Daily Papers

Recovering high-fidelity 3D hand geometry from images is a critical task in computer vision, holding significant value for domains such as robotics, animation and VR/AR. Crucially, scalable applications demand both accuracy and deployment flexibility, requiring the ability to leverage massive amounts of unstructured image data from the internet or enable deployment on consumer-grade RGB cameras without complex calibration. However, current methods face a dilemma. While single-view approaches are easy to deploy, they suffer from depth ambiguity and occlusion. Conversely, multi-view systems resolve these uncertainties but typically demand fixed, calibrated setups, limiting their real-world utility. To bridge this gap, we draw inspiration from 3D foundation models that learn explicit geometry directly from visual data. By reformulating hand reconstruction from arbitrary views as a visual-geometry grounded task, we propose a feed-forward architecture that, for the first time in literature, jointly infers 3D hand meshes and camera poses from uncalibrated views. Extensive evaluations show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks and demonstrates strong generalization to uncalibrated, in-the-wild scenarios. Here is the link of our project page: https://lym29.github.io/HGGT/.

3D semantic occupancy prediction has become a crucial perception task for comprehensive scene understanding in autonomous driving. While recent advances have explored 3D Gaussian splatting for occupancy modeling to substantially reduce computational overhead, the generation of high-quality 3D Gaussians relies heavily on accurate geometric cues, which are often insufficient in purely vision-centric paradigms. To bridge this gap, we advocate for injecting the strong geometric grounding capability from Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) into occupancy prediction. In this regard, we introduce Visual Geometry Grounded Gaussian Splatting (VG3S), a novel framework that empowers Gaussian-based occupancy prediction with cross-view 3D geometric grounding. Specifically, to fully exploit the rich 3D geometric priors from a frozen VFM, we propose a plug-and-play hierarchical geometric feature adapter, which can effectively transform generic VFM tokens via feature aggregation, task-specific alignment, and multi-scale restructuring. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes occupancy benchmark demonstrate that VG3S achieves remarkable improvements of 12.6% in IoU and 7.5% in mIoU over the baseline. Furthermore, we show that VG3S generalizes seamlessly across diverse VFMs, consistently enhancing occupancy prediction accuracy and firmly underscoring the immense value of integrating priors derived from powerful, pre-trained geometry-grounded VFMs.

We present VGGT, a feed-forward neural network that directly infers all key 3D attributes of a scene, including camera parameters, point maps, depth maps, and 3D point tracks, from one, a few, or hundreds of its views. This approach is a step forward in 3D computer vision, where models have typically been constrained to and specialized for single tasks. It is also simple and efficient, reconstructing images in under one second, and still outperforming alternatives that require post-processing with visual geometry optimization techniques. The network achieves state-of-the-art results in multiple 3D tasks, including camera parameter estimation, multi-view depth estimation, dense point cloud reconstruction, and 3D point tracking. We also show that using pretrained VGGT as a feature backbone significantly enhances downstream tasks, such as non-rigid point tracking and feed-forward novel view synthesis. Code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/vggt.

General 3D foundation models have started to lead the trend of unifying diverse vision tasks, yet most assume RGB-only inputs and ignore readily available geometric cues (e.g., camera intrinsics, poses, and depth maps). To address this issue, we introduce OmniVGGT, a novel framework that can effectively benefit from an arbitrary number of auxiliary geometric modalities during both training and inference. In our framework, a GeoAdapter is proposed to encode depth and camera intrinsics/extrinsics into a spatial foundation model. It employs zero-initialized convolutions to progressively inject geometric information without disrupting the foundation model's representation space. This design ensures stable optimization with negligible overhead, maintaining inference speed comparable to VGGT even with multiple additional inputs. Additionally, a stochastic multimodal fusion regimen is proposed, which randomly samples modality subsets per instance during training. This enables an arbitrary number of modality inputs during testing and promotes learning robust spatial representations instead of overfitting to auxiliary cues. Comprehensive experiments on monocular/multi-view depth estimation, multi-view stereo, and camera pose estimation demonstrate that OmniVGGT outperforms prior methods with auxiliary inputs and achieves state-of-the-art results even with RGB-only input. To further highlight its practical utility, we integrated OmniVGGT into vision-language-action (VLA) models. The enhanced VLA model by OmniVGGT not only outperforms the vanilla point-cloud-based baseline on mainstream benchmarks, but also effectively leverages accessible auxiliary inputs to achieve consistent gains on robotic tasks.

3D reconstruction in large-scale scenes is a fundamental task in 3D perception, but the inherent trade-off between accuracy and computational efficiency remains a significant challenge. Existing methods either prioritize speed and produce low-quality results, or achieve high-quality reconstruction at the cost of slow inference times. In this paper, we propose SwiftVGGT, a training-free method that significantly reduce inference time while preserving high-quality dense 3D reconstruction. To maintain global consistency in large-scale scenes, SwiftVGGT performs loop closure without relying on the external Visual Place Recognition (VPR) model. This removes redundant computation and enables accurate reconstruction over kilometer-scale environments. Furthermore, we propose a simple yet effective point sampling method to align neighboring chunks using a single Sim(3)-based Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) step. This eliminates the need for the Iteratively Reweighted Least Squares (IRLS) optimization commonly used in prior work, leading to substantial speed-ups. We evaluate SwiftVGGT on multiple datasets and show that it achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction quality while requiring only 33% of the inference time of recent VGGT-based large-scale reconstruction approaches.

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) has been traditionally formulated as a single-image retrieval task. Using multiple views offers clear advantages, yet this setting remains relatively underexplored and existing methods often struggle to generalize across diverse environments. In this work we introduce UniPR-3D, the first VPR architecture that effectively integrates information from multiple views. UniPR-3D builds on a VGGT backbone capable of encoding multi-view 3D representations, which we adapt by designing feature aggregators and fine-tune for the place recognition task. To construct our descriptor, we jointly leverage the 3D tokens and intermediate 2D tokens produced by VGGT. Based on their distinct characteristics, we design dedicated aggregation modules for 2D and 3D features, allowing our descriptor to capture fine-grained texture cues while also reasoning across viewpoints. To further enhance generalization, we incorporate both single- and multi-frame aggregation schemes, along with a variable-length sequence retrieval strategy. Our experiments show that UniPR-3D sets a new state of the art, outperforming both single- and multi-view baselines and highlighting the effectiveness of geometry-grounded tokens for VPR. Our code and models will be made publicly available on Github https://github.com/dtc111111/UniPR-3D.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) still lack robustness in spatial intelligence, demonstrating poor performance on spatial understanding and reasoning tasks. We attribute this gap to the absence of a visual geometry learning process capable of reconstructing 3D space from 2D images. We present G^2VLM, a geometry grounded vision-language model that bridges two fundamental aspects of spatial intelligence: spatial 3D reconstruction and spatial understanding. G^2VLM natively leverages learned 3D visual geometry features to directly predict 3D attributes and enhance spatial reasoning tasks via in-context learning and interleaved reasoning. Our unified design is highly scalable for spatial understanding: it trains on abundant multi-view image and video data, while simultaneously leveraging the benefits of 3D visual priors that are typically only derived from hard-to-collect annotations. Experimental results demonstrate G^2VLM is proficient in both tasks, achieving comparable results to state-of-the-art feed-forward 3D reconstruction models and achieving better or competitive results across spatial understanding and reasoning tasks. By unifying a semantically strong VLM with low-level 3D vision tasks, we hope G^2VLM can serve as a strong baseline for the community and unlock more future applications, such as 3D scene editing.

Semantic distillation in radiance fields has spurred significant advances in open-vocabulary robot policies, e.g., in manipulation and navigation, founded on pretrained semantics from large vision models. While prior work has demonstrated the effectiveness of visual-only semantic features (e.g., DINO and CLIP) in Gaussian Splatting and neural radiance fields, the potential benefit of geometry-grounding in distilled fields remains an open question. In principle, visual-geometry features seem very promising for spatial tasks such as pose estimation, prompting the question: Do geometry-grounded semantic features offer an edge in distilled fields? Specifically, we ask three critical questions: First, does spatial-grounding produce higher-fidelity geometry-aware semantic features? We find that image features from geometry-grounded backbones contain finer structural details compared to their counterparts. Secondly, does geometry-grounding improve semantic object localization? We observe no significant difference in this task. Thirdly, does geometry-grounding enable higher-accuracy radiance field inversion? Given the limitations of prior work and their lack of semantics integration, we propose a novel framework SPINE for inverting radiance fields without an initial guess, consisting of two core components: coarse inversion using distilled semantics, and fine inversion using photometric-based optimization. Surprisingly, we find that the pose estimation accuracy decreases with geometry-grounded features. Our results suggest that visual-only features offer greater versatility for a broader range of downstream tasks, although geometry-grounded features contain more geometric detail. Notably, our findings underscore the necessity of future research on effective strategies for geometry-grounding that augment the versatility and performance of pretrained semantic features.

Trajectory planning in unstructured environments is a fundamental and challenging capability for mobile robots. Traditional modular pipelines suffer from latency and cascading errors across perception, localization, mapping, and planning modules. Recent end-to-end learning methods map raw visual observations directly to control signals or trajectories, promising greater performance and efficiency in open-world settings. However, most prior end-to-end approaches still rely on separate localization modules that depend on accurate sensor extrinsic calibration for self-state estimation, thereby limiting generalization across embodiments and environments. We introduce LoGoPlanner, a localization-grounded, end-to-end navigation framework that addresses these limitations by: (1) finetuning a long-horizon visual-geometry backbone to ground predictions with absolute metric scale, thereby providing implicit state estimation for accurate localization; (2) reconstructing surrounding scene geometry from historical observations to supply dense, fine-grained environmental awareness for reliable obstacle avoidance; and (3) conditioning the policy on implicit geometry bootstrapped by the aforementioned auxiliary tasks, thereby reducing error propagation.We evaluate LoGoPlanner in both simulation and real-world settings, where its fully end-to-end design reduces cumulative error while metric-aware geometry memory enhances planning consistency and obstacle avoidance, leading to more than a 27.3\% improvement over oracle-localization baselines and strong generalization across embodiments and environments. The code and models have been made publicly available on the https://steinate.github.io/logoplanner.github.io/{project page}.

Recent progress in spatial reasoning with Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) increasingly leverages geometric priors from 3D encoders. However, most existing integration strategies remain passive: geometry is exposed as a global stream and fused in an indiscriminate manner, which often induces semantic-geometry misalignment and redundant signals. We propose GeoThinker, a framework that shifts the paradigm from passive fusion to active perception. Instead of feature mixing, GeoThinker enables the model to selectively retrieve geometric evidence conditioned on its internal reasoning demands. GeoThinker achieves this through Spatial-Grounded Fusion applied at carefully selected VLM layers, where semantic visual priors selectively query and integrate task-relevant geometry via frame-strict cross-attention, further calibrated by Importance Gating that biases per-frame attention toward task-relevant structures. Comprehensive evaluation results show that GeoThinker sets a new state-of-the-art in spatial intelligence, achieving a peak score of 72.6 on the VSI-Bench. Furthermore, GeoThinker demonstrates robust generalization and significantly improved spatial perception across complex downstream scenarios, including embodied referring and autonomous driving. Our results indicate that the ability to actively integrate spatial structures is essential for next-generation spatial intelligence. Code can be found at https://github.com/Li-Hao-yuan/GeoThinker.

Visual grounding refers to the ability of a model to identify a region within some visual input that matches a textual description. Consequently, a model equipped with visual grounding capabilities can target a wide range of applications in various domains, including referring expression comprehension, answering questions pertinent to fine-grained details in images or videos, caption visual context by explicitly referring to entities, as well as low and high-level control in simulated and real environments. In this survey paper, we review representative works across the key areas of research on modern general-purpose vision language models (VLMs). We first outline the importance of grounding in VLMs, then delineate the core components of the contemporary paradigm for developing grounded models, and examine their practical applications, including benchmarks and evaluation metrics for grounded multimodal generation. We also discuss the multifaceted interrelations among visual grounding, multimodal chain-of-thought, and reasoning in VLMs. Finally, we analyse the challenges inherent to visual grounding and suggest promising directions for future research.

Remote sensing (RS) visual grounding aims to use natural language expression to locate specific objects (in the form of the bounding box or segmentation mask) in RS images, enhancing human interaction with intelligent RS interpretation systems. Early research in this area was primarily based on horizontal bounding boxes (HBBs), but as more diverse RS datasets have become available, tasks involving oriented bounding boxes (OBBs) and segmentation masks have emerged. In practical applications, different targets require different grounding types: HBB can localize an object's position, OBB provides its orientation, and mask depicts its shape. However, existing specialized methods are typically tailored to a single type of RS visual grounding task and are hard to generalize across tasks. In contrast, large vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit powerful multi-task learning capabilities but struggle to handle dense prediction tasks like segmentation. This paper proposes GeoGround, a novel framework that unifies support for HBB, OBB, and mask RS visual grounding tasks, allowing flexible output selection. Rather than customizing the architecture of VLM, our work aims to elegantly support pixel-level visual grounding output through the Text-Mask technique. We define prompt-assisted and geometry-guided learning to enhance consistency across different signals. To support model training, we present refGeo, a large-scale RS visual instruction-following dataset containing 161k image-text pairs. Experimental results show that GeoGround demonstrates strong performance across four RS visual grounding tasks, matching or surpassing the performance of specialized methods on multiple benchmarks. Code available at https://github.com/zytx121/GeoGround

Recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have made impressive progress toward general-purpose robotic manipulation by post-training large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for action prediction. Yet most VLAs entangle perception and control in a monolithic pipeline optimized purely for action, which can erode language-conditioned grounding. In our real-world tabletop tests, policies over-grasp when the target is absent, are distracted by clutter, and overfit to background appearance. To address these issues, we propose OBEYED-VLA (OBject-centric and gEometrY groundED VLA), a framework that explicitly disentangles perceptual grounding from action reasoning. Instead of operating directly on raw RGB, OBEYED-VLA augments VLAs with a perception module that grounds multi-view inputs into task-conditioned, object-centric, and geometry-aware observations. This module includes a VLM-based object-centric grounding stage that selects task-relevant object regions across camera views, along with a complementary geometric grounding stage that emphasizes the 3D structure of these objects over their appearance. The resulting grounded views are then fed to a pretrained VLA policy, which we fine-tune exclusively on single-object demonstrations collected without environmental clutter or non-target objects. On a real-world UR10e tabletop setup, OBEYED-VLA substantially improves robustness over strong VLA baselines across four challenging regimes and multiple difficulty levels: distractor objects, absent-target rejection, background appearance changes, and cluttered manipulation of unseen objects. Ablation studies confirm that both semantic grounding and geometry-aware grounding are critical to these gains. Overall, the results indicate that making perception an explicit, object-centric component is an effective way to strengthen and generalize VLA-based robotic manipulation.

Visual grounding, a crucial vision-language task involving the understanding of the visual context based on the query expression, necessitates the model to capture the interactions between objects, as well as various spatial and attribute information. However, the annotation data of visual grounding task is limited due to its time-consuming and labor-intensive annotation process, resulting in the trained models being constrained from generalizing its capability to a broader domain. To address this challenge, we propose GroundVLP, a simple yet effective zero-shot method that harnesses visual grounding ability from the existing models trained from image-text pairs and pure object detection data, both of which are more conveniently obtainable and offer a broader domain compared to visual grounding annotation data. GroundVLP proposes a fusion mechanism that combines the heatmap from GradCAM and the object proposals of open-vocabulary detectors. We demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms other zero-shot methods on RefCOCO/+/g datasets, surpassing prior zero-shot state-of-the-art by approximately 28\% on the test split of RefCOCO and RefCOCO+. Furthermore, GroundVLP performs comparably to or even better than some non-VLP-based supervised models on the Flickr30k entities dataset. Our code is available at https://github.com/om-ai-lab/GroundVLP.

