Daily Papers

Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding and reasoning about visual content, but significant challenges persist in tasks requiring cross-viewpoint understanding and spatial reasoning. We identify a critical limitation: current VLMs excel primarily at egocentric spatial reasoning (from the camera's perspective) but fail to generalize to allocentric viewpoints when required to adopt another entity's spatial frame of reference. We introduce ViewSpatial-Bench, the first comprehensive benchmark designed specifically for multi-viewpoint spatial localization recognition evaluation across five distinct task types, supported by an automated 3D annotation pipeline that generates precise directional labels. Comprehensive evaluation of diverse VLMs on ViewSpatial-Bench reveals a significant performance disparity: models demonstrate reasonable performance on camera-perspective tasks but exhibit reduced accuracy when reasoning from a human viewpoint. By fine-tuning VLMs on our multi-perspective spatial dataset, we achieve an overall performance improvement of 46.24% across tasks, highlighting the efficacy of our approach. Our work establishes a crucial benchmark for spatial intelligence in embodied AI systems and provides empirical evidence that modeling 3D spatial relationships enhances VLMs' corresponding spatial comprehension capabilities.

Vision-language Models (VLMs), despite achieving strong performance on multimodal benchmarks, often misinterpret straightforward visual concepts that humans identify effortlessly, such as counting, spatial reasoning, and viewpoint understanding. Previous studies manually identified these weaknesses and found that they often stem from deficits in specific skills. However, such manual efforts are costly, unscalable, and subject to human bias, which often overlooks subtle details in favor of salient objects, resulting in an incomplete understanding of a model's vulnerabilities. To address these limitations, we propose a Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based framework to automatically discover the failure modes or blind spots of any candidate VLM on a given data distribution without human intervention. Our framework trains a questioner agent that adaptively generates queries based on the candidate VLM's responses to elicit incorrect answers. Our approach increases question complexity by focusing on fine-grained visual details and distinct skill compositions as training progresses, consequently identifying 36 novel failure modes in which VLMs struggle. We demonstrate the broad applicability of our framework by showcasing its generalizability across various model combinations.

Although Multimodal Large Language Models have achieved remarkable progress, they still struggle with complex 3D spatial reasoning due to the reliance on 2D visual priors. Existing approaches typically mitigate this limitation either through computationally expensive post-training procedures on limited 3D datasets or through rigid tool-calling mechanisms that lack explicit geometric understanding and viewpoint flexibility. To address these challenges, we propose a training-free framework that introduces a Visual Chain-of-Thought mechanism grounded in explicit 3D reconstruction. The proposed pipeline first reconstructs a high-fidelity 3D mesh from a single image using MLLM-guided keyword extraction and mask generation at multiple granularities. Subsequently, the framework leverages an external knowledge base to iteratively compute optimal camera extrinsic parameters and synthesize novel views, thereby emulating human perspective-taking. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly enhances spatial comprehension. Specifically, the framework outperforms specialized spatial models and general-purpose MLLMs, including GPT-5.2 and Gemini-2.5-Flash, on major benchmarks such as 3DSRBench and Rel3D.

Vision-language models (VLMs) still struggle with visual perception tasks such as spatial understanding and viewpoint recognition. One plausible contributing factor is that natural image datasets provide limited supervision for low-level visual skills. This motivates a practical question: can targeted synthetic supervision, generated from only a task keyword such as Depth Order, address these weaknesses? To investigate this question, we introduce VisionFoundry, a task-aware synthetic data generation pipeline that takes only the task name as input and uses large language models (LLMs) to generate questions, answers, and text-to-image (T2I) prompts, then synthesizes images with T2I models and verifies consistency with a proprietary VLM, requiring no reference images or human annotation. Using VisionFoundry, we construct VisionFoundry-10K, a synthetic visual question answering (VQA) dataset containing 10k image-question-answer triples spanning 10 tasks. Models trained on VisionFoundry-10K achieve substantial improvements on visual perception benchmarks: +7% on MMVP and +10% on CV-Bench-3D, while preserving broader capabilities and showing favorable scaling behavior as data size increases. Our results suggest that limited task-targeted supervision is an important contributor to this bottleneck and that synthetic supervision is a promising path toward more systematic training for VLMs.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made impressive progress in connecting vision and language, but they still struggle with spatial understanding and viewpoint-aware reasoning. Recent efforts aim to augment the input representations with geometric cues rather than explicitly teaching models to reason in 3D space. We introduce Loc3R-VLM, a framework that equips 2D Vision-Language Models with advanced 3D understanding capabilities from monocular video input. Inspired by human spatial cognition, Loc3R-VLM relies on two joint objectives: global layout reconstruction to build a holistic representation of the scene structure, and explicit situation modeling to anchor egocentric perspective. These objectives provide direct spatial supervision that grounds both perception and language in a 3D context. To ensure geometric consistency and metric-scale alignment, we leverage lightweight camera pose priors extracted from a pre-trained 3D foundation model. Loc3R-VLM achieves state-of-the-art performance in language-based localization and outperforms existing 2D- and video-based approaches on situated and general 3D question-answering benchmarks, demonstrating that our spatial supervision framework enables strong 3D understanding. Project page: https://kevinqu7.github.io/loc3r-vlm

