiotemporal reasoning and grounding. This task extends existing spatiotemporal grounding work focusing on explicit action/motion grounding, to a more general format by enabling implicit reasoning via questions. To facilitate the development of the new task, we collect a large-scale dataset called GROUNDMORE, which comprises 1,715 video clips, 249K object masks that are deliberately designed with 4 question types (Causal, Sequential, Counterfactual, and Descriptive) for benchmarking deep and comprehensive motion reasoning abilities. GROUNDMORE uniquely requires models to generate visual answers, providing a more concrete and visually interpretable response than plain texts. It evaluates models on both spatiotemporal grounding and reasoning, fostering to address complex challenges in motion-related video reasoning, temporal perception, and pixel-level understanding. Furthermore, we introduce a novel baseline model named Motion-Grounded Video Reasoning Assistant (MORA). MORA incorporates the multimodal reasoning ability from the Multimodal LLM, the pixel-level perception capability from the grounding model (SAM), and the temporal perception ability from a lightweight localization head. MORA achieves respectable performance on GROUNDMORE outperforming the best existing visual grounding baseline model by an average of 21.5% relatively. We hope this novel and challenging task will pave the way for future advancements in robust and general motion understanding via video reasoning segmentation
ROCKET-1: Mastering Open-World Interaction with Visual-Temporal Context Prompting
Cai, Shaofei, Wang, Zihao, Lian, Kewei, Mu, Zhancun, Ma, Xiaojian, Liu, Anji, Liang, Yitao
Vision-language models (VLMs) have excelled in multimodal tasks, but adapting them to embodied decision-making in open-world environments presents challenges. One critical issue is bridging the gap between discrete entities in low-level observations and the abstract concepts required for effective planning. A common solution is building hierarchical agents, where VLMs serve as high-level reasoners that break down tasks into executable sub-tasks, typically specified using language. However, language suffers from the inability to communicate detailed spatial information. We propose visual-temporal context prompting, a novel communication protocol between VLMs and policy models. This protocol leverages object segmentation from past observations to guide policy-environment interactions. Using this approach, we train ROCKET-1, a low-level policy that predicts actions based on concatenated visual observations and segmentation masks, supported by real-time object tracking from SAM-2. Our method unlocks the potential of VLMs, enabling them to tackle complex tasks that demand spatial reasoning. Experiments in Minecraft show that our approach enables agents to achieve previously unattainable tasks, with a $\mathbf{76}\%$ absolute improvement in open-world interaction performance. Codes and demos are now available on the project page: https://craftjarvis.github.io/ROCKET-1.
Predictors of disease outbreaks at continentalscale in the African region: Insights and predictions with geospatial artificial intelligence using earth observations and routine disease surveillance data
Pezanowski, Scott, Koua, Etien Luc, Okeibunor, Joseph C, Gueye, Abdou Salam
Objectives: Our research adopts computational techniques to analyze disease outbreaks weekly over a large geographic area while maintaining local-level analysis by incorporating relevant high-spatial resolution cultural and environmental datasets. The abundance of data about disease outbreaks gives scientists an excellent opportunity to uncover patterns in disease spread and make future predictions. However, data over a sizeable geographic area quickly outpace human cognition. Our study area covers a significant portion of the African continent (about 17,885,000 km2). The data size makes computational analysis vital to assist human decision-makers. Methods: We first applied global and local spatial autocorrelation for malaria, cholera, meningitis, and yellow fever case counts. We then used machine learning to predict the weekly presence of these diseases in the second-level administrative district. Lastly, we used machine learning feature importance methods on the variables that affect spread. Results: Our spatial autocorrelation results show that geographic nearness is critical but varies in effect and space. Moreover, we identified many interesting hot and cold spots and spatial outliers. The machine learning model infers a binary class of cases or none with the best F1 score of 0.96 for malaria. Machine learning feature importance uncovered critical cultural and environmental factors affecting outbreaks and variations between diseases. Conclusions: Our study shows that data analytics and machine learning are vital to understanding and monitoring disease outbreaks locally across vast areas. The speed at which these methods produce insights can be critical during epidemics and emergencies.
Multimodal Contrastive Learning of Urban Space Representations from POI Data
Wang, Xinglei, Cheng, Tao, Law, Stephen, Zeng, Zichao, Yin, Lu, Liu, Junyuan
Existing methods for learning urban space representations from Point-of-Interest (POI) data face several limitations, including issues with geographical delineation, inadequate spatial information modelling, underutilisation of POI semantic attributes, and computational inefficiencies. To address these issues, we propose CaLLiPer (Contrastive Language-Location Pre-training), a novel representation learning model that directly embeds continuous urban spaces into vector representations that can capture the spatial and semantic distribution of urban environment. This model leverages a multimodal contrastive learning objective, aligning location embeddings with textual POI descriptions, thereby bypassing the need for complex training corpus construction and negative sampling. We validate CaLLiPer's effectiveness by applying it to learning urban space representations in London, UK, where it demonstrates 5-15% improvement in predictive performance for land use classification and socioeconomic mapping tasks compared to state-of-the-art methods. Visualisations of the learned representations further illustrate our model's advantages in capturing spatial variations in urban semantics with high accuracy and fine resolution. Additionally, CaLLiPer achieves reduced training time, showcasing its efficiency and scalability. This work provides a promising pathway for scalable, semantically rich urban space representation learning that can support the development of geospatial foundation models. The implementation code is available at https://github.com/xlwang233/CaLLiPer.