Answer grounding is the task of locating relevant visual evidence for the Visual Question Answering task. While a wide variety of attention methods have been introduced for this task, they suffer from the following three problems: designs that do not allow the usage of pre-trained networks and do not benefit from large data pre-training, custom designs that are not based on well-grounded previous designs, therefore limiting the learning power of the network, or complicated designs that make it challenging to re-implement or improve them. In this paper, we propose a novel architectural block, which we term Sentence Attention Block, to solve these problems. The proposed block re-calibrates channel-wise image feature-maps by explicitly modeling inter-dependencies between the image feature-maps and sentence embedding. We visually demonstrate how this block filters out irrelevant feature-maps channels based on sentence embedding. We start our design with a well-known attention method, and by making minor modifications, we improve the results to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy. The flexibility of our method makes it easy to use different pre-trained backbone networks, and its simplicity makes it easy to understand and be re-implemented. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on the TextVQA-X, VQS, VQA-X, and VizWiz-VQA-Grounding datasets. We perform multiple ablation studies to show the effectiveness of our design choices.

While reinforcement learning (RL) over chains of thought has significantly advanced language models in tasks such as mathematics and coding, visual reasoning introduces added complexity by requiring models to direct visual attention, interpret perceptual inputs, and ground abstract reasoning in spatial evidence. We introduce ViGoRL (Visually Grounded Reinforcement Learning), a vision-language model trained with RL to explicitly anchor each reasoning step to specific visual coordinates. Inspired by human visual decision-making, ViGoRL learns to produce spatially grounded reasoning traces, guiding visual attention to task-relevant regions at each step. When fine-grained exploration is required, our novel multi-turn RL framework enables the model to dynamically zoom into predicted coordinates as reasoning unfolds. Across a diverse set of visual reasoning benchmarks--including SAT-2 and BLINK for spatial reasoning, V*bench for visual search, and ScreenSpot and VisualWebArena for web-based grounding--ViGoRL consistently outperforms both supervised fine-tuning and conventional RL baselines that lack explicit grounding mechanisms. Incorporating multi-turn RL with zoomed-in visual feedback significantly improves ViGoRL's performance on localizing small GUI elements and visual search, achieving 86.4% on V*Bench. Additionally, we find that grounding amplifies other visual behaviors such as region exploration, grounded subgoal setting, and visual verification. Finally, human evaluations show that the model's visual references are not only spatially accurate but also helpful for understanding model reasoning steps. Our results show that visually grounded RL is a strong paradigm for imbuing models with general-purpose visual reasoning.

Prior studies on 3D scene understanding have primarily developed specialized models for specific tasks or required task-specific fine-tuning. In this study, we propose Grounded 3D-LLM, which explores the potential of 3D large multi-modal models (3D LMMs) to consolidate various 3D vision tasks within a unified generative framework. The model uses scene referent tokens as special noun phrases to reference 3D scenes, enabling the handling of sequences that interleave 3D and textual data. It offers a natural approach for translating 3D vision tasks into language formats using task-specific instruction templates. To facilitate the use of referent tokens in subsequent language modeling, we have curated large-scale grounded language datasets that offer finer scene-text correspondence at the phrase level by bootstrapping existing object labels. Subsequently, we introduced Contrastive LAnguage-Scene Pre-training (CLASP) to effectively leverage this data, thereby integrating 3D vision with language models. Our comprehensive evaluation covers open-ended tasks like dense captioning and 3D QA, alongside close-ended tasks such as object detection and language grounding. Experiments across multiple 3D benchmarks reveal the leading performance and the broad applicability of Grounded 3D-LLM. Code and datasets will be released on the project page: https://groundedscenellm.github.io/grounded_3d-llm.github.io.

Text-guided 3D visual grounding (T-3DVG), which aims to locate a specific object that semantically corresponds to a language query from a complicated 3D scene, has drawn increasing attention in the 3D research community over the past few years. Compared to 2D visual grounding, this task presents great potential and challenges due to its closer proximity to the real world and the complexity of data collection and 3D point cloud source processing. In this survey, we attempt to provide a comprehensive overview of the T-3DVG progress, including its fundamental elements, recent research advances, and future research directions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic survey on the T-3DVG task. Specifically, we first provide a general structure of the T-3DVG pipeline with detailed components in a tutorial style, presenting a complete background overview. Then, we summarize the existing T-3DVG approaches into different categories and analyze their strengths and weaknesses. We also present the benchmark datasets and evaluation metrics to assess their performances. Finally, we discuss the potential limitations of existing T-3DVG and share some insights on several promising research directions. The latest papers are continually collected at https://github.com/liudaizong/Awesome-3D-Visual-Grounding.

Recent advances in multimodal large language models(MLLMs) have led to remarkable progress in visual grounding, enabling fine-grained cross-modal alignment between textual queries and image regions. However, transferring such capabilities to remote sensing imagery remains challenging, as targets are often extremely small within kilometer-scale scenes, and queries typically involve intricate geospatial relations such as relative positions, spatial hierarchies, or contextual dependencies across distant objects. To address these challenges, we propose GeoViS, a Geospatially Rewarded Visual Search framework that reformulates remote sensing visual grounding as a progressive search-and-reasoning process. Rather than directly predicting the target location in a single step, GeoViS actively explores the global image through a tree-structured sequence of visual cues, integrating multimodal perception, spatial reasoning, and reward-guided exploration to refine geospatial hypotheses iteratively. This design enables the model to detect subtle small-scale targets while maintaining holistic scene awareness. Extensive experiments on five remote sensing grounding benchmarks demonstrate that GeoViS achieves precise geospatial understanding and consistently surpasses existing methods across key visual grounding metrics, highlighting its strong cross-domain generalization and interpretability.

Current multi-view indoor 3D object detectors rely on sensor geometry that is costly to obtain (i.e., precisely calibrated multi-view camera poses) to fuse multi-view information into a global scene representation, limiting deployment in real-world scenes. We target a more practical setting: Sensor-Geometry-Free (SG-Free) multi-view indoor 3D object detection, where there are no sensor-provided geometric inputs (multi-view poses or depth). Recent Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT) shows that strong 3D cues can be inferred directly from images. Building on this insight, we present VGGT-Det, the first framework tailored for SG-Free multi-view indoor 3D object detection. Rather than merely consuming VGGT predictions, our method integrates VGGT encoder into a transformer-based pipeline. To effectively leverage both the semantic and geometric priors from inside VGGT, we introduce two novel key components: (i) Attention-Guided Query Generation (AG): exploits VGGT attention maps as semantic priors to initialize object queries, improving localization by focusing on object regions while preserving global spatial structure; (ii) Query-Driven Feature Aggregation (QD): a learnable See-Query interacts with object queries to 'see' what they need, and then dynamically aggregates multi-level geometric features across VGGT layers that progressively lift 2D features into 3D. Experiments show that VGGT-Det significantly surpasses the best-performing method in the SG-Free setting by 4.4 and 8.6 mAP@0.25 on ScanNet and ARKitScenes, respectively. Ablation study shows that VGGT's internally learned semantic and geometric priors can be effectively leveraged by our AG and QD.

Current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) often underperform on mathematical problem-solving tasks that require fine-grained visual understanding. The limitation is largely attributable to inadequate perception of geometric primitives during image-level contrastive pre-training (e.g., CLIP). While recent efforts to improve math MLLMs have focused on scaling up mathematical visual instruction datasets and employing stronger LLM backbones, they often overlook persistent errors in visual recognition. In this paper, we systematically evaluate the visual grounding capabilities of state-of-the-art MLLMs and reveal a significant negative correlation between visual grounding accuracy and problem-solving performance, underscoring the critical role of fine-grained visual understanding. Notably, advanced models like GPT-4o exhibit a 70% error rate when identifying geometric entities, highlighting that this remains a key bottleneck in visual mathematical reasoning. To address this, we propose a novel approach, SVE-Math (Selective Vision-Enhanced Mathematical MLLM), featuring a geometric-grounded vision encoder and a feature router that dynamically adjusts the contribution of hierarchical visual feature maps. Our model recognizes accurate visual primitives and generates precise visual prompts tailored to the language model's reasoning needs. In experiments, SVE-Math-Qwen2.5-7B outperforms other 7B models by 15% on MathVerse and is compatible with GPT-4V on MathVista. Despite being trained on smaller datasets, SVE-Math-7B achieves competitive performance on GeoQA, rivaling models trained on significantly larger datasets. Our findings emphasize the importance of incorporating fine-grained visual understanding into MLLMs and provide a promising direction for future research.

Grounding 3D object affordance seeks to locate objects' ''action possibilities'' regions in the 3D space, which serves as a link between perception and operation for embodied agents. Existing studies primarily focus on connecting visual affordances with geometry structures, e.g. relying on annotations to declare interactive regions of interest on the object and establishing a mapping between the regions and affordances. However, the essence of learning object affordance is to understand how to use it, and the manner that detaches interactions is limited in generalization. Normally, humans possess the ability to perceive object affordances in the physical world through demonstration images or videos. Motivated by this, we introduce a novel task setting: grounding 3D object affordance from 2D interactions in images, which faces the challenge of anticipating affordance through interactions of different sources. To address this problem, we devise a novel Interaction-driven 3D Affordance Grounding Network (IAG), which aligns the region feature of objects from different sources and models the interactive contexts for 3D object affordance grounding. Besides, we collect a Point-Image Affordance Dataset (PIAD) to support the proposed task. Comprehensive experiments on PIAD demonstrate the reliability of the proposed task and the superiority of our method. The project is available at https://github.com/yyvhang/IAGNet.

A unique aspect of human visual understanding is the ability to flexibly interpret abstract concepts: acquiring lifted rules explaining what they symbolize, grounding them across familiar and unfamiliar contexts, and making predictions or reasoning about them. While off-the-shelf vision-language models excel at making literal interpretations of images (e.g., recognizing object categories such as tree branches), they still struggle to make sense of such visual abstractions (e.g., how an arrangement of tree branches may form the walls of a maze). To address this challenge, we introduce Deep Schema Grounding (DSG), a framework that leverages explicit structured representations of visual abstractions for grounding and reasoning. At the core of DSG are schemas--dependency graph descriptions of abstract concepts that decompose them into more primitive-level symbols. DSG uses large language models to extract schemas, then hierarchically grounds concrete to abstract components of the schema onto images with vision-language models. The grounded schema is used to augment visual abstraction understanding. We systematically evaluate DSG and different methods in reasoning on our new Visual Abstractions Dataset, which consists of diverse, real-world images of abstract concepts and corresponding question-answer pairs labeled by humans. We show that DSG significantly improves the abstract visual reasoning performance of vision-language models, and is a step toward human-aligned understanding of visual abstractions.

AI-driven geometric problem solving is a complex vision-language task that requires accurate diagram interpretation, mathematical reasoning, and robust cross-modal grounding. A foundational yet underexplored capability for this task is the ability to identify and interpret geometric elements based on natural language queries. To address this, we introduce the task of Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) for geometric problems, which evaluates whether models can localize points, shapes, and spatial relations in diagrams in response to textual prompts. We present GeoRef, a benchmark dataset constructed from existing geometric problem corpora, featuring diverse, high-quality annotations and queries. Due to the lack of annotated data for this task, we generate a large-scale synthetic training dataset using a structured geometric formal language, enabling broad coverage of geometric concepts and facilitating model adaptation. We explore two fine-tuning approaches: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Our results show that GRPO significantly outperforms SFT by better aligning model behavior with task-specific rewards. Furthermore, we propose a verify-and-regenerate mechanism that detects incorrect predictions and re-infers answers using contextual reasoning history, further boosting accuracy. Notably, even state-of-the-art Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle with this task, underscoring the necessity of explicitly evaluating and strengthening geometric grounding as a prerequisite for robust geometric problem solving. Moreover, models trained on GeoRef demonstrate measurable improvements on downstream geometric reasoning tasks, highlighting the broader value of REC as a foundation for multimodal mathematical understanding.

Visual Grounding (VG) tasks, such as referring expression detection and segmentation tasks are important for linking visual entities to context, especially in complex reasoning tasks that require detailed query interpretation. This paper explores VG beyond basic perception, highlighting challenges for methods that require reasoning like human cognition. Recent advances in large language methods (LLMs) and Vision-Language methods (VLMs) have improved abilities for visual comprehension, contextual understanding, and reasoning. These methods are mainly split into end-to-end and compositional methods, with the latter offering more flexibility. Compositional approaches that integrate LLMs and foundation models show promising performance but still struggle with complex reasoning with language-based logical representations. To address these limitations, we propose NAVER, a compositional visual grounding method that integrates explicit probabilistic logic reasoning within a finite-state automaton, equipped with a self-correcting mechanism. This design improves robustness and interpretability in inference through explicit logic reasoning. Our results show that NAVER achieves SoTA performance comparing to recent end-to-end and compositional baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/ControlNet/NAVER .

Existing RGB-based imitation learning approaches typically employ traditional vision encoders such as ResNet or ViT, which lack explicit 3D reasoning capabilities. Recent geometry-grounded vision models, such as VGGT~wang2025vggt, provide robust spatial understanding and are promising candidates to address this limitation. This work investigates the integration of geometry-aware visual representations into robotic manipulation. Our results suggest that incorporating the geometry-aware vision encoder into imitation learning frameworks, including ACT and DP, yields up to 6.5% improvement over standard vision encoders in success rate across single- and bi-manual manipulation tasks in both simulation and real-world settings. Despite these benefits, most geometry-grounded models require high computational cost, limiting their deployment in practical robotic systems. To address this challenge, we propose eVGGT, an efficient geometry-aware encoder distilled from VGGT. eVGGT is nearly 9 times faster and 5 times smaller than VGGT, while preserving strong 3D reasoning capabilities. Code and pretrained models will be released to facilitate further research in geometry-aware robotics.

Although great progress has been made in 3D visual grounding, current models still rely on explicit textual descriptions for grounding and lack the ability to reason human intentions from implicit instructions. We propose a new task called 3D reasoning grounding and introduce a new benchmark ScanReason which provides over 10K question-answer-location pairs from five reasoning types that require the synerization of reasoning and grounding. We further design our approach, ReGround3D, composed of the visual-centric reasoning module empowered by Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM) and the 3D grounding module to obtain accurate object locations by looking back to the enhanced geometry and fine-grained details from the 3D scenes. A chain-of-grounding mechanism is proposed to further boost the performance with interleaved reasoning and grounding steps during inference. Extensive experiments on the proposed benchmark validate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

Grounding natural language in physical 3D environments is essential for the advancement of embodied artificial intelligence. Current datasets and models for 3D visual grounding predominantly focus on identifying and localizing objects from static, object-centric descriptions. These approaches do not adequately address the dynamic and sequential nature of task-oriented grounding necessary for practical applications. In this work, we propose a new task: Task-oriented Sequential Grounding in 3D scenes, wherein an agent must follow detailed step-by-step instructions to complete daily activities by locating a sequence of target objects in indoor scenes. To facilitate this task, we introduce SG3D, a large-scale dataset containing 22,346 tasks with 112,236 steps across 4,895 real-world 3D scenes. The dataset is constructed using a combination of RGB-D scans from various 3D scene datasets and an automated task generation pipeline, followed by human verification for quality assurance. We adapted three state-of-the-art 3D visual grounding models to the sequential grounding task and evaluated their performance on SG3D. Our results reveal that while these models perform well on traditional benchmarks, they face significant challenges with task-oriented sequential grounding, underscoring the need for further research in this area.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive general capabilities across a wide range of multi-modal tasks. However, the reasoning processes of LVLMs often suffer from unreliable outputs and limited interpretability. To address this, grounded visual reasoning has emerged as a promising paradigm that enforces responses anchored on salient visual evidence regions. However, existing approaches typically rely on costly supervision such as bounding box annotations, chain-of-thought rationale or external tool calls, limiting their scalability. In this work, we propose Ground-R1, a reinforcement learning framework that enables grounded visual reasoning without requiring explicit evidence or rationale annotations. Ground-R1 consists of a grounding phase that generates evidence region rollouts based on format constraints, and an answering phase that produces responses guided by both answer correctness and format adherence rewards. Extensive experiments across multiple visual reasoning benchmarks manifest that Ground-R1 achieves superior performance and exhibits emergent cognitive behaviors such as uncertainty awareness, spatial perception, and iterative refinement, offering a scalable and interpretable alternative to existing approaches.