Multimodal language models (MLLMs) are increasingly being implemented in real-world environments, necessitating their ability to interpret 3D spaces and comprehend temporal dynamics. Despite their potential, current top models within our community still fall short in adequately understanding spatial and temporal dimensions. We introduce Coarse Correspondence, a simple, training-free, effective, and general-purpose visual prompting method to elicit 3D and temporal understanding in multimodal LLMs. Our method uses a lightweight tracking model to find object correspondences between frames in a video or between sets of image viewpoints. It selects the most frequent object instances and visualizes them with markers with unique IDs in the image. With this simple approach, we achieve state-of-the-art results on 3D understanding benchmarks including ScanQA (+20.5\%) and a subset of OpenEQA (+9.7\%), and on long-form video benchmarks such as EgoSchema (+6.0\%). We also curate a small diagnostic dataset to evaluate whether MLLMs can reason about space from a described viewpoint other than the camera viewpoint. Again, Coarse Correspondence improves spatial perspective-taking abilities but we highlight that MLLMs struggle with this task. Together, we demonstrate that our simple prompting method can significantly aid downstream tasks that require 3D or temporal reasoning.

Bridging the gap between ego-centric and exo-centric views has been a long-standing question in computer vision. In this paper, we focus on the emerging Ego-Exo object correspondence task, which aims to understand object relations across ego-exo perspectives through segmentation. While numerous segmentation models have been proposed, most operate on a single image (view), making them impractical for cross-view scenarios. PSALM, a recently proposed segmentation method, stands out as a notable exception with its demonstrated zero-shot ability on this task. However, due to the drastic viewpoint change between ego and exo, PSALM fails to accurately locate and segment objects, especially in complex backgrounds or when object appearances change significantly. To address these issues, we propose ObjectRelator, a novel approach featuring two key modules: Multimodal Condition Fusion (MCFuse) and SSL-based Cross-View Object Alignment (XObjAlign). MCFuse introduces language as an additional cue, integrating both visual masks and textual descriptions to improve object localization and prevent incorrect associations. XObjAlign enforces cross-view consistency through self-supervised alignment, enhancing robustness to object appearance variations. Extensive experiments demonstrate ObjectRelator's effectiveness on the large-scale Ego-Exo4D benchmark and HANDAL-X (an adapted dataset for cross-view segmentation) with state-of-the-art performance. Code is made available at: http://yuqianfu.com/ObjectRelator.

This review thoroughly examines the role of semantically-aware Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) in visual scene understanding, covering an analysis of over 250 scholarly papers. It explores how NeRFs adeptly infer 3D representations for both stationary and dynamic objects in a scene. This capability is pivotal for generating high-quality new viewpoints, completing missing scene details (inpainting), conducting comprehensive scene segmentation (panoptic segmentation), predicting 3D bounding boxes, editing 3D scenes, and extracting object-centric 3D models. A significant aspect of this study is the application of semantic labels as viewpoint-invariant functions, which effectively map spatial coordinates to a spectrum of semantic labels, thus facilitating the recognition of distinct objects within the scene. Overall, this survey highlights the progression and diverse applications of semantically-aware neural radiance fields in the context of visual scene interpretation.

The advancement of 3D vision-language (3D VL) learning is hindered by several limitations in existing 3D VL datasets: they rarely necessitate reasoning beyond a close range of objects in single viewpoint, and annotations often link instructions to single objects, missing richer contextual alignments between multiple objects. This significantly curtails the development of models capable of deep, multi-view 3D scene understanding over distant objects. To address these challenges, we introduce MV-ScanQA, a novel 3D question answering dataset where 68% of questions explicitly require integrating information from multiple views (compared to less than 7% in existing datasets), thereby rigorously testing multi-view compositional reasoning. To facilitate the training of models for such demanding scenarios, we present TripAlign dataset, a large-scale and low-cost 2D-3D-language pre-training corpus containing 1M <2D view, set of 3D objects, text> triplets that explicitly aligns groups of contextually related objects with text, providing richer, view-grounded multi-object multimodal alignment signals than previous single-object annotations. We further develop LEGO, a baseline method for the multi-view reasoning challenge in MV-ScanQA, transferring knowledge from pre-trained 2D LVLMs to 3D domain with TripAlign. Empirically, LEGO pre-trained on TripAlign achieves state-of-the-art performance not only on the proposed MV-ScanQA, but also on existing benchmarks for 3D dense captioning and question answering. Datasets and code are available at https://matthewdm0816.github.io/tripalign-mvscanqa.

