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 spatial relationship




Speaking Your Language: Spatial Relationships in Interpretable Emergent Communication

Neural Information Processing Systems

Effective communication requires the ability to refer to specific parts of an observation in relation to others. While emergent communication literature shows success in developing various language properties, no research has shown the emergence of such positional references. This paper demonstrates how agents can communicate about spatial relationships within their observations. The results indicate that agents can develop a language capable of expressing the relationships between parts of their observation, achieving over 90% accuracy when trained in a referential game which requires such communication. Using a collocation measure, we demonstrate how the agents create such references. This analysis suggests that agents use a mixture of non-compositional and compositional messages to convey spatial relationships. We also show that the emergent language is interpretable by humans. The translation accuracy is tested by communicating with the receiver agent, where the receiver achieves over 78% accuracy using parts of this lexicon, confirming that the interpretation of the emergent language was successful.


MoGenTS: Motion Generation based on Spatial-Temporal Joint Modeling

Neural Information Processing Systems

Motion generation from discrete quantization offers many advantages over continuous regression, but at the cost of inevitable approximation errors. Previous methods usually quantize the entire body pose into one code, which not only faces the difficulty in encoding all joints within one vector but also loses the spatial relationship between different joints. Differently, in this work we quantize each individual joint into one vector, which i) simplifies the quantization process as the complexity associated with a single joint is markedly lower than that of the entire pose; ii) maintains a spatial-temporal structure that preserves both the spatial relationships among joints and the temporal movement patterns; iii) yields a 2D token map, which enables the application of various 2D operations widely used in 2D images. Grounded in the 2D motion quantization, we build a spatial-temporal modeling framework, where 2D joint VQVAE, temporal-spatial 2D masking technique, and spatial-temporal 2D attention are proposed to take advantage of spatial-temporal signals among the 2D tokens. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms previous methods across different datasets, with a $26.6\%$ decrease of FID on HumanML3D and a $29.9\%$ decrease on KIT-ML.


VisMin: Visual Minimal-Change Understanding

Neural Information Processing Systems

Fine-grained understanding of objects, attributes, and relationships between objects is crucial for visual-language models (VLMs). To evaluate VLMs' fine-grained understanding, existing benchmarks primarily focus on evaluating VLMs' capability to distinguish between two very similar captions given an image. In this paper, our focus is on evaluating VLMs' capability to distinguish between two very similar images given a caption. To this end, we introduce a new, challenging benchmark termed Visual Minimal-Change Understanding (VisMin), which requires models to predict the correct image-caption match given two images and two captions. Importantly, the image pair (as well as the caption pair) contains minimal changes, i.e., between the two images (as well as between the two captions), only one aspect changes at a time from among the following possible types of changes: object, attribute, count, and spatial relation.


SIRI: Spatial Relation Induced Network For Spatial Description Resolution

Neural Information Processing Systems

Spatial Description Resolution, as a language-guided localization task, is proposed for target location in a panoramic street view, given corresponding language descriptions. Explicitly characterizing an object-level relationship while distilling spatial relationships are currently absent but crucial to this task. Mimicking humans, who sequentially traverse spatial relationship words and objects with a first-person view to locate their target, we propose a novel spatial relationship induced (SIRI) network. Specifically, visual features are firstly correlated at an implicit object-level in a projected latent space; then they are distilled by each spatial relationship word, resulting in each differently activated feature representing each spatial relationship. Further, we introduce global position priors to fix the absence of positional information, which may result in global positional reasoning ambiguities. Both the linguistic and visual features are concatenated to finalize the target localization. Experimental results on the Touchdown show that our method is around 24\% better than the state-of-the-art method in terms of accuracy, measured by an 80-pixel radius. Our method also generalizes well on our proposed extended dataset collected using the same settings as Touchdown.


SceneGen: Single-Image 3D Scene Generation in One Feedforward Pass

Meng, Yanxu, Wu, Haoning, Zhang, Ya, Xie, Weidi

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

3D content generation has recently attracted significant research interest, driven by its critical applications in VR/AR and embodied AI. In this work, we tackle the challenging task of synthesizing multiple 3D assets within a single scene image. Concretely, our contributions are fourfold: (i) we present SceneGen, a novel framework that takes a scene image and corresponding object masks as input, simultaneously producing multiple 3D assets with geometry and texture. Notably, SceneGen operates with no need for extra optimization or asset retrieval; (ii) we introduce a novel feature aggregation module that integrates local and global scene information from visual and geometric encoders within the feature extraction module. Coupled with a position head, this enables the generation of 3D assets and their relative spatial positions in a single feedforward pass; (iii) we demonstrate SceneGen's direct extensibility to multi-image input scenarios. Despite being trained solely on single-image inputs, our architecture yields improved generation performance when multiple images are provided; and (iv) extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations confirm the efficiency and robustness of our approach. We believe this paradigm offers a novel solution for high-quality 3D content generation, potentially advancing its practical applications in downstream tasks. The code and model will be publicly available at: https://mengmouxu.github.io/SceneGen.