Visual Language Models (VLMs) have increasingly become the main paradigm for understanding indoor scenes, but they still struggle with metric and spatial reasoning. Current approaches rely on end-to-end video understanding or large-scale spatial question answering fine-tuning, inherently coupling perception and reasoning. In this paper, we investigate whether decoupling perception and reasoning leads to improved spatial reasoning. We propose an agentic framework for static 3D indoor scene reasoning that grounds an LLM in an explicit 3D scene graph (3DSG). Rather than ingesting videos directly, each scene is represented as a persistent 3DSG constructed by a dedicated perception module. To isolate reasoning performance, we instantiate the 3DSG from ground-truth annotations. The agent interacts with the scene exclusively through structured geometric tools that expose fundamental properties such as object dimensions, distances, poses, and spatial relationships. The results we obtain on the static split of VSI-Bench provide an upper bound under ideal perceptual conditions on the spatial reasoning performance, and we find that it is significantly higher than previous works, by up to 16\%, without task specific fine-tuning. Compared to base VLMs, our agentic variant achieves significantly better performance, with average improvements between 33\% to 50\%. These findings indicate that explicit geometric grounding substantially improves spatial reasoning performance, and suggest that structured representations offer a compelling alternative to purely end-to-end visual reasoning.

Visual Grounding is also known as Referring Expression Comprehension and Phrase Grounding. It involves localizing a natural number of specific regions within an image based on a given textual description. The objective of this task is to emulate the prevalent referential relationships in social conversations, equipping machines with human-like multimodal comprehension capabilities. Consequently, it has extensive applications in various domains. However, since 2021, visual grounding has witnessed significant advancements, with emerging new concepts such as grounded pre-training, grounding multimodal LLMs, generalized visual grounding, and giga-pixel grounding, which have brought numerous new challenges. In this survey, we initially examine the developmental history of visual grounding and provide an overview of essential background knowledge. We systematically track and summarize the advancements and meticulously organize the various settings in visual grounding, thereby establishing precise definitions of these settings to standardize future research and ensure a fair comparison. Additionally, we delve into several advanced topics and highlight numerous applications of visual grounding. Finally, we outline the challenges confronting visual grounding and propose valuable directions for future research, which may serve as inspiration for subsequent researchers. By extracting common technical details, this survey encompasses the representative works in each subtopic over the past decade. To the best, this paper presents the most comprehensive overview currently available in the field of grounding. This survey is designed to be suitable for both beginners and experienced researchers, serving as an invaluable resource for understanding key concepts and tracking the latest research developments. We keep tracing related works at https://github.com/linhuixiao/Awesome-Visual-Grounding.

We propose a unified framework that integrates object detection (OD) and visual grounding (VG) for remote sensing (RS) imagery. To support conventional OD and establish an intuitive prior for VG task, we fine-tune an open-set object detector using referring expression data, framing it as a partially supervised OD task. In the first stage, we construct a graph representation of each image, comprising object queries, class embeddings, and proposal locations. Then, our task-aware architecture processes this graph to perform the VG task. The model consists of: (i) a multi-branch network that integrates spatial, visual, and categorical features to generate task-aware proposals, and (ii) an object reasoning network that assigns probabilities across proposals, followed by a soft selection mechanism for final referring object localization. Our model demonstrates superior performance on the OPT-RSVG and DIOR-RSVG datasets, achieving significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods while retaining classical OD capabilities. The code will be available in our repository: https://github.com/rd20karim/MB-ORES.

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/

3D visual grounding is the task of localizing the object in a 3D scene which is referred by a description in natural language. With a wide range of applications ranging from autonomous indoor robotics to AR/VR, the task has recently risen in popularity. A common formulation to tackle 3D visual grounding is grounding-by-detection, where localization is done via bounding boxes. However, for real-life applications that require physical interactions, a bounding box insufficiently describes the geometry of an object. We therefore tackle the problem of dense 3D visual grounding, i.e. referral-based 3D instance segmentation. We propose a dense 3D grounding network ConcreteNet, featuring three novel stand-alone modules which aim to improve grounding performance for challenging repetitive instances, i.e. instances with distractors of the same semantic class. First, we introduce a bottom-up attentive fusion module that aims to disambiguate inter-instance relational cues, next we construct a contrastive training scheme to induce separation in the latent space, and finally we resolve view-dependent utterances via a learned global camera token. ConcreteNet ranks 1st on the challenging ScanRefer online benchmark by a considerable +9.43% accuracy at 50% IoU and has won the ICCV 3rd Workshop on Language for 3D Scenes "3D Object Localization" challenge.

We study the problem of jointly reasoning about language and vision through a navigation and spatial reasoning task. We introduce the Touchdown task and dataset, where an agent must first follow navigation instructions in a real-life visual urban environment, and then identify a location described in natural language to find a hidden object at the goal position. The data contains 9,326 examples of English instructions and spatial descriptions paired with demonstrations. Empirical analysis shows the data presents an open challenge to existing methods, and qualitative linguistic analysis shows that the data displays richer use of spatial reasoning compared to related resources.

Affordance grounding refers to the task of finding the area of an object with which one can interact. It is a fundamental but challenging task, as a successful solution requires the comprehensive understanding of a scene in multiple aspects including detection, localization, and recognition of objects with their parts, of geo-spatial configuration/layout of the scene, of 3D shapes and physics, as well as of the functionality and potential interaction of the objects and humans. Much of the knowledge is hidden and beyond the image content with the supervised labels from a limited training set. In this paper, we make an attempt to improve the generalization capability of the current affordance grounding by taking the advantage of the rich world, abstract, and human-object-interaction knowledge from pretrained large-scale vision language models. Under the AGD20K benchmark, our proposed model demonstrates a significant performance gain over the competing methods for in-the-wild object affordance grounding. We further demonstrate it can ground affordance for objects from random Internet images, even if both objects and actions are unseen during training. Project site: https://jasonqsy.github.io/AffordanceLLM/

3D visual grounding involves finding a target object in a 3D scene that corresponds to a given sentence query. Although many approaches have been proposed and achieved impressive performance, they all require dense object-sentence pair annotations in 3D point clouds, which are both time-consuming and expensive. To address the problem that fine-grained annotated data is difficult to obtain, we propose to leverage weakly supervised annotations to learn the 3D visual grounding model, i.e., only coarse scene-sentence correspondences are used to learn object-sentence links. To accomplish this, we design a novel semantic matching model that analyzes the semantic similarity between object proposals and sentences in a coarse-to-fine manner. Specifically, we first extract object proposals and coarsely select the top-K candidates based on feature and class similarity matrices. Next, we reconstruct the masked keywords of the sentence using each candidate one by one, and the reconstructed accuracy finely reflects the semantic similarity of each candidate to the query. Additionally, we distill the coarse-to-fine semantic matching knowledge into a typical two-stage 3D visual grounding model, which reduces inference costs and improves performance by taking full advantage of the well-studied structure of the existing architectures. We conduct extensive experiments on ScanRefer, Nr3D, and Sr3D, which demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Open-Vocabulary 3D object affordance grounding aims to anticipate ``action possibilities'' regions on 3D objects with arbitrary instructions, which is crucial for robots to generically perceive real scenarios and respond to operational changes. Existing methods focus on combining images or languages that depict interactions with 3D geometries to introduce external interaction priors. However, they are still vulnerable to a limited semantic space by failing to leverage implied invariant geometries and potential interaction intentions. Normally, humans address complex tasks through multi-step reasoning and respond to diverse situations by leveraging associative and analogical thinking. In light of this, we propose GREAT (GeometRy-intEntion collAboraTive inference) for Open-Vocabulary 3D Object Affordance Grounding, a novel framework that mines the object invariant geometry attributes and performs analogically reason in potential interaction scenarios to form affordance knowledge, fully combining the knowledge with both geometries and visual contents to ground 3D object affordance. Besides, we introduce the Point Image Affordance Dataset v2 (PIADv2), the largest 3D object affordance dataset at present to support the task. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of GREAT. The code and dataset are available at https://yawen-shao.github.io/GREAT/.

Visual grounding is a common vision task that involves grounding descriptive sentences to the corresponding regions of an image. Most existing methods use independent image-text encoding and apply complex hand-crafted modules or encoder-decoder architectures for modal interaction and query reasoning. However, their performance significantly drops when dealing with complex textual expressions. This is because the former paradigm only utilizes limited downstream data to fit the multi-modal feature fusion. Therefore, it is only effective when the textual expressions are relatively simple. In contrast, given the wide diversity of textual expressions and the uniqueness of downstream training data, the existing fusion module, which extracts multimodal content from a visual-linguistic context, has not been fully investigated. In this paper, we present a simple yet robust transformer-based framework, SimVG, for visual grounding. Specifically, we decouple visual-linguistic feature fusion from downstream tasks by leveraging existing multimodal pre-trained models and incorporating additional object tokens to facilitate deep integration of downstream and pre-training tasks. Furthermore, we design a dynamic weight-balance distillation method in the multi-branch synchronous learning process to enhance the representation capability of the simpler branch. This branch only consists of a lightweight MLP, which simplifies the structure and improves reasoning speed. Experiments on six widely used VG datasets, i.e., RefCOCO/+/g, ReferIt, Flickr30K, and GRefCOCO, demonstrate the superiority of SimVG. Finally, the proposed method not only achieves improvements in efficiency and convergence speed but also attains new state-of-the-art performance on these benchmarks. Codes and models will be available at https://github.com/Dmmm1997/SimVG.

Language grounding to vision is an active field of research aiming to enrich text-based representations of word meanings by leveraging perceptual knowledge from vision. Despite many attempts at language grounding, it is still unclear how to effectively inject visual knowledge into the word embeddings of a language in such a way that a proper balance of textual and visual knowledge is maintained. Some common concerns are the following. Is visual grounding beneficial for abstract words or is its contribution only limited to concrete words? What is the optimal way of bridging the gap between text and vision? How much do we gain by visually grounding textual embeddings? The present study addresses these questions by proposing a simple yet very effective grounding approach for pre-trained word embeddings. Our model aligns textual embeddings with vision while largely preserving the distributional statistics that characterize word use in text corpora. By applying a learned alignment, we are able to generate visually grounded embeddings for unseen words, including abstract words. A series of evaluations on word similarity benchmarks shows that visual grounding is beneficial not only for concrete words, but also for abstract words. We also show that our method for visual grounding offers advantages for contextualized embeddings, but only when these are trained on corpora of relatively modest size. Code and grounded embeddings for English are available at https://github.com/Hazel1994/Visually_Grounded_Word_Embeddings_2.

3D visual grounding (3DVG) is a critical task in scene understanding that aims to identify objects in 3D scenes based on text descriptions. However, existing methods rely on separately pre-trained vision and text encoders, resulting in a significant gap between the two modalities in terms of spatial geometry and semantic categories. This discrepancy often causes errors in object positioning and classification. The paper proposes UniSpace-3D, which innovatively introduces a unified representation space for 3DVG, effectively bridging the gap between visual and textual features. Specifically, UniSpace-3D incorporates three innovative designs: i) a unified representation encoder that leverages the pre-trained CLIP model to map visual and textual features into a unified representation space, effectively bridging the gap between the two modalities; ii) a multi-modal contrastive learning module that further reduces the modality gap; iii) a language-guided query selection module that utilizes the positional and semantic information to identify object candidate points aligned with textual descriptions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniSpace-3D outperforms baseline models by at least 2.24% on the ScanRefer and Nr3D/Sr3D datasets. The code will be made available upon acceptance of the paper.

Recent studies have demonstrated the efficacy of using Reinforcement Learning (RL) in building reasoning models that articulate chains of thoughts prior to producing final answers. However, despite ongoing advances that aim at enabling reasoning for vision-language tasks, existing open-source visual reasoning models typically generate reasoning content with pure natural language, lacking explicit integration of visual information. This limits their ability to produce clearly articulated and visually grounded reasoning chains. To this end, we propose Grounded Reasoning with Images and Texts (GRIT), a novel method for training MLLMs to think with images. GRIT introduces a grounded reasoning paradigm, in which models generate reasoning chains that interleave natural language and explicit bounding box coordinates. These coordinates point to regions of the input image that the model consults during its reasoning process. Additionally, GRIT is equipped with a reinforcement learning approach, GRPO-GR, built upon the GRPO algorithm. GRPO-GR employs robust rewards focused on the final answer accuracy and format of the grounded reasoning output, which eliminates the need for data with reasoning chain annotations or explicit bounding box labels. As a result, GRIT achieves exceptional data efficiency, requiring as few as 20 image-question-answer triplets from existing datasets. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that GRIT effectively trains MLLMs to produce coherent and visually grounded reasoning chains, showing a successful unification of reasoning and grounding abilities.

Visual Grounding (VG) methods in Visual Question Answering (VQA) attempt to improve VQA performance by strengthening a model's reliance on question-relevant visual information. The presence of such relevant information in the visual input is typically assumed in training and testing. This assumption, however, is inherently flawed when dealing with imperfect image representations common in large-scale VQA, where the information carried by visual features frequently deviates from expected ground-truth contents. As a result, training and testing of VG-methods is performed with largely inaccurate data, which obstructs proper assessment of their potential benefits. In this study, we demonstrate that current evaluation schemes for VG-methods are problematic due to the flawed assumption of availability of relevant visual information. Our experiments show that these methods can be much more effective when evaluation conditions are corrected. Code is provided on GitHub.

Diagrams serve as a fundamental form of visual language, representing complex concepts and their inter-relationships through structured symbols, shapes, and spatial arrangements. Unlike natural images, their inherently symbolic and abstract nature poses significant challenges for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, current benchmarks conflate perceptual and reasoning tasks, making it difficult to assess whether MLLMs genuinely understand mathematical diagrams beyond superficial pattern recognition. To address this gap, we introduce MATHGLANCE, a benchmark specifically designed to isolate and evaluate mathematical perception in MLLMs. MATHGLANCE comprises 1.2K images and 1.6K carefully curated questions spanning four perception tasks: shape classification, object counting, relationship identification, and object grounding, covering diverse domains including plane geometry, solid geometry, and graphical representations. Our evaluation of MLLMs reveals that their ability to understand diagrams is notably limited, particularly in fine-grained grounding tasks. In response, we construct GeoPeP, a perception-oriented dataset of 200K structured geometry image-text pairs explicitly annotated with geometric primitives and precise spatial relationships. Training MLLM on GeoPeP leads to significant gains in perceptual accuracy, which in turn substantially improves mathematical reasoning. Our benchmark and dataset establish critical standards for evaluating and advancing multimodal mathematical understanding, providing valuable resources and insights to foster future MLLM research.