Camera control has been extensively studied in conditioned video generation; however, performing precisely altering the camera trajectories while faithfully preserving the video content remains a challenging task. The mainstream approach to achieving precise camera control is warping a 3D representation according to the target trajectory. However, such methods fail to fully leverage the 3D priors of video diffusion models (VDMs) and often fall into the Inpainting Trap, resulting in subject inconsistency and degraded generation quality. To address this problem, we propose DepthDirector, a video re-rendering framework with precise camera controllability. By leveraging the depth video from explicit 3D representation as camera-control guidance, our method can faithfully reproduce the dynamic scene of an input video under novel camera trajectories. Specifically, we design a View-Content Dual-Stream Condition mechanism that injects both the source video and the warped depth sequence rendered under the target viewpoint into the pretrained video generation model. This geometric guidance signal enables VDMs to comprehend camera movements and leverage their 3D understanding capabilities, thereby facilitating precise camera control and consistent content generation. Next, we introduce a lightweight LoRA-based video diffusion adapter to train our framework, fully preserving the knowledge priors of VDMs. Additionally, we construct a large-scale multi-camera synchronized dataset named MultiCam-WarpData using Unreal Engine 5, containing 8K videos across 1K dynamic scenes. Extensive experiments show that DepthDirector outperforms existing methods in both camera controllability and visual quality. Our code and dataset will be publicly available.

We introduce RoadSocial, a large-scale, diverse VideoQA dataset tailored for generic road event understanding from social media narratives. Unlike existing datasets limited by regional bias, viewpoint bias and expert-driven annotations, RoadSocial captures the global complexity of road events with varied geographies, camera viewpoints (CCTV, handheld, drones) and rich social discourse. Our scalable semi-automatic annotation framework leverages Text LLMs and Video LLMs to generate comprehensive question-answer pairs across 12 challenging QA tasks, pushing the boundaries of road event understanding. RoadSocial is derived from social media videos spanning 14M frames and 414K social comments, resulting in a dataset with 13.2K videos, 674 tags and 260K high-quality QA pairs. We evaluate 18 Video LLMs (open-source and proprietary, driving-specific and general-purpose) on our road event understanding benchmark. We also demonstrate RoadSocial's utility in improving road event understanding capabilities of general-purpose Video LLMs.

Learning visual features from unlabeled images has proven successful for semantic categorization, often by mapping different views of the same object to the same feature to achieve recognition invariance. However, visual recognition involves not only identifying what an object is but also understanding how it is presented. For example, seeing a car from the side versus head-on is crucial for deciding whether to stay put or jump out of the way. While unsupervised feature learning for downstream viewpoint reasoning is important, it remains under-explored, partly due to the lack of a standardized evaluation method and benchmarks. We introduce a new dataset of adjacent image triplets obtained from a viewpoint trajectory, without any semantic or pose labels. We benchmark both semantic classification and pose estimation accuracies on the same visual feature. Additionally, we propose a viewpoint trajectory regularization loss for learning features from unlabeled image triplets. Our experiments demonstrate that this approach helps develop a visual representation that encodes object identity and organizes objects by their poses, retaining semantic classification accuracy while achieving emergent global pose awareness and better generalization to novel objects. Our dataset and code are available at http://pwang.pw/trajSSL/.

The phenomenon of model-wise double descent, where the test error peaks and then reduces as the model size increases, is an interesting topic that has attracted the attention of researchers due to the striking observed gap between theory and practice Belkin2018ReconcilingMM. Additionally, while double descent has been observed in various tasks and architectures, the peak of double descent can sometimes be noticeably absent or diminished, even without explicit regularization, such as weight decay and early stopping. In this paper, we investigate this intriguing phenomenon from the optimization perspective and propose a simple optimization-based explanation for why double descent sometimes occurs weakly or not at all. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to demonstrate that many disparate factors contributing to model-wise double descent (initialization, normalization, batch size, learning rate, optimization algorithm) are unified from the viewpoint of optimization: model-wise double descent is observed if and only if the optimizer can find a sufficiently low-loss minimum. These factors directly affect the condition number of the optimization problem or the optimizer and thus affect the final minimum found by the optimizer, reducing or increasing the height of the double descent peak. We conduct a series of controlled experiments on random feature models and two-layer neural networks under various optimization settings, demonstrating this optimization-based unified view. Our results suggest the following implication: Double descent is unlikely to be a problem for real-world machine learning setups. Additionally, our results help explain the gap between weak double descent peaks in practice and strong peaks observable in carefully designed setups.