An Empirical Analysis on Spatial Reasoning Capabilities of Large Multimodal Models
Shiri, Fatemeh, Guo, Xiao-Yu, Far, Mona Golestan, Yu, Xin, Haffari, Gholamreza, Li, Yuan-Fang
Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have achieved strong performance across a range of vision and language tasks. However, their spatial reasoning capabilities are under-investigated. In this paper, we construct a novel VQA dataset, Spatial-MM, to comprehensively study LMMs' spatial understanding and reasoning capabilities. Our analyses on object-relationship and multi-hop reasoning reveal several important findings. Firstly, bounding boxes and scene graphs, even synthetic ones, can significantly enhance LMMs' spatial reasoning. Secondly, LMMs struggle more with questions posed from the human perspective than the camera perspective about the image. Thirdly, chain of thought (CoT) prompting does not improve model performance on complex multi-hop questions involving spatial relations. % Moreover, spatial reasoning steps are much less accurate than non-spatial ones across MLLMs. Lastly, our perturbation analysis on GQA-spatial reveals that LMMs are much stronger at basic object detection than complex spatial reasoning. We believe our benchmark dataset and in-depth analyses can spark further research on LMMs spatial reasoning. Spatial-MM benchmark is available at: https://github.com/FatemehShiri/Spatial-MM
Querying Perception Streams with Spatial Regular Expressions
Anderson, Jacob, Fainekos, Georgios, Hoxha, Bardh, Okamoto, Hideki, Prokhorov, Danil
Perception in fields like robotics, manufacturing, and data analysis generates large volumes of temporal and spatial data to effectively capture their environments. However, sorting through this data for specific scenarios is a meticulous and error-prone process, often dependent on the application, and lacks generality and reproducibility. In this work, we introduce SpREs as a novel querying language for pattern matching over perception streams containing spatial and temporal data derived from multi-modal dynamic environments. To highlight the capabilities of SpREs, we developed the STREM tool as both an offline and online pattern matching framework for perception data. We demonstrate the offline capabilities of STREM through a case study on a publicly available AV dataset (Woven Planet Perception) and its online capabilities through a case study integrating STREM in ROS with the CARLA simulator. We also conduct performance benchmark experiments on various SpRE queries. Using our matching framework, we are able to find over 20,000 matches within 296 ms making STREM applicable in runtime monitoring applications.
Discovering Latent Structural Causal Models from Spatio-Temporal Data
Wang, Kun, Varambally, Sumanth, Watson-Parris, Duncan, Ma, Yi-An, Yu, Rose
Many important phenomena in scientific fields such as climate, neuroscience, and epidemiology are naturally represented as spatiotemporal gridded data with complex interactions. For example, in climate science, researchers aim to uncover how large-scale events, such as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and the Antarctic Oscillation (AAO), influence other global processes. Inferring causal relationships from these data is a challenging problem compounded by the high dimensionality of such data and the correlations between spatially proximate points. We present SPACY (SPAtiotemporal Causal discoverY), a novel framework based on variational inference, designed to explicitly model latent time-series and their causal relationships from spatially confined modes in the data. Our method uses an end-to-end training process that maximizes an evidence-lower bound (ELBO) for the data likelihood. Theoretically, we show that, under some conditions, the latent variables are identifiable up to transformation by an invertible matrix. Empirically, we show that SPACY outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on synthetic data, remains scalable for large grids, and identifies key known phenomena from real-world climate data.
From Electrode to Global Brain: Integrating Multi- and Cross-Scale Brain Connections and Interactions Under Cross-Subject and Within-Subject Scenarios
According to the study of brain connectomics [29] and the aforementioned statement above, the topological connection Spurred on by the advent of advanced non-invasive techniques of the human brain takes place on three separate levels with such as electroencephalogram (EEG), explorations of different scales, inextricably linked with the geometry of the brain networks have entered a new era [40]. The proposed multi-scale spatial data distribution as a remarkable organ, exhibits a high level of time-varying differences can thus be concluded as three categories under complexity attributed to the intricate nature of the structural different brain scales: connections among its constituent units [4]. To the best of the authors' knowledge, The deep domain adaptation (DDA) method combines the no previous work has integrated the multi-scale spatial data superiority of deep learning and transfer learning, becoming distribution problem with the deep domain adaptation network one of the most efficient tools to address the data distribution (DDAN), neither on the design of the CNN structure nor difference problem in cross-subject EEG classification tasks the establishment of the adaptation domain. More and more researchers utilize this powerful integrate the principles of multi-scale brain topological structures tool to solve cross-subject motor imagery (MI) classification in order to solve the multi-scale spatial data distribution problems [35], [37], [38], aiming to improve the model generalization difference problem [29], a novel multi-scale spatial domain and the classification performance by transferring adaptation network (MSSDAN) consists of both multi-scale knowledge from source domain subject. The existing three types of crosssubject A. Overview of MSSDAN MI classification (MTM: multi-source to multi-target, MTS: multi-source to single-target, and STS) DDA methods In this paper, we propose MSSDAN, a new domain adaptation focus more on the global [15], [39], [41], class [14], [20], and method for the brain-computer interface, which consists of temporal domain adaptations [2], [5].