Large language models have shown impressive results for multi-hop mathematical reasoning when the input question is only textual. Many mathematical reasoning problems, however, contain both text and image. With the ever-increasing adoption of vision language models (VLMs), understanding their reasoning abilities for such problems is crucial. In this paper, we evaluate the reasoning capabilities of VLMs along various axes through the lens of geometry problems. We procedurally create a synthetic dataset of geometry questions with controllable difficulty levels along multiple axes, thus enabling a systematic evaluation. The empirical results obtained using our benchmark for state-of-the-art VLMs indicate that these models are not as capable in subjects like geometry (and, by generalization, other topics requiring similar reasoning) as suggested by previous benchmarks. This is made especially clear by the construction of our benchmark at various depth levels, since solving higher-depth problems requires long chains of reasoning rather than additional memorized knowledge. We release the dataset for further research in this area.

3D visual grounding aims to locate objects based on natural language descriptions in 3D scenes. Existing methods rely on a pre-defined Object Lookup Table (OLT) to query Visual Language Models (VLMs) for reasoning about object locations, which limits the applications in scenarios with undefined or unforeseen targets. To address this problem, we present OpenGround, a novel zero-shot framework for open-world 3D visual grounding. Central to OpenGround is the Active Cognition-based Reasoning (ACR) module, which is designed to overcome the fundamental limitation of pre-defined OLTs by progressively augmenting the cognitive scope of VLMs. The ACR module performs human-like perception of the target via a cognitive task chain and actively reasons about contextually relevant objects, thereby extending VLM cognition through a dynamically updated OLT. This allows OpenGround to function with both pre-defined and open-world categories. We also propose a new dataset named OpenTarget, which contains over 7000 object-description pairs to evaluate our method in open-world scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OpenGround achieves competitive performance on Nr3D, state-of-the-art on ScanRefer, and delivers a substantial 17.6% improvement on OpenTarget. Project Page at https://why-102.github.io/openground.io/.

Visual grounding is an essential tool that links user-provided text queries with query-specific regions within an image. Despite advancements in visual grounding models, their ability to comprehend complex queries remains limited. To overcome this limitation, we introduce LLM-Optic, an innovative method that utilizes Large Language Models (LLMs) as an optical lens to enhance existing visual grounding models in comprehending complex text queries involving intricate text structures, multiple objects, or object spatial relationships, situations that current models struggle with. LLM-Optic first employs an LLM as a Text Grounder to interpret complex text queries and accurately identify objects the user intends to locate. Then a pre-trained visual grounding model is used to generate candidate bounding boxes given the refined query by the Text Grounder. After that, LLM-Optic annotates the candidate bounding boxes with numerical marks to establish a connection between text and specific image regions, thereby linking two distinct modalities. Finally, it employs a Large Multimodal Model (LMM) as a Visual Grounder to select the marked candidate objects that best correspond to the original text query. Through LLM-Optic, we have achieved universal visual grounding, which allows for the detection of arbitrary objects specified by arbitrary human language input. Importantly, our method achieves this enhancement without requiring additional training or fine-tuning. Extensive experiments across various challenging benchmarks demonstrate that LLM-Optic achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot visual grounding capabilities. Project Page: https://haoyu-zhao.github.io/LLM-Optic.github.io/.

This paper presents GPSM4K, a comprehensive geometry multimodal dataset tailored to augment the problem-solving capabilities of Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs). GPSM4K encompasses 2157 multimodal question-answer pairs manually extracted from mathematics textbooks spanning grades 7-12 and is further augmented to 5340 problems, consisting of both numerical and theorem-proving questions. In contrast to PGPS9k, Geometry3K, and Geo170K which feature only objective-type questions, GPSM4K offers detailed step-by-step solutions in a consistent format, facilitating a comprehensive evaluation of problem-solving approaches. This dataset serves as an excellent benchmark for assessing the geometric reasoning capabilities of LVLMs. Evaluation of our test set shows that there is scope for improvement needed in open-source language models in geometry problem-solving. Finetuning on our training set increases the geometry problem-solving capabilities of models. Further, We also evaluate the effectiveness of techniques such as image captioning and Retrieval Augmentation generation (RAG) on model performance. We leveraged LLM to automate the task of final answer evaluation by providing ground truth and predicted solutions. This research will help to assess and improve the geometric reasoning capabilities of LVLMs.

Visual grounding, i.e., localizing objects in images according to natural language queries, is an important topic in visual language understanding. The most effective approaches for this task are based on deep learning, which generally require expensive manually labeled image-query or patch-query pairs. To eliminate the heavy dependence on human annotations, we present a novel method, named Pseudo-Q, to automatically generate pseudo language queries for supervised training. Our method leverages an off-the-shelf object detector to identify visual objects from unlabeled images, and then language queries for these objects are obtained in an unsupervised fashion with a pseudo-query generation module. Then, we design a task-related query prompt module to specifically tailor generated pseudo language queries for visual grounding tasks. Further, in order to fully capture the contextual relationships between images and language queries, we develop a visual-language model equipped with multi-level cross-modality attention mechanism. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method has two notable benefits: (1) it can reduce human annotation costs significantly, e.g., 31% on RefCOCO without degrading original model's performance under the fully supervised setting, and (2) without bells and whistles, it achieves superior or comparable performance compared to state-of-the-art weakly-supervised visual grounding methods on all the five datasets we have experimented. Code is available at https://github.com/LeapLabTHU/Pseudo-Q.

In this paper, we claim that 3D visual grounding is the cornerstone of spatial reasoning and introduce the Grounded-Spatial Reasoner (GS-Reasoner) to explore the effective spatial representations that bridge the gap between them. Existing 3D LLMs suffer from the absence of a unified 3D representation capable of jointly capturing semantic and geometric information. This deficiency is manifested either in poor performance on grounding or in an excessive reliance on external modules, ultimately hindering the seamless integration of grounding and spatial reasoning. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective dual-path pooling mechanism that tightly aligns geometric features with both semantic and positional cues, constructing a unified image patch-based 3D representation that encapsulates all essential information without increasing the number of input tokens. Leveraging this holistic representation, GS-Reasoner is the first 3D LLM that achieves autoregressive grounding entirely without external modules while delivering performance comparable to state-of-the-art models, establishing a unified and self-contained framework for 3D spatial reasoning. To further bridge grounding and spatial reasoning, we introduce the Grounded Chain-of-Thought (GCoT) dataset. This dataset is meticulously curated to include both 3D bounding box annotations for objects referenced in reasoning questions and step-by-step reasoning paths that integrate grounding as a core component of the problem-solving process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GS-Reasoner achieves impressive results on 3D visual grounding, which in turn significantly enhances its spatial reasoning capabilities, leading to state-of-the-art performance.

We introduce the task of localizing a flexible number of objects in real-world 3D scenes using natural language descriptions. Existing 3D visual grounding tasks focus on localizing a unique object given a text description. However, such a strict setting is unnatural as localizing potentially multiple objects is a common need in real-world scenarios and robotic tasks (e.g., visual navigation and object rearrangement). To address this setting we propose Multi3DRefer, generalizing the ScanRefer dataset and task. Our dataset contains 61926 descriptions of 11609 objects, where zero, single or multiple target objects are referenced by each description. We also introduce a new evaluation metric and benchmark methods from prior work to enable further investigation of multi-modal 3D scene understanding. Furthermore, we develop a better baseline leveraging 2D features from CLIP by rendering object proposals online with contrastive learning, which outperforms the state of the art on the ScanRefer benchmark.

Recent advancements in reinforcement learning (RL) have enhanced the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), yet the impact on multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) is limited. Particularly in vision-intensive tasks like geometric reasoning, MLLMs hallucinate frequently, leading to inaccurate reasoning. We attribute this to the perceptual bottleneck in MLLMs, which caps the benefits of reasoning training. To quantify this, we design a Geo-Perception Question-Answering (GeoPQA) benchmark, targeting basic geometric concepts and spatial relationships. Experiments on GeoPQA reveal significant shortcomings of MLLMs in visual perception, which constrain RL reward signals for effective training. To address this bottleneck, we propose a two-stage RL training framework by first enhancing the visual perception of geometric structures, then fostering reasoning capabilities. Applied to Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct, our two-stage training improves geometric reasoning by 9.7% and geometric problem solving by 9.1%, compared to the direct reasoning training approach. Our method also generalizes to other vision-intensive domains like figure understanding, highlighting the importance of perceptual grounding in effective MLLM reasoning.

The extraction of modular object-centric representations for downstream tasks is an emerging area of research. Learning grounded representations of objects that are guaranteed to be stable and invariant promises robust performance across different tasks and environments. Slot Attention (SA) learns object-centric representations by assigning objects to slots, but presupposes a single distribution from which all slots are randomly initialised. This results in an inability to learn specialized slots which bind to specific object types and remain invariant to identity-preserving changes in object appearance. To address this, we present \textsc{Conditional Slot Attention} (CoSA) using a novel concept of Grounded Slot Dictionary (GSD) inspired by vector quantization. Our proposed GSD comprises (i) canonical object-level property vectors and (ii) parametric Gaussian distributions, which define a prior over the slots. We demonstrate the benefits of our method in multiple downstream tasks such as scene generation, composition, and task adaptation, whilst remaining competitive with SA in popular object discovery benchmarks.

We propose UniTAB that Unifies Text And Box outputs for grounded vision-language (VL) modeling. Grounded VL tasks such as grounded captioning require the model to generate a text description and align predicted words with object regions. To achieve this, models must generate desired text and box outputs together, and meanwhile indicate the alignments between words and boxes. In contrast to existing solutions that use multiple separate modules for different outputs, UniTAB represents both text and box outputs with a shared token sequence, and introduces a special <obj> token to naturally indicate word-box alignments in the sequence. UniTAB thus could provide a more comprehensive and interpretable image description, by freely grounding generated words to object regions. On grounded captioning, UniTAB presents a simpler solution with a single output head, and significantly outperforms state of the art in both grounding and captioning evaluations. On general VL tasks that have different desired output formats (i.e., text, box, or their combination), UniTAB with a single network achieves better or comparable performance than task-specific state of the art. Experiments cover 7 VL benchmarks, including grounded captioning, visual grounding, image captioning, and visual question answering. Furthermore, UniTAB's unified multi-task network and the task-agnostic output sequence design make the model parameter efficient and generalizable to new tasks.

Visual grounding aims to identify objects or regions in a scene based on natural language descriptions, essential for spatially aware perception in autonomous driving. However, existing visual grounding tasks typically depend on bounding boxes that often fail to capture fine-grained details. Not all voxels within a bounding box are occupied, resulting in inaccurate object representations. To address this, we introduce a benchmark for 3D occupancy grounding in challenging outdoor scenes. Built on the nuScenes dataset, it integrates natural language with voxel-level occupancy annotations, offering more precise object perception compared to the traditional grounding task. Moreover, we propose GroundingOcc, an end-to-end model designed for 3D occupancy grounding through multi-modal learning. It combines visual, textual, and point cloud features to predict object location and occupancy information from coarse to fine. Specifically, GroundingOcc comprises a multimodal encoder for feature extraction, an occupancy head for voxel-wise predictions, and a grounding head to refine localization. Additionally, a 2D grounding module and a depth estimation module enhance geometric understanding, thereby boosting model performance. Extensive experiments on the benchmark demonstrate that our method outperforms existing baselines on 3D occupancy grounding. The dataset is available at https://github.com/RONINGOD/GroundingOcc.

3D vision-language grounding, which focuses on aligning language with the 3D physical environment, stands as a cornerstone in the development of embodied agents. In comparison to recent advancements in the 2D domain, grounding language in 3D scenes faces several significant challenges: (i) the inherent complexity of 3D scenes due to the diverse object configurations, their rich attributes, and intricate relationships; (ii) the scarcity of paired 3D vision-language data to support grounded learning; and (iii) the absence of a unified learning framework to distill knowledge from grounded 3D data. In this work, we aim to address these three major challenges in 3D vision-language by examining the potential of systematically upscaling 3D vision-language learning in indoor environments. We introduce the first million-scale 3D vision-language dataset, SceneVerse, encompassing about 68K 3D indoor scenes and comprising 2.5M vision-language pairs derived from both human annotations and our scalable scene-graph-based generation approach. We demonstrate that this scaling allows for a unified pre-training framework, Grounded Pre-training for Scenes (GPS), for 3D vision-language learning. Through extensive experiments, we showcase the effectiveness of GPS by achieving state-of-the-art performance on all existing 3D visual grounding benchmarks. The vast potential of SceneVerse and GPS is unveiled through zero-shot transfer experiments in the challenging 3D vision-language tasks. Project website: https://scene-verse.github.io .

Visual grounding is the task of locating objects specified by natural language expressions. Existing methods extend generic object detection frameworks to tackle this task. They typically extract visual and textual features separately using independent visual and textual encoders, then fuse these features in a multi-modal decoder for final prediction. However, visual grounding presents unique challenges. It often involves locating objects with different text descriptions within the same image. Existing methods struggle with this task because the independent visual encoder produces identical visual features for the same image, limiting detection performance. Some recently approaches propose various language-guided visual encoders to address this issue, but they mostly rely solely on textual information and require sophisticated designs. In this paper, we introduce Multi-modal Conditional Adaptation (MMCA), which enables the visual encoder to adaptively update weights, directing its focus towards text-relevant regions. Specifically, we first integrate information from different modalities to obtain multi-modal embeddings. Then we utilize a set of weighting coefficients, which generated from the multimodal embeddings, to reorganize the weight update matrices and apply them to the visual encoder of the visual grounding model. Extensive experiments on four widely used datasets demonstrate that MMCA achieves significant improvements and state-of-the-art results. Ablation experiments further demonstrate the lightweight and efficiency of our method. Our source code is available at: https://github.com/Mr-Bigworth/MMCA.

Modern vision models have achieved remarkable success in benchmarks where local features provide critical information about the target. There is now a growing interest in solving tasks that require more global reasoning, where local features offer no significant information. These tasks are reminiscent of the connectivity tasks discussed by Minsky and Papert in 1969, which exposed the limitations of the perceptron model and contributed to the first AI winter. In this paper, we revisit such tasks by introducing four global visual benchmarks involving path findings and mazes. We show that: (1) although today's large vision models largely surpass the expressivity limitations of the early models, they still struggle with the learning efficiency; we put forward the "globality degree" notion to understand this limitation; (2) we then demonstrate that the picture changes and global reasoning becomes feasible with the introduction of "visual scratchpads"; similarly to the text scratchpads and chain-of-thoughts used in language models, visual scratchpads help break down global tasks into simpler ones; (3) we finally show that some scratchpads are better than others, in particular, "inductive scratchpads" that take steps relying on less information afford better out-of-distribution generalization and succeed for smaller model sizes.

The real world is messy and unstructured. Uncovering critical information often requires active, goal-driven exploration. It remains to be seen whether Vision-Language Models (VLMs), which recently emerged as a popular zero-shot tool in many difficult tasks, can operate effectively in such conditions. In this paper, we answer this question by introducing FlySearch, a 3D, outdoor, photorealistic environment for searching and navigating to objects in complex scenes. We define three sets of scenarios with varying difficulty and observe that state-of-the-art VLMs cannot reliably solve even the simplest exploration tasks, with the gap to human performance increasing as the tasks get harder. We identify a set of central causes, ranging from vision hallucination, through context misunderstanding, to task planning failures, and we show that some of them can be addressed by finetuning. We publicly release the benchmark, scenarios, and the underlying codebase.