Vision-language models (VLM) excel at general understanding yet remain weak at dynamic spatial reasoning (DSR), i.e., reasoning about the evolvement of object geometry and relationship in 3D space over time, largely due to the scarcity of scalable 4D-aware training resources. To bridge this gap across aspects of dataset, benchmark and model, we introduce DSR Suite. First, we propose an automated pipeline that generates multiple-choice question-answer pairs from in-the-wild videos for DSR. By leveraging modern vision foundation models, the pipeline extracts rich geometric and motion information, including camera poses, local point clouds, object masks, orientations, and 3D trajectories. These geometric cues enable the construction of DSR-Train for learning and further human-refined DSR-Bench for evaluation. Compared with previous works, our data emphasize (i) in-the-wild video sources, (ii) object- and scene-level 3D requirements, (iii) viewpoint transformations, (iv) multi-object interactions, and (v) fine-grained, procedural answers. Beyond data, we propose a lightweight Geometry Selection Module (GSM) to seamlessly integrate geometric priors into VLMs, which condenses question semantics and extracts question-relevant knowledge from pretrained 4D reconstruction priors into a compact set of geometry tokens. This targeted extraction avoids overwhelming the model with irrelevant knowledge. Experiments show that integrating DSR-Train and GSM into Qwen2.5-VL-7B significantly enhances its dynamic spatial reasoning capability, while maintaining accuracy on general video understanding benchmarks.

Real-world aerial scene understanding is limited by a lack of datasets that contain densely annotated images curated under a diverse set of conditions. Due to inherent challenges in obtaining such images in controlled real-world settings, we present SkyScenes, a synthetic dataset of densely annotated aerial images captured from Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) perspectives. We carefully curate SkyScenes images from CARLA to comprehensively capture diversity across layout (urban and rural maps), weather conditions, times of day, pitch angles and altitudes with corresponding semantic, instance and depth annotations. Through our experiments using SkyScenes, we show that (1) Models trained on SkyScenes generalize well to different real-world scenarios, (2) augmenting training on real images with SkyScenes data can improve real-world performance, (3) controlled variations in SkyScenes can offer insights into how models respond to changes in viewpoint conditions, and (4) incorporating additional sensor modalities (depth) can improve aerial scene understanding.

A vision model with general-purpose object-level 3D understanding should be capable of inferring both 2D (e.g., class name and bounding box) and 3D information (e.g., 3D location and 3D viewpoint) for arbitrary rigid objects in natural images. This is a challenging task, as it involves inferring 3D information from 2D signals and most importantly, generalizing to rigid objects from unseen categories. However, existing datasets with object-level 3D annotations are often limited by the number of categories or the quality of annotations. Models developed on these datasets become specialists for certain categories or domains, and fail to generalize. In this work, we present ImageNet3D, a large dataset for general-purpose object-level 3D understanding. ImageNet3D augments 200 categories from the ImageNet dataset with 2D bounding box, 3D pose, 3D location annotations, and image captions interleaved with 3D information. With the new annotations available in ImageNet3D, we could (i) analyze the object-level 3D awareness of visual foundation models, and (ii) study and develop general-purpose models that infer both 2D and 3D information for arbitrary rigid objects in natural images, and (iii) integrate unified 3D models with large language models for 3D-related reasoning.. We consider two new tasks, probing of object-level 3D awareness and open vocabulary pose estimation, besides standard classification and pose estimation. Experimental results on ImageNet3D demonstrate the potential of our dataset in building vision models with stronger general-purpose object-level 3D understanding.

Large vision-language models (VLMs) have made significant strides in 2D visual understanding tasks, sparking interest in extending these capabilities to 3D scene understanding. However, current 3D VLMs often struggle with robust reasoning and generalization due to limitations in high-quality spatial data and the static nature of viewpoint assumptions. To address these challenges, we propose 3D-R1, a foundation model that enhances the reasoning capabilities of 3D VLMs. Specifically, we first construct a high-quality synthetic dataset with CoT, named Scene-30K, leveraging existing 3D-VL datasets and a data engine based on Gemini 2.5 Pro. It serves as cold-start initialization data for 3D-R1. Moreover, we leverage RLHF policy such as GRPO in the reinforcement learning training process to enhance reasoning capabilities and introduce three reward functions: a perception reward, a semantic similarity reward and a format reward to maintain detection accuracy and answer semantic precision. Furthermore, we introduce a dynamic view selection strategy that adaptively chooses the most informative perspectives for 3D scene understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that 3D-R1 delivers an average improvement of 10% across various 3D scene benchmarks, highlighting its effectiveness in enhancing reasoning and generalization in 3D scene understanding. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/3D-R1. Website: https://aigeeksgroup.github.io/3D-R1.