No Labels, No Problem: Training Visual Reasoners with Multimodal Verifiers

Marsili, Damiano, Gkioxari, Georgia

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Visual reasoning is challenging, requiring both precise object grounding and understanding complex spatial relationships. Existing methods fall into two camps: language-only chain-of-thought approaches, which demand large-scale (image, query, answer) supervision, and program-synthesis approaches which use pre-trained models and avoid training, but suffer from flawed logic and erroneous grounding. We propose an annotation-free training framework that improves both reasoning and grounding. Our framework uses AI-powered verifiers: an LLM verifier refines LLM reasoning via reinforcement learning, while a VLM verifier strengthens visual grounding through automated hard-negative mining, eliminating the need for ground truth labels. This design combines the strengths of modern AI systems: advanced language-only reasoning models for decomposing spatial queries into simpler subtasks, and strong vision specialist models improved via performant VLM critics. We evaluate our approach across diverse spatial reasoning tasks, and show that our method improves visual reasoning and surpasses open-source and proprietary models, while with our improved visual grounding model we further outperform recent text-only visual reasoning methods. Project webpage: https://glab-caltech.github.io/valor/


Reasoning Path and Latent State Analysis for Multi-view Visual Spatial Reasoning: A Cognitive Science Perspective

Xue, Qiyao, Liu, Weichen, Wang, Shiqi, Wang, Haoming, Wu, Yuyang, Gao, Wei

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Spatial reasoning is a core aspect of human intelligence that allows perception, inference and planning in 3D environments. However, current vision-language models (VLMs) struggle to maintain geometric coherence and cross-view consistency for spatial reasoning in multi-view settings. We attribute this gap to the lack of fine-grained benchmarks that isolate multi-view reasoning from single-view perception and temporal factors. To address this, we present ReMindView-Bench, a cognitively grounded benchmark for evaluating how VLMs construct, align and maintain spatial mental models across complementary viewpoints. ReMindView-Bench systematically varies viewpoint spatial pattern and query type to probe key factors of spatial cognition. Evaluations of 15 current VLMs reveals consistent failures in cross-view alignment and perspective-taking in multi-view spatial reasoning, motivating deeper analysis on the reasoning process. Explicit phase-wise analysis using LLM-as-a-judge and self-consistency prompting shows that VLMs perform well on in-frame perception but degrade sharply when integrating information across views. Implicit analysis, including linear probing and entropy dynamics, further show progressive loss of task-relevant information and uncertainty separation between correct and incorrect trajectories. These results provide a cognitively grounded diagnosis of VLM spatial reasoning and reveal how multi-view spatial mental models are formed, degraded and destabilized across reasoning phases. The ReMindView-Bench benchmark is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Xue0823/ReMindView-Bench, and the source codes of benchmark construction and VLM reasoning analysis are available at https://github.com/pittisl/ReMindView-Bench.


REM: Evaluating LLM Embodied Spatial Reasoning through Multi-Frame Trajectories

Thompson, Jacob, Garcia-Lopez, Emiliano, Bisk, Yonatan

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Humans build viewpoint-independent cognitive maps through navigation, enabling intuitive reasoning about object permanence and spatial relations. We argue that multimodal large language models (MLLMs), despite extensive video training, lack this fundamental spatial reasoning capability, a critical limitation for embodied applications. To demonstrate these limitations and drive research, we introduce REM (Reasoning over Embodied Multi-Frame Trajectories), a benchmark using controllable 3D environments for long-horizon embodied spatial reasoning. REM systematically evaluates key aspects like object permanence/distinction, spatial relationships, and numerical tracking across dynamic embodied viewpoints. Our evaluation shows that the best-performing current models exhibit promising overall performance, but become increasingly unreliable at even moderate complexity levels easily handled by humans. These findings highlight challenges MLLMs face in developing robust spatial representations from sequential visual input. Consequently, REM provides targeted metrics and diagnostics to foster improved spatial understanding in future models.