We introduce the novel task of Language-Guided Object Placement in Real 3D Scenes. Our model is given a 3D scene's point cloud, a 3D asset, and a textual prompt broadly describing where the 3D asset should be placed. The task here is to find a valid placement for the 3D asset that respects the prompt. Compared with other language-guided localization tasks in 3D scenes such as grounding, this task has specific challenges: it is ambiguous because it has multiple valid solutions, and it requires reasoning about 3D geometric relationships and free space. We inaugurate this task by proposing a new benchmark and evaluation protocol. We also introduce a new dataset for training 3D LLMs on this task, as well as the first method to serve as a non-trivial baseline. We believe that this challenging task and our new benchmark could become part of the suite of benchmarks used to evaluate and compare generalist 3D LLM models.

Visual grounding, the task of linking textual queries to specific regions within images, plays a pivotal role in vision-language integration. Existing methods typically rely on extensive task-specific annotations and fine-tuning, limiting their ability to generalize effectively to novel or out-of-distribution scenarios. To address these limitations, we introduce GroundingAgent, a novel agentic visual grounding framework that operates without any task-specific fine-tuning. GroundingAgent employs a structured, iterative reasoning mechanism that integrates pretrained open-vocabulary object detectors, multimodal large language models (MLLMs), and large language models (LLMs) to progressively refine candidate regions through joint semantic and spatial analyses. Remarkably, GroundingAgent achieves an average zero-shot grounding accuracy of 65.1 % on widely-used benchmarks (RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, RefCOCOg), entirely without fine-tuning. Furthermore, by substituting MLLM-generated captions with the original query texts, the accuracy at the selection stage alone reaches approximately 90 %, closely matching supervised performance and underscoring the critical role of LLM reasoning capabilities. GroundingAgent also offers strong interpretability, transparently illustrating each reasoning step and providing clear insights into its decision-making process.

3D Visual Grounding (3DVG) seeks to locate target objects in 3D scenes using natural language descriptions, enabling downstream applications such as augmented reality and robotics. Existing approaches typically rely on labeled 3D data and predefined categories, limiting scalability to open-world settings. We present SeeGround, a zero-shot 3DVG framework that leverages 2D Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to bypass the need for 3D-specific training. To bridge the modality gap, we introduce a hybrid input format that pairs query-aligned rendered views with spatially enriched textual descriptions. Our framework incorporates two core components: a Perspective Adaptation Module that dynamically selects optimal viewpoints based on the query, and a Fusion Alignment Module that integrates visual and spatial signals to enhance localization precision. Extensive evaluations on ScanRefer and Nr3D confirm that SeeGround achieves substantial improvements over existing zero-shot baselines -- outperforming them by 7.7% and 7.1%, respectively -- and even rivals fully supervised alternatives, demonstrating strong generalization under challenging conditions.

We present a scalable 3D reconstruction model that addresses a critical limitation in offline feed-forward methods: their computational and memory requirements grow quadratically w.r.t. the number of input images. Our approach is built on the key insight that this bottleneck stems from the varying-length Key-Value (KV) space representation of scene geometry, which we distill into a fixed-size Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) via test-time training. VGG-T^3 (Visual Geometry Grounded Test Time Training) scales linearly w.r.t. the number of input views, similar to online models, and reconstructs a 1k image collection in just 54 seconds, achieving a 11.6times speed-up over baselines that rely on softmax attention. Since our method retains global scene aggregation capability, our point map reconstruction error outperforming other linear-time methods by large margins. Finally, we demonstrate visual localization capabilities of our model by querying the scene representation with unseen images.

Empowered by large-scale training, vision-language models (VLMs) achieve strong image and video understanding, yet their ability to perform spatial reasoning in both static scenes and dynamic videos remains limited. Recent advances try to handle this limitation by injecting geometry tokens from pretrained 3D foundation models into VLMs. Nevertheless, we observe that naive token fusion followed by standard fine-tuning in this line of work often leaves such geometric cues underutilized for spatial reasoning, as VLMs tend to rely heavily on 2D visual cues. In this paper, we propose GeoSR, a framework designed to make geometry matter by encouraging VLMs to actively reason with geometry tokens. GeoSR introduces two key components: (1) Geometry-Unleashing Masking, which strategically masks portions of 2D vision tokens during training to weaken non-geometric shortcuts and force the model to consult geometry tokens for spatial reasoning; and (2) Geometry-Guided Fusion, a gated routing mechanism that adaptively amplifies geometry token contributions in regions where geometric evidence is critical. Together, these designs unleash the potential of geometry tokens for spatial reasoning tasks. Extensive experiments on both static and dynamic spatial reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that GeoSR consistently outperforms prior methods and establishes new state-of-the-art performance by effectively leveraging geometric information. The project page is available at https://suhzhang.github.io/GeoSR/.

We present v1, a lightweight extension to Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) that enables selective visual revisitation during inference. While current MLLMs typically consume visual input only once and reason purely over internal memory, v1 introduces a simple point-and-copy mechanism that allows the model to dynamically retrieve relevant image regions throughout the reasoning process. This mechanism augments existing architectures with minimal modifications, enabling contextual access to visual tokens based on the model's evolving hypotheses. To train this capability, we construct v1g, a dataset of 300K multimodal reasoning traces with interleaved visual grounding annotations. Experiments on three multimodal mathematical reasoning benchmarks -- MathVista, MathVision, and MathVerse -- demonstrate that v1 consistently improves performance over comparable baselines, particularly on tasks requiring fine-grained visual reference and multi-step reasoning. Our results suggest that dynamic visual access is a promising direction for enhancing grounded multimodal reasoning. Code, models, and data will be released to support future research.

We investigate the ability of Vision Language Models (VLMs) to perform visual perspective taking using a novel set of visual tasks inspired by established human tests. Our approach leverages carefully controlled scenes, in which a single humanoid minifigure is paired with a single object. By systematically varying spatial configurations - such as object position relative to the humanoid minifigure and the humanoid minifigure's orientation - and using both bird's-eye and surface-level views, we created 144 unique visual tasks. Each visual task is paired with a series of 7 diagnostic questions designed to assess three levels of visual cognition: scene understanding, spatial reasoning, and visual perspective taking. Our evaluation of several state-of-the-art models, including GPT-4-Turbo, GPT-4o, Llama-3.2-11B-Vision-Instruct, and variants of Claude Sonnet, reveals that while they excel in scene understanding, the performance declines significantly on spatial reasoning and further deteriorates on perspective-taking. Our analysis suggests a gap between surface-level object recognition and the deeper spatial and perspective reasoning required for complex visual tasks, pointing to the need for integrating explicit geometric representations and tailored training protocols in future VLM development.

Facilitating an entity's interaction with objects requires accurately identifying parts that afford specific actions. Weakly supervised affordance grounding (WSAG) seeks to imitate human learning from third-person demonstrations, where humans intuitively grasp functional parts without needing pixel-level annotations. To achieve this, grounding is typically learned using a shared classifier across images from different perspectives, along with distillation strategies incorporating part discovery process. However, since affordance-relevant parts are not always easily distinguishable, models primarily rely on classification, often focusing on common class-specific patterns that are unrelated to affordance. To address this limitation, we move beyond isolated part-level learning by introducing selective prototypical and pixel contrastive objectives that adaptively learn affordance-relevant cues at both the part and object levels, depending on the granularity of the available information. Initially, we find the action-associated objects in both egocentric (object-focused) and exocentric (third-person example) images by leveraging CLIP. Then, by cross-referencing the discovered objects of complementary views, we excavate the precise part-level affordance clues in each perspective. By consistently learning to distinguish affordance-relevant regions from affordance-irrelevant background context, our approach effectively shifts activation from irrelevant areas toward meaningful affordance cues. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Codes are available at github.com/hynnsk/SelectiveCL.

Unified visual grounding pursues a simple and generic technical route to leverage multi-task data with less task-specific design. The most advanced methods typically present boxes and masks as vertex sequences to model referring detection and segmentation as an autoregressive sequential vertex generation paradigm. However, generating high-dimensional vertex sequences sequentially is error-prone because the upstream of the sequence remains static and cannot be refined based on downstream vertex information, even if there is a significant location gap. Besides, with limited vertexes, the inferior fitting of objects with complex contours restricts the performance upper bound. To deal with this dilemma, we propose a parallel vertex generation paradigm for superior high-dimension scalability with a diffusion model by simply modifying the noise dimension. An intuitive materialization of our paradigm is Parallel Vertex Diffusion (PVD) to directly set vertex coordinates as the generation target and use a diffusion model to train and infer. We claim that it has two flaws: (1) unnormalized coordinate caused a high variance of loss value; (2) the original training objective of PVD only considers point consistency but ignores geometry consistency. To solve the first flaw, Center Anchor Mechanism (CAM) is designed to convert coordinates as normalized offset values to stabilize the training loss value. For the second flaw, Angle summation loss (ASL) is designed to constrain the geometry difference of prediction and ground truth vertexes for geometry-level consistency. Empirical results show that our PVD achieves state-of-the-art in both referring detection and segmentation, and our paradigm is more scalable and efficient than sequential vertex generation with high-dimension data.

Recent interest in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) for practical applications is moderated by the significant challenge of hallucination or the inconsistency between the factual information and the generated text. In this paper, we first perform an in-depth analysis of hallucinations and discover several novel insights about how and when LVLMs hallucinate. From our analysis, we show that: (1) The community's efforts have been primarily targeted towards reducing hallucinations related to visual recognition (VR) prompts (e.g., prompts that only require describing the image), thereby ignoring hallucinations for cognitive prompts (e.g., prompts that require additional skills like reasoning on contents of the image). (2) LVLMs lack visual perception, i.e., they can see but not necessarily understand or perceive the input image. We analyze responses to cognitive prompts and show that LVLMs hallucinate due to a perception gap: although LVLMs accurately recognize visual elements in the input image and possess sufficient cognitive skills, they struggle to respond accurately and hallucinate. To overcome this shortcoming, we propose Visual Description Grounded Decoding (VDGD), a simple, robust, and training-free method for alleviating hallucinations. Specifically, we first describe the image and add it as a prefix to the instruction. Next, during auto-regressive decoding, we sample from the plausible candidates according to their KL-Divergence (KLD) to the description, where lower KLD is given higher preference. Experimental results on several benchmarks and LVLMs show that VDGD improves significantly over other baselines in reducing hallucinations. We also propose VaLLu, a benchmark for the comprehensive evaluation of the cognitive capabilities of LVLMs.

Geometry problem-solving (GPS), a challenging task requiring both visual comprehension and symbolic reasoning, effectively measures the reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Humans exhibit strong reasoning ability in this task through accurate identification and adaptive application of geometric principles within visual contexts. However, existing benchmarks fail to jointly assess both dimensions of the human-like geometric reasoning mechanism in MLLMs, remaining a critical gap in assessing their ability to tackle GPS. To this end, we introduce GeoSense, the first comprehensive bilingual benchmark designed to systematically evaluate the geometric reasoning abilities of MLLMs through the lens of geometric principles. GeoSense features a five-level hierarchical framework of geometric principles spanning plane and solid geometry, an intricately annotated dataset of 1,789 problems, and an innovative evaluation strategy. Through extensive experiments on GeoSense with various open-source and closed-source MLLMs, we observe that Gemini-2.0-pro-flash performs best, achieving an overall score of 65.3. Our in-depth analysis reveals that the identification and application of geometric principles remain a bottleneck for leading MLLMs, jointly hindering their reasoning abilities. These findings underscore GeoSense's potential to guide future advancements in MLLMs' geometric reasoning capabilities, paving the way for more robust and human-like reasoning in artificial intelligence.

3D Visual Grounding (3DVG) aims to locate objects in 3D scenes based on textual descriptions, which is essential for applications like augmented reality and robotics. Traditional 3DVG approaches rely on annotated 3D datasets and predefined object categories, limiting scalability and adaptability. To overcome these limitations, we introduce SeeGround, a zero-shot 3DVG framework leveraging 2D Vision-Language Models (VLMs) trained on large-scale 2D data. We propose to represent 3D scenes as a hybrid of query-aligned rendered images and spatially enriched text descriptions, bridging the gap between 3D data and 2D-VLMs input formats. We propose two modules: the Perspective Adaptation Module, which dynamically selects viewpoints for query-relevant image rendering, and the Fusion Alignment Module, which integrates 2D images with 3D spatial descriptions to enhance object localization. Extensive experiments on ScanRefer and Nr3D demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing zero-shot methods by large margins. Notably, we exceed weakly supervised methods and rival some fully supervised ones, outperforming previous SOTA by 7.7% on ScanRefer and 7.1% on Nr3D, showcasing its effectiveness.

Most existing 3D referring expression segmentation (3DRES) methods rely on dense, high-quality point clouds, while real-world agents such as robots and mobile phones operate with only a few sparse RGB views and strict latency constraints. We introduce Multi-view 3D Referring Expression Segmentation (MV-3DRES), where the model must recover scene structure and segment the referred object directly from sparse multi-view images. Traditional two-stage pipelines, which first reconstruct a point cloud and then perform segmentation, often yield low-quality geometry, produce coarse or degraded target regions, and run slowly. We propose the Multimodal Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (MVGGT), an efficient end-to-end framework that integrates language information into sparse-view geometric reasoning through a dual-branch design. Training in this setting exposes a critical optimization barrier, termed Foreground Gradient Dilution (FGD), where sparse 3D signals lead to weak supervision. To resolve this, we introduce Per-view No-target Suppression Optimization (PVSO), which provides stronger and more balanced gradients across views, enabling stable and efficient learning. To support consistent evaluation, we build MVRefer, a benchmark that defines standardized settings and metrics for MV-3DRES. Experiments show that MVGGT establishes the first strong baseline and achieves both high accuracy and fast inference, outperforming existing alternatives. Code and models are publicly available at https://mvggt.github.io.

Ensuring accessible pedestrian navigation requires reasoning about both semantic and spatial aspects of complex urban scenes, a challenge that existing Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) struggle to meet. Although these models can describe visual content, their lack of explicit grounding leads to object hallucinations and unreliable depth reasoning, limiting their usefulness for accessibility guidance. We introduce WalkGPT, a pixel-grounded LVLM for the new task of Grounded Navigation Guide, unifying language reasoning and segmentation within a single architecture for depth-aware accessibility guidance. Given a pedestrian-view image and a navigation query, WalkGPT generates a conversational response with segmentation masks that delineate accessible and harmful features, along with relative depth estimation. The model incorporates a Multi-Scale Query Projector (MSQP) that shapes the final image tokens by aggregating them along text tokens across spatial hierarchies, and a Calibrated Text Projector (CTP), guided by a proposed Region Alignment Loss, that maps language embeddings into segmentation-aware representations. These components enable fine-grained grounding and depth inference without user-provided cues or anchor points, allowing the model to generate complete and realistic navigation guidance. We also introduce PAVE, a large-scale benchmark of 41k pedestrian-view images paired with accessibility-aware questions and depth-grounded answers. Experiments show that WalkGPT achieves strong grounded reasoning and segmentation performance. The source code and dataset are available on the https://sites.google.com/view/walkgpt-26/home{project website}.

We study visually grounded VideoQA in response to the emerging trends of utilizing pretraining techniques for video-language understanding. Specifically, by forcing vision-language models (VLMs) to answer questions and simultaneously provide visual evidence, we seek to ascertain the extent to which the predictions of such techniques are genuinely anchored in relevant video content, versus spurious correlations from language or irrelevant visual context. Towards this, we construct NExT-GQA -- an extension of NExT-QA with 10.5K temporal grounding (or location) labels tied to the original QA pairs. With NExT-GQA, we scrutinize a series of state-of-the-art VLMs. Through post-hoc attention analysis, we find that these models are extremely weak in substantiating the answers despite their strong QA performance. This exposes the limitation of current VLMs in making reliable predictions. As a remedy, we further explore and propose a grounded-QA method via Gaussian mask optimization and cross-modal learning. Experiments with different backbones demonstrate that this grounding mechanism improves both grounding and QA. With these efforts, we aim to push towards trustworthy VLMs in VQA systems. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/doc-doc/NExT-GQA.