Transferring and integrating knowledge across first-person (egocentric) and third-person (exocentric) viewpoints is intrinsic to human intelligence, enabling humans to learn from others and convey insights from their own experiences. Despite rapid progress in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), their ability to perform such cross-view reasoning remains unexplored. To address this, we introduce EgoExoBench, the first benchmark for egocentric-exocentric video understanding and reasoning. Built from publicly available datasets, EgoExoBench comprises over 7,300 question-answer pairs spanning eleven sub-tasks organized into three core challenges: semantic alignment, viewpoint association, and temporal reasoning. We evaluate 13 state-of-the-art MLLMs and find that while these models excel on single-view tasks, they struggle to align semantics across perspectives, accurately associate views, and infer temporal dynamics in the ego-exo context. We hope EgoExoBench can serve as a valuable resource for research on embodied agents and intelligent assistants seeking human-like cross-view intelligence.

Tracking and identifying athletes on the pitch holds a central role in collecting essential insights from the game, such as estimating the total distance covered by players or understanding team tactics. This tracking and identification process is crucial for reconstructing the game state, defined by the athletes' positions and identities on a 2D top-view of the pitch, (i.e. a minimap). However, reconstructing the game state from videos captured by a single camera is challenging. It requires understanding the position of the athletes and the viewpoint of the camera to localize and identify players within the field. In this work, we formalize the task of Game State Reconstruction and introduce SoccerNet-GSR, a novel Game State Reconstruction dataset focusing on football videos. SoccerNet-GSR is composed of 200 video sequences of 30 seconds, annotated with 9.37 million line points for pitch localization and camera calibration, as well as over 2.36 million athlete positions on the pitch with their respective role, team, and jersey number. Furthermore, we introduce GS-HOTA, a novel metric to evaluate game state reconstruction methods. Finally, we propose and release an end-to-end baseline for game state reconstruction, bootstrapping the research on this task. Our experiments show that GSR is a challenging novel task, which opens the field for future research. Our dataset and codebase are publicly available at https://github.com/SoccerNet/sn-gamestate.

Humans build shared spatial understanding by communicating partial, viewpoint-dependent observations. We ask whether Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) can do the same, aligning distinct egocentric views through dialogue to form a coherent, allocentric mental model of a shared environment. To study this systematically, we introduce COSMIC, a benchmark for Collaborative Spatial Communication. In this setting, two static MLLM agents observe a 3D indoor environment from different viewpoints and exchange natural-language messages to solve spatial queries. COSMIC contains 899 diverse scenes and 1250 question-answer pairs spanning five tasks. We find a consistent capability hierarchy, MLLMs are most reliable at identifying shared anchor objects across views, perform worse on relational reasoning, and largely fail at building globally consistent maps, performing near chance, even for the frontier models. Moreover, we find thinking capability yields consistent gains in anchor grounding, but is insufficient for higher-level spatial communication. To contextualize model behavior, we additionally collect 250 human-human dialogues. Humans achieve 95% aggregate accuracy, leaving significant room for improvement for even the best performing model Gemini-3-Pro-Thinking which achieves 72% aggregate accuracy. Moreover, human conversations become increasingly specific as partners converge on a shared mental model, whereas model dialogues continue to explore new possibilities rather than converging, consistent with a limited ability to build and maintain a robust shared mental model. Our code and data is available at https://github.com/ankursikarwar/Cosmic

Real-world user-generated short videos, especially those distributed on platforms such as WeChat Channel and TikTok, dominate the mobile internet. However, current large multimodal models lack essential temporally-structured, detailed, and in-depth video comprehension capabilities, which are the cornerstone of effective video search and recommendation, as well as emerging video applications. Understanding real-world shorts is actually challenging due to their complex visual elements, high information density in both visuals and audio, and fast pacing that focuses on emotional expression and viewpoint delivery. This requires advanced reasoning to effectively integrate multimodal information, including visual, audio, and text. In this work, we introduce ARC-Hunyuan-Video, a multimodal model that processes visual, audio, and textual signals from raw video inputs end-to-end for structured comprehension. The model is capable of multi-granularity timestamped video captioning and summarization, open-ended video question answering, temporal video grounding, and video reasoning. Leveraging high-quality data from an automated annotation pipeline, our compact 7B-parameter model is trained through a comprehensive regimen: pre-training, instruction fine-tuning, cold start, reinforcement learning (RL) post-training, and final instruction fine-tuning. Quantitative evaluations on our introduced benchmark ShortVid-Bench and qualitative comparisons demonstrate its strong performance in real-world video comprehension, and it supports zero-shot or fine-tuning with a few samples for diverse downstream applications. The real-world production deployment of our model has yielded tangible and measurable improvements in user engagement and satisfaction, a success supported by its remarkable efficiency, with stress tests indicating an inference time of just 10 seconds for a one-minute video on H20 GPU.