3D Visual Grounding (3DVG) aims at localizing 3D object based on textual descriptions. Conventional supervised methods for 3DVG often necessitate extensive annotations and a predefined vocabulary, which can be restrictive. To address this issue, we propose a novel visual programming approach for zero-shot open-vocabulary 3DVG, leveraging the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Our approach begins with a unique dialog-based method, engaging with LLMs to establish a foundational understanding of zero-shot 3DVG. Building on this, we design a visual program that consists of three types of modules, i.e., view-independent, view-dependent, and functional modules. These modules, specifically tailored for 3D scenarios, work collaboratively to perform complex reasoning and inference. Furthermore, we develop an innovative language-object correlation module to extend the scope of existing 3D object detectors into open-vocabulary scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our zero-shot approach can outperform some supervised baselines, marking a significant stride towards effective 3DVG.

Embodied scene understanding requires not only comprehending visual-spatial information that has been observed but also determining where to explore next in the 3D physical world. Existing 3D Vision-Language (3D-VL) models primarily focus on grounding objects in static observations from 3D reconstruction, such as meshes and point clouds, but lack the ability to actively perceive and explore their environment. To address this limitation, we introduce \textbf{M}ove \textbf{t}o \textbf{U}nderstand (\model), a unified framework that integrates active perception with \textbf{3D} vision-language learning, enabling embodied agents to effectively explore and understand their environment. This is achieved by three key innovations: 1) Online query-based representation learning, enabling direct spatial memory construction from RGB-D frames, eliminating the need for explicit 3D reconstruction. 2) A unified objective for grounding and exploring, which represents unexplored locations as frontier queries and jointly optimizes object grounding and frontier selection. 3) End-to-end trajectory learning that combines Vision-Language-Exploration pre-training over a million diverse trajectories collected from both simulated and real-world RGB-D sequences. Extensive evaluations across various embodied navigation and question-answering benchmarks show that MTU3D outperforms state-of-the-art reinforcement learning and modular navigation approaches by 14\%, 23\%, 9\%, and 2\% in success rate on HM3D-OVON, GOAT-Bench, SG3D, and A-EQA, respectively. \model's versatility enables navigation using diverse input modalities, including categories, language descriptions, and reference images. These findings highlight the importance of bridging visual grounding and exploration for embodied intelligence.

Generalization to unseen tasks is an important ability for few-shot learners to achieve better zero-/few-shot performance on diverse tasks. However, such generalization to vision-language tasks including grounding and generation tasks has been under-explored; existing few-shot VL models struggle to handle tasks that involve object grounding and multiple images such as visual commonsense reasoning or NLVR2. In this paper, we introduce GRILL, GRounded vIsion Language aLigning, a novel VL model that can be generalized to diverse tasks including visual question answering, captioning, and grounding tasks with no or very few training instances. Specifically, GRILL learns object grounding and localization by exploiting object-text alignments, which enables it to transfer to grounding tasks in a zero-/few-shot fashion. We evaluate our model on various zero-/few-shot VL tasks and show that it consistently surpasses the state-of-the-art few-shot methods.

We propose Perceptual Taxonomy, a structured process of scene understanding that first recognizes objects and their spatial configurations, then infers task-relevant properties such as material, affordance, function, and physical attributes to support goal-directed reasoning. While this form of reasoning is fundamental to human cognition, current vision-language benchmarks lack comprehensive evaluation of this ability and instead focus on surface-level recognition or image-text alignment. To address this gap, we introduce Perceptual Taxonomy, a benchmark for physically grounded visual reasoning. We annotate 3173 objects with four property families covering 84 fine-grained attributes. Using these annotations, we construct a multiple-choice question benchmark with 5802 images across both synthetic and real domains. The benchmark contains 28033 template-based questions spanning four types (object description, spatial reasoning, property matching, and taxonomy reasoning), along with 50 expert-crafted questions designed to evaluate models across the full spectrum of perceptual taxonomy reasoning. Experimental results show that leading vision-language models perform well on recognition tasks but degrade by 10 to 20 percent on property-driven questions, especially those requiring multi-step reasoning over structured attributes. These findings highlight a persistent gap in structured visual understanding and the limitations of current models that rely heavily on pattern matching. We also show that providing in-context reasoning examples from simulated scenes improves performance on real-world and expert-curated questions, demonstrating the effectiveness of perceptual-taxonomy-guided prompting.

Robots interacting with humans through natural language can unlock numerous applications such as Referring Grasp Synthesis (RGS). Given a text query, RGS determines a stable grasp pose to manipulate the referred object in the robot's workspace. RGS comprises two steps: visual grounding and grasp pose estimation. Recent studies leverage powerful Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for visually grounding free-flowing natural language in real-world robotic execution. However, comparisons in complex, cluttered environments with multiple instances of the same object are lacking. This paper introduces HiFi-CS, featuring hierarchical application of Featurewise Linear Modulation (FiLM) to fuse image and text embeddings, enhancing visual grounding for complex attribute rich text queries encountered in robotic grasping. Visual grounding associates an object in 2D/3D space with natural language input and is studied in two scenarios: Closed and Open Vocabulary. HiFi-CS features a lightweight decoder combined with a frozen VLM and outperforms competitive baselines in closed vocabulary settings while being 100x smaller in size. Our model can effectively guide open-set object detectors like GroundedSAM to enhance open-vocabulary performance. We validate our approach through real-world RGS experiments using a 7-DOF robotic arm, achieving 90.33\% visual grounding accuracy in 15 tabletop scenes. Our codebase is provided here: https://github.com/vineet2104/hifics

Visual grounding is a ubiquitous building block in many vision-language tasks and yet remains challenging due to large variations in visual and linguistic features of grounding entities, strong context effect and the resulting semantic ambiguities. Prior works typically focus on learning representations of individual phrases with limited context information. To address their limitations, this paper proposes a language-guided graph representation to capture the global context of grounding entities and their relations, and develop a cross-modal graph matching strategy for the multiple-phrase visual grounding task. In particular, we introduce a modular graph neural network to compute context-aware representations of phrases and object proposals respectively via message propagation, followed by a graph-based matching module to generate globally consistent localization of grounding phrases. We train the entire graph neural network jointly in a two-stage strategy and evaluate it on the Flickr30K Entities benchmark. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms the prior state of the arts by a sizable margin, evidencing the efficacy of our grounding framework. Code is available at "https://github.com/youngfly11/LCMCG-PyTorch".

We present NoReGeo, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate the intrinsic geometric understanding of large language models (LLMs) without relying on reasoning or algebraic computation. Unlike existing benchmarks that primarily assess models' proficiency in reasoning-based geometry-where solutions are derived using algebraic methods-NoReGeo focuses on evaluating whether LLMs can inherently encode spatial relationships and recognize geometric properties directly. Our benchmark comprises 2,500 trivial geometric problems spanning 25 categories, each carefully crafted to be solvable purely through native geometric understanding, assuming known object locations. We assess a range of state-of-the-art models on NoReGeo, including frontier models like GPT-4, observing that even the most advanced systems achieve an overall maximum of 65% accuracy in binary classification tasks. Further, our ablation experiments demonstrate that such geometric understanding does not emerge through fine-tuning alone, indicating that effective training for geometric comprehension requires a specialized approach from the outset. Our findings highlight a significant gap in current LLMs' ability to natively grasp geometric concepts, providing a foundation for future research toward models with true geometric cognition.

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong capabilities in broad knowledge representation, yet they are inherently deficient in pixel-level perceptual understanding. Although the Segment Anything Model (SAM) represents a significant advancement in visual-prompt-driven image segmentation, it exhibits notable limitations in multi-mask prediction and category-specific segmentation tasks, and it cannot integrate all segmentation tasks within a unified model architecture. To address these limitations, we present X-SAM, a streamlined Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) framework that extends the segmentation paradigm from segment anything to any segmentation. Specifically, we introduce a novel unified framework that enables more advanced pixel-level perceptual comprehension for MLLMs. Furthermore, we propose a new segmentation task, termed Visual GrounDed (VGD) segmentation, which segments all instance objects with interactive visual prompts and empowers MLLMs with visual grounded, pixel-wise interpretative capabilities. To enable effective training on diverse data sources, we present a unified training strategy that supports co-training across multiple datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that X-SAM achieves state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of image segmentation benchmarks, highlighting its efficiency for multimodal, pixel-level visual understanding. Code is available at https://github.com/wanghao9610/X-SAM.

Recent advances in large multimodal models (LMMs) have recognized fine-grained grounding as an imperative factor of visual understanding and dialogue. However, the benefits of such representation in LMMs are limited to the natural image domain, and these models perform poorly for remote sensing (RS). The distinct overhead viewpoint, scale variation, and presence of small objects in high-resolution RS imagery present a unique challenge in region-level comprehension. Moreover, the development of the grounding conversation capability of LMMs within RS is hindered by the lack of granular, RS domain-specific grounded data. Addressing these limitations, we propose GeoPixel - the first end-to-end high resolution RS-LMM that supports pixel-level grounding. This capability allows fine-grained visual perception by generating interleaved masks in conversation. GeoPixel supports up to 4K HD resolution in any aspect ratio, ideal for high-precision RS image analysis. To support the grounded conversation generation (GCG) in RS imagery, we curate a visually grounded dataset GeoPixelD through a semi-automated pipeline that utilizes set-of-marks prompting and spatial priors tailored for RS data to methodically control the data generation process. GeoPixel demonstrates superior performance in pixel-level comprehension, surpassing existing LMMs in both single-target and multi-target segmentation tasks. Our methodological ablation studies validate the effectiveness of each component in the overall architecture. Our code and data will be publicly released.

State-of-the-art visual grounding models can achieve high detection accuracy, but they are not designed to distinguish between all objects versus only certain objects of interest. In natural language, in order to specify a particular object or set of objects of interest, humans use determiners such as "my", "either" and "those". Determiners, as an important word class, are a type of schema in natural language about the reference or quantity of the noun. Existing grounded referencing datasets place much less emphasis on determiners, compared to other word classes such as nouns, verbs and adjectives. This makes it difficult to develop models that understand the full variety and complexity of object referencing. Thus, we have developed and released the DetermiNet dataset , which comprises 250,000 synthetically generated images and captions based on 25 determiners. The task is to predict bounding boxes to identify objects of interest, constrained by the semantics of the given determiner. We find that current state-of-the-art visual grounding models do not perform well on the dataset, highlighting the limitations of existing models on reference and quantification tasks.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) extend Large Language Models to the vision domain. Initial efforts towards LMMs used holistic images and text prompts to generate ungrounded textual responses. Very recently, region-level LMMs have been used to generate visually grounded responses. However, they are limited to only referring a single object category at a time, require users to specify the regions in inputs, or cannot offer dense pixel-wise object grounding. In this work, we present Grounding LMM (GLaMM), the first model that can generate natural language responses seamlessly intertwined with corresponding object segmentation masks. GLaMM not only grounds objects appearing in the conversations but is flexible enough to accept both textual and optional visual prompts (region of interest) as input. This empowers users to interact with the model at various levels of granularity, both in textual and visual domains. Due to the lack of standard benchmarks for the novel setting of generating visually grounded detailed conversations, we introduce a comprehensive evaluation protocol with our curated grounded conversations. Our proposed Grounded Conversation Generation (GCG) task requires densely grounded concepts in natural scenes at a large-scale. To this end, we propose a densely annotated Grounding-anything Dataset (GranD) using our proposed automated annotation pipeline that encompasses 7.5M unique concepts grounded in a total of 810M regions available with segmentation masks. Besides GCG, GLaMM also performs effectively on several downstream tasks e.g., referring expression segmentation, image and region-level captioning and vision-language conversations. Project Page: https://mbzuai-oryx.github.io/groundingLMM.

GUI grounding, the task of identifying a precise location on an interface image from a natural language query, plays a crucial role in enhancing the capabilities of Vision-Language Model (VLM) agents. While general VLMs, such as GPT-4V, demonstrate strong performance across various tasks, their proficiency in GUI grounding remains suboptimal. Recent studies have focused on fine-tuning these models specifically for one-shot GUI grounding, yielding significant improvements over baseline performance. We introduce a visual prompting framework called Iterative Narrowing (IN) to further enhance the performance of both general and fine-tuned models in GUI grounding. For evaluation, we tested our method on a comprehensive benchmark comprising different UI platforms.

The advent of Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) signals a paradigm shift in artificial intelligence, moving from passive perception to active, cross-modal generation. Despite their unprecedented ability to synthesize information, a critical gap persists in evaluation: existing benchmarks primarily assess discriminative understanding or unconstrained image generation separately, failing to measure the integrated cognitive process of generative reasoning. To bridge this gap, we propose that geometric construction provides an ideal testbed as it inherently demands a fusion of language comprehension and precise visual generation. We introduce GGBench, a benchmark designed specifically to evaluate geometric generative reasoning. It provides a comprehensive framework for systematically diagnosing a model's ability to not only understand and reason but to actively construct a solution, thereby setting a more rigorous standard for the next generation of intelligent systems. Project website: https://opendatalab-raiser.github.io/GGBench/.

We investigate whether video generative models can exhibit visuospatial intelligence, a capability central to human cognition, using only visual data. To this end, we present Video4Spatial, a framework showing that video diffusion models conditioned solely on video-based scene context can perform complex spatial tasks. We validate on two tasks: scene navigation - following camera-pose instructions while remaining consistent with 3D geometry of the scene, and object grounding - which requires semantic localization, instruction following, and planning. Both tasks use video-only inputs, without auxiliary modalities such as depth or poses. With simple yet effective design choices in the framework and data curation, Video4Spatial demonstrates strong spatial understanding from video context: it plans navigation and grounds target objects end-to-end, follows camera-pose instructions while maintaining spatial consistency, and generalizes to long contexts and out-of-domain environments. Taken together, these results advance video generative models toward general visuospatial reasoning.

Charts play an important role in visualization, reasoning, data analysis, and the exchange of ideas among humans. However, existing vision-language models (VLMs) still lack accurate perception of details and struggle to extract fine-grained structures from charts. Such limitations in chart grounding also hinder their ability to compare multiple charts and reason over them. In this paper, we introduce a novel "ChartAlign Benchmark (ChartAB)" to provide a comprehensive evaluation of VLMs in chart grounding tasks, i.e., extracting tabular data, localizing visualization elements, and recognizing various attributes from charts of diverse types and complexities. We design a JSON template to facilitate the calculation of evaluation metrics specifically tailored for each grounding task. By incorporating a novel two-stage inference workflow, the benchmark can further evaluate VLMs' capability to align and compare elements/attributes across two charts. Our analysis of evaluations on several recent VLMs reveals new insights into their perception biases, weaknesses, robustness, and hallucinations in chart understanding. These findings highlight the fine-grained discrepancies among VLMs in chart understanding tasks and point to specific skills that need to be strengthened in current models.

Spatial reasoning, the ability to ground language in 3D understanding, remains a persistent challenge for Vision-Language Models (VLMs). We identify two fundamental bottlenecks: inadequate 3D understanding capabilities stemming from 2D-centric pre-training, and reasoning failures induced by redundant 3D information. To address these, we first construct a Minimal Sufficient Set (MSS) of information before answering a given question: a compact selection of 3D perception results from expert models. We introduce MSSR (Minimal Sufficient Spatial Reasoner), a dual-agent framework that implements this principle. A Perception Agent programmatically queries 3D scenes using a versatile perception toolbox to extract sufficient information, including a novel SOG (Situated Orientation Grounding) module that robustly extracts language-grounded directions. A Reasoning Agent then iteratively refines this information to pursue minimality, pruning redundant details and requesting missing ones in a closed loop until the MSS is curated. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method, by explicitly pursuing both sufficiency and minimality, significantly improves accuracy and achieves state-of-the-art performance across two challenging benchmarks. Furthermore, our framework produces interpretable reasoning paths, offering a promising source of high-quality training data for future models. Source code is available at https://github.com/gyj155/mssr.