Camera-controllable image editing aims to synthesize novel views of a given scene under varying camera poses while strictly preserving cross-view geometric consistency. However, existing methods typically rely on fragmented geometric guidance, such as only injecting point clouds at the representation level despite models containing multiple levels, and are mainly based on image diffusion models that operate on discrete view mappings. These two limitations jointly lead to geometric drift and structural degradation under continuous camera motion. We observe that while leveraging video models provides continuous viewpoint priors for camera-controllable image editing, they still struggle to form stable geometric understanding if geometric guidance remains fragmented. To systematically address this, we inject unified geometric guidance across three levels that jointly determine the generative output: representation, architecture, and loss function. To this end, we propose UniGeo, a novel camera-controllable editing framework. Specifically, at the representation level, UniGeo incorporates a frame-decoupled geometric reference injection mechanism to provide robust cross-view geometry context. At the architecture level, it introduces geometric anchor attention to align multi-view features. At the loss function level, it proposes a trajectory-endpoint geometric supervision strategy to explicitly reinforce the structural fidelity of target views. Comprehensive experiments across multiple public benchmarks, encompassing both extensive and limited camera motion settings, demonstrate that UniGeo significantly outperforms existing methods in both visual quality and geometric consistency.

Segment matching is an important intermediate task in computer vision that establishes correspondences between semantically or geometrically coherent regions across images. Unlike keypoint matching, which focuses on localized features, segment matching captures structured regions, offering greater robustness to occlusions, lighting variations, and viewpoint changes. In this paper, we leverage the spatial understanding of 3D foundation models to tackle wide-baseline segment matching, a challenging setting involving extreme viewpoint shifts. We propose an architecture that uses the inductive bias of these 3D foundation models to match segments across image pairs with up to 180 degree view-point change rotation. Extensive experiments show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods, including the SAM2 video propagator and local feature matching methods, by up to 30% on the AUPRC metric, on ScanNet++ and Replica datasets. We further demonstrate benefits of the proposed model on relevant downstream tasks, including 3D instance mapping and object-relative navigation. Project Page: https://segmast3r.github.io/

We present a framework for perspective-aware reasoning in vision-language models (VLMs) through mental imagery simulation. Perspective-taking, the ability to perceive an environment or situation from an alternative viewpoint, is a key benchmark for human-level visual understanding, essential for environmental interaction and collaboration with autonomous agents. Despite advancements in spatial reasoning within VLMs, recent research has shown that modern VLMs significantly lack perspective-aware reasoning capabilities and exhibit a strong bias toward egocentric interpretations. To bridge the gap between VLMs and human perception, we focus on the role of mental imagery, where humans perceive the world through abstracted representations that facilitate perspective shifts. Motivated by this, we propose a framework for perspective-aware reasoning, named Abstract Perspective Change (APC), that effectively leverages vision foundation models, such as object detection, segmentation, and orientation estimation, to construct scene abstractions and enable perspective transformations. Our experiments on synthetic and real-image benchmarks, compared with various VLMs, demonstrate significant improvements in perspective-aware reasoning with our framework, further outperforming fine-tuned spatial reasoning models and novel-view-synthesis-based approaches.

Current vision-language models may incorporate single-dimensional spatial cues, such as depth, object boundary, and basic spatial directions (e.g. left, right, front, back), yet often lack the multi-dimensional spatial reasoning necessary for human-like understanding and real-world applications. To address this gap, we develop SPHERE (Spatial Perception and Hierarchical Evaluation of REasoning), a hierarchical evaluation framework with a new human-annotated dataset to pinpoint model strengths and weaknesses, advancing from single-skill tasks to multi-skill tasks, and ultimately to complex reasoning tasks that require the integration of multiple spatial and visual cues with logical reasoning. Benchmark evaluation of state-of-the-art open-source models reveal significant shortcomings, especially in the abilities to understand distance and proximity, to reason from both allocentric and egocentric viewpoints, and to perform complex reasoning in a physical context. This work underscores the need for more advanced approaches to spatial understanding and reasoning, paving the way for improvements in vision-language models and their alignment with human-like spatial capabilities. The dataset will be open-sourced upon publication.

In embodied AI perception systems, visual perception should be active: the goal is not to passively process static images, but to actively acquire more informative data within pixel and spatial budget constraints. Existing vision models and fixed RGB-D camera systems fundamentally fail to reconcile wide-area coverage with fine-grained detail acquisition, severely limiting their efficacy in open-world robotic applications. To address this issue, we propose EyeVLA, a robotic eyeball for active visual perception that can take proactive actions based on instructions, enabling clear observation of fine-grained target objects and detailed information across a wide spatial extent. EyeVLA discretizes action behaviors into action tokens and integrates them with vision-language models (VLMs) that possess strong open-world understanding capabilities, enabling joint modeling of vision, language, and actions within a single autoregressive sequence. By using the 2D bounding box coordinates to guide the reasoning chain and applying reinforcement learning to refine the viewpoint selection policy, we transfer the open-world scene understanding capability of the VLM to a vision language action (VLA) policy using only minimal real-world data. Experiments show that our system efficiently performs instructed scenes in real-world environments and actively acquires more accurate visual information through instruction-driven actions of rotation and zoom, thereby achieving strong environmental perception capabilities. EyeVLA introduces a novel robotic vision system that leverages detailed and spatially rich, large-scale embodied data, and actively acquires highly informative visual observations for downstream embodied tasks.

To address the data scarcity associated with 3D assets, 2D-lifting techniques such as Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) have become a widely adopted practice in text-to-3D generation pipelines. However, the diffusion models used in these techniques are prone to viewpoint bias and thus lead to geometric inconsistencies such as the Janus problem. To counter this, we introduce MT3D, a text-to-3D generative model that leverages a high-fidelity 3D object to overcome viewpoint bias and explicitly infuse geometric understanding into the generation pipeline. Firstly, we employ depth maps derived from a high-quality 3D model as control signals to guarantee that the generated 2D images preserve the fundamental shape and structure, thereby reducing the inherent viewpoint bias. Next, we utilize deep geometric moments to ensure geometric consistency in the 3D representation explicitly. By incorporating geometric details from a 3D asset, MT3D enables the creation of diverse and geometrically consistent objects, thereby improving the quality and usability of our 3D representations.

While current visual captioning models have achieved impressive performance, they often assume that the image is well-captured and provides a complete view of the scene. In real-world scenarios, however, a single image may not offer a good viewpoint, hindering fine-grained scene understanding. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel task called Embodied Captioning, which equips visual captioning models with navigation capabilities, enabling them to actively explore the scene and reduce visual ambiguity from suboptimal viewpoints. Specifically, starting at a random viewpoint, an agent must navigate the environment to gather information from different viewpoints and generate a comprehensive paragraph describing all objects in the scene. To support this task, we build the ET-Cap dataset with Kubric simulator, consisting of 10K 3D scenes with cluttered objects and three annotated paragraphs per scene. We propose a Cascade Embodied Captioning model (CaBOT), which comprises of a navigator and a captioner, to tackle this task. The navigator predicts which actions to take in the environment, while the captioner generates a paragraph description based on the whole navigation trajectory. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms other carefully designed baselines. Our dataset, codes and models are available at https://aim3-ruc.github.io/ExploreAndTell.

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have significantly improved 2D visual understanding, prompting interest in their application to complex 3D reasoning tasks. However, it remains unclear whether these models can effectively capture the detailed spatial information required for robust real-world performance, especially cross-view consistency, a key requirement for accurate 3D reasoning. Considering this issue, we introduce Viewpoint Learning, a task designed to evaluate and improve the spatial reasoning capabilities of MLLMs. We present the Viewpoint-100K dataset, consisting of 100K object-centric image pairs with diverse viewpoints and corresponding question-answer pairs. Our approach employs a two-stage fine-tuning strategy: first, foundational knowledge is injected to the baseline MLLM via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on Viewpoint-100K, resulting in significant improvements across multiple tasks; second, generalization is enhanced through Reinforcement Learning using the Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) algorithm on a broader set of questions. Additionally, we introduce a hybrid cold-start initialization method designed to simultaneously learn viewpoint representations and maintain coherent reasoning thinking. Experimental results show that our approach significantly activates the spatial reasoning ability of MLLM, improving performance on both in-domain and out-of-domain reasoning tasks. Our findings highlight the value of developing foundational spatial skills in MLLMs, supporting future progress in robotics, autonomous systems, and 3D scene understanding.

Humans view the world through many sensory channels, e.g., the long-wavelength light channel, viewed by the left eye, or the high-frequency vibrations channel, heard by the right ear. Each view is noisy and incomplete, but important factors, such as physics, geometry, and semantics, tend to be shared between all views (e.g., a "dog" can be seen, heard, and felt). We investigate the classic hypothesis that a powerful representation is one that models view-invariant factors. We study this hypothesis under the framework of multiview contrastive learning, where we learn a representation that aims to maximize mutual information between different views of the same scene but is otherwise compact. Our approach scales to any number of views, and is view-agnostic. We analyze key properties of the approach that make it work, finding that the contrastive loss outperforms a popular alternative based on cross-view prediction, and that the more views we learn from, the better the resulting representation captures underlying scene semantics. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on image and video unsupervised learning benchmarks. Code is released at: http://github.com/HobbitLong/CMC/.