Unlike Object Detection, Visual Grounding task necessitates the detection of an object described by complex free-form language. To simultaneously model such complex semantic and visual representations, recent state-of-the-art studies adopt transformer-based models to fuse features from both modalities, further introducing various modules that modulate visual features to align with the language expressions and eliminate the irrelevant redundant information. However, their loss function, still adopting common Object Detection losses, solely governs the bounding box regression output, failing to fully optimize for the above objectives. To tackle this problem, in this paper, we first analyze the attention mechanisms of transformer-based models. Building upon this, we further propose a novel framework named Attention-Driven Constraint Balancing (AttBalance) to optimize the behavior of visual features within language-relevant regions. Extensive experimental results show that our method brings impressive improvements. Specifically, we achieve constant improvements over five different models evaluated on four different benchmarks. Moreover, we attain a new state-of-the-art performance by integrating our method into QRNet.

Multimodal foundation models, such as GPT-4o, have recently made remarkable progress, but it is not clear where exactly these models stand in terms of understanding vision. In this paper, we benchmark the performance of popular multimodal foundation models (GPT-4o, o4-mini, Gemini 1.5 Pro and Gemini 2.0 Flash, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Qwen2-VL, Llama 3.2) on standard computer vision tasks (semantic segmentation, object detection, image classification, depth and surface normal prediction) using established datasets (e.g., COCO, ImageNet and its variants, etc). The main challenges to performing this are: 1) most models are trained to output text and cannot natively express versatile domains, such as segments or 3D geometry, and 2) many leading models are proprietary and accessible only at an API level, i.e., there is no weight access to adapt them. We address these challenges by translating standard vision tasks into equivalent text-promptable and API-compatible tasks via prompt chaining to create a standardized benchmarking framework. We observe that 1) the models are not close to the state-of-the-art specialist models at any task. However, 2) they are respectable generalists; this is remarkable as they are presumably trained on primarily image-text-based tasks. 3) They perform semantic tasks notably better than geometric ones. 4) While the prompt-chaining techniques affect performance, better models exhibit less sensitivity to prompt variations. 5) GPT-4o performs the best among non-reasoning models, securing the top position in 4 out of 6 tasks, 6) reasoning models, e.g. o3, show improvements in geometric tasks, and 7) a preliminary analysis of models with native image generation, like the latest GPT-4o, shows they exhibit quirks like hallucinations and spatial misalignments.

Visual grounding, localizing objects from natural language descriptions, represents a critical bridge between language and vision understanding. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) achieve impressive scores on existing benchmarks, a fundamental question remains: can MLLMs truly ground language in vision with human-like sophistication, or are they merely pattern-matching on simplified datasets? Current benchmarks fail to capture real-world complexity where humans effortlessly navigate ambiguous references and recognize when grounding is impossible. To rigorously assess MLLMs' true capabilities, we introduce GroundingME, a benchmark that systematically challenges models across four critical dimensions: (1) Discriminative, distinguishing highly similar objects, (2) Spatial, understanding complex relational descriptions, (3) Limited, handling occlusions or tiny objects, and (4) Rejection, recognizing ungroundable queries. Through careful curation combining automated generation with human verification, we create 1,005 challenging examples mirroring real-world complexity. Evaluating 25 state-of-the-art MLLMs reveals a profound capability gap: the best model achieves only 45.1% accuracy, while most score 0% on rejection tasks, reflexively hallucinating objects rather than acknowledging their absence, raising critical safety concerns for deployment. We explore two strategies for improvements: (1) test-time scaling selects optimal response by thinking trajectory to improve complex grounding by up to 2.9%, and (2) data-mixture training teaches models to recognize ungroundable queries, boosting rejection accuracy from 0% to 27.9%. GroundingME thus serves as both a diagnostic tool revealing current limitations in MLLMs and a roadmap toward human-level visual grounding.

In natural language processing, most models try to learn semantic representations merely from texts. The learned representations encode the distributional semantics but fail to connect to any knowledge about the physical world. In contrast, humans learn language by grounding concepts in perception and action and the brain encodes grounded semantics for cognition. Inspired by this notion and recent work in vision-language learning, we design a two-stream model for grounding language learning in vision. The model includes a VGG-based visual stream and a Bert-based language stream. The two streams merge into a joint representational space. Through cross-modal contrastive learning, the model first learns to align visual and language representations with the MS COCO dataset. The model further learns to retrieve visual objects with language queries through a cross-modal attention module and to infer the visual relations between the retrieved objects through a bilinear operator with the Visual Genome dataset. After training, the language stream of this model is a stand-alone language model capable of embedding concepts in a visually grounded semantic space. This semantic space manifests principal dimensions explainable with human intuition and neurobiological knowledge. Word embeddings in this semantic space are predictive of human-defined norms of semantic features and are segregated into perceptually distinctive clusters. Furthermore, the visually grounded language model also enables compositional language understanding based on visual knowledge and multimodal image search with queries based on images, texts, or their combinations.

Humans possess spatial reasoning abilities that enable them to understand spaces through multimodal observations, such as vision and sound. Large multimodal reasoning models extend these abilities by learning to perceive and reason, showing promising performance across diverse spatial tasks. However, systematic reviews and publicly available benchmarks for these models remain limited. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of multimodal spatial reasoning tasks with large models, categorizing recent progress in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and introducing open benchmarks for evaluation. We begin by outlining general spatial reasoning, focusing on post-training techniques, explainability, and architecture. Beyond classical 2D tasks, we examine spatial relationship reasoning, scene and layout understanding, as well as visual question answering and grounding in 3D space. We also review advances in embodied AI, including vision-language navigation and action models. Additionally, we consider emerging modalities such as audio and egocentric video, which contribute to novel spatial understanding through new sensors. We believe this survey establishes a solid foundation and offers insights into the growing field of multimodal spatial reasoning. Updated information about this survey, codes and implementation of the open benchmarks can be found at https://github.com/zhengxuJosh/Awesome-Spatial-Reasoning.

Multi-object 3D Grounding involves locating 3D boxes based on a given query phrase from a point cloud. It is a challenging and significant task with numerous applications in visual understanding, human-computer interaction, and robotics. To tackle this challenge, we introduce D-LISA, a two-stage approach incorporating three innovations. First, a dynamic vision module that enables a variable and learnable number of box proposals. Second, a dynamic camera positioning that extracts features for each proposal. Third, a language-informed spatial attention module that better reasons over the proposals to output the final prediction. Empirically, experiments show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on multi-object 3D grounding by 12.8% (absolute) and is competitive in single-object 3D grounding.

In this work, we propose a modular approach for the Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) task by decomposing the problem into four sub-modules that use state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in a zero-shot setting. Given navigation instruction in natural language, we first prompt LLM to extract the landmarks and the order in which they are visited. Assuming the known model of the environment, we retrieve the top-k locations of the last landmark and generate k path hypotheses from the starting location to the last landmark using the shortest path algorithm on the topological map of the environment. Each path hypothesis is represented by a sequence of panoramas. We then use dynamic programming to compute the alignment score between the sequence of panoramas and the sequence of landmark names, which match scores obtained from VLM. Finally, we compute the nDTW metric between the hypothesis that yields the highest alignment score to evaluate the path fidelity. We demonstrate superior performance compared to other approaches that use joint semantic maps like VLMaps vlmaps on the complex R2R-Habitat r2r instruction dataset and quantify in detail the effect of visual grounding on navigation performance.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made significant progress in integrating visual and linguistic understanding. Existing benchmarks typically focus on high-level semantic capabilities, such as scene understanding and visual reasoning, but often overlook a crucial, foundational ability: geometric perception. Geometric perception involves understanding geometric shapes, structures, and spatial relationships, which are essential for supporting higher-level semantic tasks. Despite its importance, this capability remains underexplored in current MLLM research. To address this gap, we introduce GePBench, a novel benchmark designed to assess the geometric perception abilities of MLLMs. Our extensive evaluations reveal that current state-of-the-art MLLMs exhibit significant deficiencies in geometric perception tasks. Furthermore, we show that models trained with GePBench data demonstrate substantial improvements on a wide range of benchmark tasks, highlighting the critical role of geometric perception in enabling advanced multimodal applications. Our code and datasets will be publicly available.

Recent advancements in Spatial Intelligence (SI) have predominantly relied on Vision-Language Models (VLMs), yet a critical question remains: does spatial understanding originate from visual encoders or the fundamental reasoning backbone? Inspired by this question, we introduce SiT-Bench, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate the SI performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) without pixel-level input, comprises over 3,800 expert-annotated items across five primary categories and 17 subtasks, ranging from egocentric navigation and perspective transformation to fine-grained robotic manipulation. By converting single/multi-view scenes into high-fidelity, coordinate-aware textual descriptions, we challenge LLMs to perform symbolic textual reasoning rather than visual pattern matching. Evaluation results of state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs reveals that while models achieve proficiency in localized semantic tasks, a significant "spatial gap" remains in global consistency. Notably, we find that explicit spatial reasoning significantly boosts performance, suggesting that LLMs possess latent world-modeling potential. Our proposed dataset SiT-Bench serves as a foundational resource to foster the development of spatially-grounded LLM backbones for future VLMs and embodied agents. Our code and benchmark will be released at https://github.com/binisalegend/SiT-Bench .

Geometric Problem Solving (GPS) poses a unique challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), requiring not only the joint interpretation of text and diagrams but also iterative visuospatial reasoning. While existing approaches process diagrams as static images, they lack the capacity for dynamic manipulation - a core aspect of human geometric reasoning involving auxiliary line construction and affine transformations. We present GeoSketch, a neural-symbolic framework that recasts geometric reasoning as an interactive perception-reasoning-action loop. GeoSketch integrates: (1) a Perception module that abstracts diagrams into structured logic forms, (2) a Symbolic Reasoning module that applies geometric theorems to decide the next deductive step, and (3) a Sketch Action module that executes operations such as drawing auxiliary lines or applying transformations, thereby updating the diagram in a closed loop. To train this agent, we develop a two-stage pipeline: supervised fine-tuning on 2,000 symbolic-curated trajectories followed by reinforcement learning with dense, symbolic rewards to enhance robustness and strategic exploration. To evaluate this paradigm, we introduce the GeoSketch Benchmark, a high-quality set of 390 geometry problems requiring auxiliary construction or affine transformations. Experiments on strong MLLM baselines demonstrate that GeoSketch significantly improves stepwise reasoning accuracy and problem-solving success over static perception methods. By unifying hierarchical decision-making, executable visual actions, and symbolic verification, GeoSketch advances multimodal reasoning from static interpretation to dynamic, verifiable interaction, establishing a new foundation for solving complex visuospatial problems.

Recent advances in large-scale pretraining have yielded visual foundation models with strong capabilities. Not only can recent models generalize to arbitrary images for their training task, their intermediate representations are useful for other visual tasks such as detection and segmentation. Given that such models can classify, delineate, and localize objects in 2D, we ask whether they also represent their 3D structure? In this work, we analyze the 3D awareness of visual foundation models. We posit that 3D awareness implies that representations (1) encode the 3D structure of the scene and (2) consistently represent the surface across views. We conduct a series of experiments using task-specific probes and zero-shot inference procedures on frozen features. Our experiments reveal several limitations of the current models. Our code and analysis can be found at https://github.com/mbanani/probe3d.

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have led to improved performance on tasks such as visual question answering and image captioning. Consequently, these models are now well-positioned to reason about the physical world, particularly within domains such as robotic manipulation. However, current VLMs are limited in their understanding of the physical concepts (e.g., material, fragility) of common objects, which restricts their usefulness for robotic manipulation tasks that involve interaction and physical reasoning about such objects. To address this limitation, we propose PhysObjects, an object-centric dataset of 36.9K crowd-sourced and 417K automated physical concept annotations of common household objects. We demonstrate that fine-tuning a VLM on PhysObjects improves its understanding of physical object concepts, by capturing human priors of these concepts from visual appearance. We incorporate this physically-grounded VLM in an interactive framework with a large language model-based robotic planner, and show improved planning performance on tasks that require reasoning about physical object concepts, compared to baselines that do not leverage physically-grounded VLMs. We additionally illustrate the benefits of our physically-grounded VLM on a real robot, where it improves task success rates. We release our dataset and provide further details and visualizations of our results at https://iliad.stanford.edu/pg-vlm/.

Visual grounding tasks aim to localize image regions based on natural language references. In this work, we explore whether generative VLMs predominantly trained on image-text data could be leveraged to scale up the text annotation of visual grounding data. We find that grounding knowledge already exists in generative VLM and can be elicited by proper prompting. We thus prompt a VLM to generate object-level descriptions by feeding it object regions from existing object detection datasets. We further propose attribute modeling to explicitly capture the important object attributes, and spatial relation modeling to capture inter-object relationship, both of which are common linguistic pattern in referring expression. Our constructed dataset (500K images, 1M objects, 16M referring expressions) is one of the largest grounding datasets to date, and the first grounding dataset with purely model-generated queries and human-annotated objects. To verify the quality of this data, we conduct zero-shot transfer experiments to the popular RefCOCO benchmarks for both referring expression comprehension (REC) and segmentation (RES) tasks. On both tasks, our model significantly outperform the state-of-the-art approaches without using human annotated visual grounding data. Our results demonstrate the promise of generative VLM to scale up visual grounding in the real world. Code and models will be released.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at complex visual tasks such as VQA and chart understanding, yet recent work suggests they struggle with simple perceptual tests. We present an evaluation of vision-language models' capacity for nonlocal visual reasoning: reasoning that requires chaining evidence collected from multiple, possibly distant regions of an image. We isolate three distinct forms of nonlocal vision: comparative perception, which demands holding two images in working memory and comparing them; saccadic search, which requires making discrete, evidence-driven jumps to locate successive targets; and smooth visual search, which involves following a continuous contour. Flagship models (e.g., GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude Sonnet 4), even those that perform well on prior primitive-vision benchmarks, fail these tests and barely exceed random accuracy on two variants of our tasks that are trivial for humans. Our structured evaluation suite allows us to test whether VLMs can perform visual algorithms similar to those used by humans. Our findings show that despite gains in raw visual acuity, current models lack core visual reasoning capabilities.

We present GLIPv2, a grounded VL understanding model, that serves both localization tasks (e.g., object detection, instance segmentation) and Vision-Language (VL) understanding tasks (e.g., VQA, image captioning). GLIPv2 elegantly unifies localization pre-training and Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) with three pre-training tasks: phrase grounding as a VL reformulation of the detection task, region-word contrastive learning as a novel region-word level contrastive learning task, and the masked language modeling. This unification not only simplifies the previous multi-stage VLP procedure but also achieves mutual benefits between localization and understanding tasks. Experimental results show that a single GLIPv2 model (all model weights are shared) achieves near SoTA performance on various localization and understanding tasks. The model also shows (1) strong zero-shot and few-shot adaption performance on open-vocabulary object detection tasks and (2) superior grounding capability on VL understanding tasks. Code will be released at https://github.com/microsoft/GLIP.

Vision Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in 2D vision and language tasks. However, their ability to reason about spatial arrangements remains limited. In this work, we introduce Spatial Region GPT (SpatialRGPT) to enhance VLMs' spatial perception and reasoning capabilities. SpatialRGPT advances VLMs' spatial understanding through two key innovations: (1) a data curation pipeline that enables effective learning of regional representation from 3D scene graphs, and (2) a flexible plugin module for integrating depth information into the visual encoder of existing VLMs. During inference, when provided with user-specified region proposals, SpatialRGPT can accurately perceive their relative directions and distances. Additionally, we propose SpatialRGBT-Bench, a benchmark with ground-truth 3D annotations encompassing indoor, outdoor, and simulated environments, for evaluating 3D spatial cognition in VLMs. Our results demonstrate that SpatialRGPT significantly enhances performance in spatial reasoning tasks, both with and without local region prompts. The model also exhibits strong generalization capabilities, effectively reasoning about complex spatial relations and functioning as a region-aware dense reward annotator for robotic tasks. Code, dataset, and benchmark are released at https://www.anjiecheng.me/SpatialRGPT

Despite recent advances in multimodal reasoning, representing auxiliary geometric constructions remains a fundamental challenge for multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Such constructions are absent from the original diagram and must be introduced before theorems apply. Existing approaches predominantly rely on explicit construction paradigms, including text-based geometric specification, visual-token interleaving during reasoning, and tool-augmented geometric execution. However, these methods either fail to faithfully represent complex spatial relationships, incur representation mismatch between discrete symbols and continuous geometric structures, or rely on external capabilities that hinder end-to-end optimization. To address these limitations, we propose LatentGeo, a framework that learns continuous latent visual representations to internalize auxiliary geometric constructions without pixel-level rendering or external executors. We design a three-stage curriculum that progressively aligns and internalizes these latent representations through auxiliary visual supervision, followed by LaGDPO, a latent-aware reinforcement learning procedure that stabilizes latent representations during policy optimization while improving end-task correctness. To systematically evaluate construction-centric representation quality, we introduce GeoAux, a new benchmark targeting visually dependent geometry problems, and conduct experiments on GeoAux and MathVerse. Results show that LatentGeo achieves substantial gains on geometric reasoning tasks, particularly those requiring auxiliary constructions. Extensive analyses and ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of each component in our framework.

Large language models have recently shown human level performance on a variety of reasoning tasks. However, the ability of these models to perform complex visual reasoning has not been studied in detail yet. A key challenge in many visual reasoning tasks is that the visual information needs to be tightly integrated in the reasoning process. We propose to address this challenge by drawing inspiration from human visual problem solving which depends on a variety of low-level visual capabilities. It can often be cast as the three step-process of ``Look, Remember, Reason'': visual information is incrementally extracted using low-level visual routines in a step-by-step fashion until a final answer is reached. We follow the same paradigm to enable existing large language models, with minimal changes to the architecture, to solve visual reasoning problems. To this end, we introduce rationales over the visual input that allow us to integrate low-level visual capabilities, such as object recognition and tracking, as surrogate tasks. We show competitive performance on diverse visual reasoning tasks from the CLEVR, CATER, and ACRE datasets over state-of-the-art models designed specifically for these tasks.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved impressive success in question-answering tasks, yet their capabilities for spatial understanding are less explored. This work investigates a critical question: do existing MLLMs possess 3D spatial perception and understanding abilities? Concretely, we make the following contributions in this paper: (i) we introduce VGBench, a benchmark specifically designed to assess MLLMs for visual geometry perception, e.g., camera pose and motion estimation; (ii) we propose SpatialScore, the most comprehensive and diverse multimodal spatial understanding benchmark to date, integrating VGBench with relevant data from the other 11 existing datasets. This benchmark comprises 28K samples across various spatial understanding tasks, modalities, and QA formats, along with a carefully curated challenging subset, SpatialScore-Hard; (iii) we develop SpatialAgent, a novel multi-agent system incorporating 9 specialized tools for spatial understanding, supporting both Plan-Execute and ReAct reasoning paradigms; (iv) we conduct extensive evaluations to reveal persistent challenges in spatial reasoning while demonstrating the effectiveness of SpatialAgent. We believe SpatialScore will offer valuable insights and serve as a rigorous benchmark for the next evolution of MLLMs.

Plane geometry problem solving (PGPS) has recently gained significant attention as a benchmark to assess the multi-modal reasoning capabilities of large vision-language models. Despite the growing interest in PGPS, the research community still lacks a comprehensive overview that systematically synthesizes recent work in PGPS. To fill this gap, we present a survey of existing PGPS studies. We first categorize PGPS methods into an encoder-decoder framework and summarize the corresponding output formats used by their encoders and decoders. Subsequently, we classify and analyze these encoders and decoders according to their architectural designs. Finally, we outline major challenges and promising directions for future research. In particular, we discuss the hallucination issues arising during the encoding phase within encoder-decoder architectures, as well as the problem of data leakage in current PGPS benchmarks.

3D visual grounding is the ability to localize objects in 3D scenes conditioned by utterances. Most existing methods devote the referring head to localize the referred object directly, causing failure in complex scenarios. In addition, it does not illustrate how and why the network reaches the final decision. In this paper, we address this question Can we design an interpretable 3D visual grounding framework that has the potential to mimic the human perception system?. To this end, we formulate the 3D visual grounding problem as a sequence-to-sequence task by first predicting a chain of anchors and then the final target. Interpretability not only improves the overall performance but also helps us identify failure cases. Following the chain of thoughts approach enables us to decompose the referring task into interpretable intermediate steps, boosting the performance and making our framework extremely data-efficient. Moreover, our proposed framework can be easily integrated into any existing architecture. We validate our approach through comprehensive experiments on the Nr3D, Sr3D, and Scanrefer benchmarks and show consistent performance gains compared to existing methods without requiring manually annotated data. Furthermore, our proposed framework, dubbed CoT3DRef, is significantly data-efficient, whereas on the Sr3D dataset, when trained only on 10% of the data, we match the SOTA performance that trained on the entire data.

Spatial reasoning is a fundamental aspect of human cognition, yet it remains a major challenge for contemporary vision-language models (VLMs). Prior work largely relied on synthetic or LLM-generated environments with limited task designs and puzzle-like setups, failing to capture the real-world complexity, visual noise, and diverse spatial relationships that VLMs encounter. To address this, we introduce SpatiaLab, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating VLMs' spatial reasoning in realistic, unconstrained contexts. SpatiaLab comprises 1,400 visual question-answer pairs across six major categories: Relative Positioning, Depth & Occlusion, Orientation, Size & Scale, Spatial Navigation, and 3D Geometry, each with five subcategories, yielding 30 distinct task types. Each subcategory contains at least 25 questions, and each main category includes at least 200 questions, supporting both multiple-choice and open-ended evaluation. Experiments across diverse state-of-the-art VLMs, including open- and closed-source models, reasoning-focused, and specialized spatial reasoning models, reveal a substantial gap in spatial reasoning capabilities compared with humans. In the multiple-choice setup, InternVL3.5-72B achieves 54.93% accuracy versus 87.57% for humans. In the open-ended setting, all models show a performance drop of around 10-25%, with GPT-5-mini scoring highest at 40.93% versus 64.93% for humans. These results highlight key limitations in handling complex spatial relationships, depth perception, navigation, and 3D geometry. By providing a diverse, real-world evaluation framework, SpatiaLab exposes critical challenges and opportunities for advancing VLMs' spatial reasoning, offering a benchmark to guide future research toward robust, human-aligned spatial understanding. SpatiaLab is available at: https://spatialab-reasoning.github.io/.

The rapid advancement of vision-language models has catalyzed the emergence of GUI agents, which hold immense potential for automating complex tasks, from online shopping to flight booking, thereby alleviating the burden of repetitive digital workflows. As a foundational capability, GUI grounding is typically established as a prerequisite for end-to-end task execution. It enables models to precisely locate interface elements, such as text and icons, to perform accurate operations like clicking and typing. Unlike prior works that fine-tune models already possessing strong spatial awareness (e.g., Qwen3-VL), we aim to master the full technical pipeline by starting from a base model with minimal grounding ability, such as POINTS-1.5. We introduce POINTS-GUI-G-8B, which achieves state-of-the-art performance with scores of 59.9 on ScreenSpot-Pro, 66.0 on OSWorld-G, 95.7 on ScreenSpot-v2, and 49.9 on UI-Vision. Our model's success is driven by three key factors: (1) Refined Data Engineering, involving the unification of diverse open-source datasets format alongside sophisticated strategies for augmentation, filtering, and difficulty grading; (2) Improved Training Strategies, including continuous fine-tuning of the vision encoder to enhance perceptual accuracy and maintaining resolution consistency between training and inference; and (3) Reinforcement Learning (RL) with Verifiable Rewards. While RL is traditionally used to bolster reasoning, we demonstrate that it significantly improves precision in the perception-intensive GUI grounding task. Furthermore, GUI grounding provides a natural advantage for RL, as rewards are easily verifiable and highly accurate.

Spatial reasoning ability is crucial for Vision Language Models (VLMs) to support real-world applications in diverse domains including robotics, augmented reality, and autonomous navigation. Unfortunately, existing benchmarks are inadequate in assessing spatial reasoning ability, especially the intrinsic-dynamic spatial reasoning which is a fundamental aspect of human spatial cognition. In this paper, we propose a unified benchmark, Spatial-DISE, based on a cognitively grounded taxonomy that categorizes tasks into four fundamental quadrants: Intrinsic-Static, Intrinsic-Dynamic, Extrinsic-Static, and Extrinsic-Dynamic spatial reasoning. Moreover, to address the issue of data scarcity, we develop a scalable and automated pipeline to generate diverse and verifiable spatial reasoning questions, resulting in a new Spatial-DISE dataset that includes Spatial-DISE Bench (559 evaluation VQA pairs) and Spatial-DISE-12K (12K+ training VQA pairs). Our comprehensive evaluation across 28 state-of-the-art VLMs reveals that, current VLMs have a large and consistent gap to human competence, especially on multi-step multi-view spatial reasoning. Spatial-DISE offers a robust framework, valuable dataset, and clear direction for future research toward human-like spatial intelligence. Benchmark, dataset, and code will be publicly released.

Spatial relations are a basic part of human cognition. However, they are expressed in natural language in a variety of ways, and previous work has suggested that current vision-and-language models (VLMs) struggle to capture relational information. In this paper, we present Visual Spatial Reasoning (VSR), a dataset containing more than 10k natural text-image pairs with 65 types of spatial relations in English (such as: under, in front of, and facing). While using a seemingly simple annotation format, we show how the dataset includes challenging linguistic phenomena, such as varying reference frames. We demonstrate a large gap between human and model performance: the human ceiling is above 95%, while state-of-the-art models only achieve around 70%. We observe that VLMs' by-relation performances have little correlation with the number of training examples and the tested models are in general incapable of recognising relations concerning the orientations of objects.

Integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into visual domain tasks, resulting in visual-LLMs (V-LLMs), has enabled exceptional performance in vision-language tasks, particularly for visual question answering (VQA). However, existing V-LLMs (e.g. BLIP-2, LLaVA) demonstrate weak spatial reasoning and localization awareness. Despite generating highly descriptive and elaborate textual answers, these models fail at simple tasks like distinguishing a left vs right location. In this work, we explore how image-space coordinate based instruction fine-tuning objectives could inject spatial awareness into V-LLMs. We discover optimal coordinate representations, data-efficient instruction fine-tuning objectives, and pseudo-data generation strategies that lead to improved spatial awareness in V-LLMs. Additionally, our resulting model improves VQA across image and video domains, reduces undesired hallucination, and generates better contextual object descriptions. Experiments across 5 vision-language tasks involving 14 different datasets establish the clear performance improvements achieved by our proposed framework.

Geometry problem solving (GPS) represents a critical frontier in artificial intelligence, with profound applications in education, computer-aided design, and computational graphics. Despite its significance, automating GPS remains challenging due to the dual demands of spatial understanding and rigorous logical reasoning. Recent advances in large models have enabled notable breakthroughs, particularly for SAT-level problems, yet the field remains fragmented across methodologies, benchmarks, and evaluation frameworks. This survey systematically synthesizes GPS advancements through three core dimensions: (1) benchmark construction, (2) textual and diagrammatic parsing, and (3) reasoning paradigms. We further propose a unified analytical paradigm, assess current limitations, and identify emerging opportunities to guide future research toward human-level geometric reasoning, including automated benchmark generation and interpretable neuro-symbolic integration.

Visual Spatial Reasoning (VSR) is a core human cognitive ability and a critical requirement for advancing embodied intelligence and autonomous systems. Despite recent progress in Vision-Language Models (VLMs), achieving human-level VSR remains highly challenging due to the complexity of representing and reasoning over three-dimensional space. In this paper, we present a systematic investigation of VSR in VLMs, encompassing a review of existing methodologies across input modalities, model architectures, training strategies, and reasoning mechanisms. Furthermore, we categorize spatial intelligence into three levels of capability, ie, basic perception, spatial understanding, spatial planning, and curate SIBench, a spatial intelligence benchmark encompassing nearly 20 open-source datasets across 23 task settings. Experiments with state-of-the-art VLMs reveal a pronounced gap between perception and reasoning, as models show competence in basic perceptual tasks but consistently underperform in understanding and planning tasks, particularly in numerical estimation, multi-view reasoning, temporal dynamics, and spatial imagination. These findings underscore the substantial challenges that remain in achieving spatial intelligence, while providing both a systematic roadmap and a comprehensive benchmark to drive future research in the field. The related resources of this study are accessible at https://sibench.github.io/Awesome-Visual-Spatial-Reasoning/.

Human perception for effective object tracking in a 2D video stream arises from the implicit use of prior 3D knowledge combined with semantic reasoning. In contrast, most generic object tracking (GOT) methods primarily rely on 2D features of the target and its surroundings while neglecting 3D geometric cues, which makes them susceptible to partial occlusion, distractors, and variations in geometry and appearance. To address this limitation, we introduce GOT-Edit, an online cross-modality model editing approach that integrates geometry-aware cues into a generic object tracker from a 2D video stream. Our approach leverages features from a pre-trained Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer to enable geometric cue inference from only a few 2D images. To tackle the challenge of seamlessly combining geometry and semantics, GOT-Edit performs online model editing with null-space constrained updates that incorporate geometric information while preserving semantic discrimination, yielding consistently better performance across diverse scenarios. Extensive experiments on multiple GOT benchmarks demonstrate that GOT-Edit achieves superior robustness and accuracy, particularly under occlusion and clutter, establishing a new paradigm for combining 2D semantics with 3D geometric reasoning for generic object tracking.

Humans naturally perceive the geometric structure and semantic content of a 3D world as intertwined dimensions, enabling coherent and accurate understanding of complex scenes. However, most prior approaches prioritize training large geometry models for low-level 3D reconstruction and treat high-level spatial understanding in isolation, overlooking the crucial interplay between these two fundamental aspects of 3D-scene analysis, thereby limiting generalization and leading to poor performance in downstream 3D understanding tasks. Recent attempts have mitigated this issue by simply aligning 3D models with specific language models, thus restricting perception to the aligned model's capacity and limiting adaptability to downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose InstanceGrounded Geometry Transformer (IGGT), an end-to-end large unified transformer to unify the knowledge for both spatial reconstruction and instance-level contextual understanding. Specifically, we design a 3D-Consistent Contrastive Learning strategy that guides IGGT to encode a unified representation with geometric structures and instance-grounded clustering through only 2D visual inputs. This representation supports consistent lifting of 2D visual inputs into a coherent 3D scene with explicitly distinct object instances. To facilitate this task, we further construct InsScene-15K, a large-scale dataset with high-quality RGB images, poses, depth maps, and 3D-consistent instance-level mask annotations with a novel data curation pipeline.