Understanding perspective is fundamental to human visual perception, yet the extent to which multimodal large language models (MLLMs) internalize perspective geometry remains unclear. We introduce MMPerspective, the first benchmark specifically designed to systematically evaluate MLLMs' understanding of perspective through 10 carefully crafted tasks across three complementary dimensions: Perspective Perception, Reasoning, and Robustness. Our benchmark comprises 2,711 real-world and synthetic image instances with 5,083 question-answer pairs that probe key capabilities, such as vanishing point perception and counting, perspective type reasoning, line relationship understanding in 3D space, invariance to perspective-preserving transformations, etc. Through a comprehensive evaluation of 43 state-of-the-art MLLMs, we uncover significant limitations: while models demonstrate competence on surface-level perceptual tasks, they struggle with compositional reasoning and maintaining spatial consistency under perturbations. Our analysis further reveals intriguing patterns between model architecture, scale, and perspective capabilities, highlighting both robustness bottlenecks and the benefits of chain-of-thought prompting. MMPerspective establishes a valuable testbed for diagnosing and advancing spatial understanding in vision-language systems. Resources available at: https://yunlong10.github.io/MMPerspective/

Multi-image spatial reasoning remains challenging for current multimodal large language models (MLLMs). While single-view perception is inherently 2D, reasoning over multiple views requires building a coherent scene understanding across viewpoints. In particular, we study perspective taking, where a model must build a coherent 3D understanding from multi-view observations and use it to reason from a new, language-specified viewpoint. We introduce CAMCUE, a pose-aware multi-image framework that uses camera pose as an explicit geometric anchor for cross-view fusion and novel-view reasoning. CAMCUE injects per-view pose into visual tokens, grounds natural-language viewpoint descriptions to a target camera pose, and synthesizes a pose-conditioned imagined target view to support answering. To support this setting, we curate CAMCUE-DATA with 27,668 training and 508 test instances pairing multi-view images and poses with diverse target-viewpoint descriptions and perspective-shift questions. We also include human-annotated viewpoint descriptions in the test split to evaluate generalization to human language. CAMCUE improves overall accuracy by 9.06% and predicts target poses from natural-language viewpoint descriptions with over 90% rotation accuracy within 20° and translation accuracy within a 0.5 error threshold. This direct grounding avoids expensive test-time search-and-match, reducing inference time from 256.6s to 1.45s per example and enabling fast, interactive use in real-world scenarios.

Human perception of the world is shaped by a multitude of viewpoints and modalities. While many existing datasets focus on scene understanding from a certain perspective (e.g. egocentric or third-person views), our dataset offers a panoptic perspective (i.e. multiple viewpoints with multiple data modalities). Specifically, we encapsulate third-person panoramic and front views, as well as egocentric monocular/binocular views with rich modalities including video, multi-channel audio, directional binaural delay, location data and textual scene descriptions within each scene captured, presenting comprehensive observation of the world. Figure 1 offers a glimpse of all 28 scene categories of our 360+x dataset. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first database that covers multiple viewpoints with multiple data modalities to mimic how daily information is accessed in the real world. Through our benchmark analysis, we presented 5 different scene understanding tasks on the proposed 360+x dataset to evaluate the impact and benefit of each data modality and perspective in panoptic scene understanding. We hope this unique dataset could broaden the scope of comprehensive scene understanding and encourage the community to approach these problems from more diverse perspectives.

Visual perspective-taking (VPT), the ability to understand the viewpoint of another person, enables individuals to anticipate the actions of other people. For instance, a driver can avoid accidents by assessing what pedestrians see. Humans typically develop this skill in early childhood, but it remains unclear whether the recently emerging Vision Language Models (VLMs) possess such capability. Furthermore, as these models are increasingly deployed in the real world, understanding how they perform nuanced tasks like VPT becomes essential. In this paper, we introduce two manually curated datasets, Isle-Bricks and Isle-Dots for testing VPT skills, and we use it to evaluate 12 commonly used VLMs. Across all models, we observe a significant performance drop when perspective-taking is required. Additionally, we find performance in object detection tasks is poorly correlated with performance on VPT tasks, suggesting that the existing benchmarks might not be sufficient to understand this problem. The code and the dataset will be available at https://sites.google.com/view/perspective-taking

Top-view perspective denotes a typical way in which humans read and reason over different types of maps, and it is vital for localization and navigation of humans as well as of `non-human' agents, such as the ones backed by large Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Nonetheless, spatial reasoning capabilities of modern VLMs remain unattested and underexplored. In this work, we thus study their capability to understand and reason over spatial relations from the top view. The focus on top view also enables controlled evaluations at different granularity of spatial reasoning; we clearly disentangle different abilities (e.g., recognizing particular objects versus understanding their relative positions). We introduce the TopViewRS (Top-View Reasoning in Space) dataset, consisting of 11,384 multiple-choice questions with either realistic or semantic top-view map as visual input. We then use it to study and evaluate VLMs across 4 perception and reasoning tasks with different levels of complexity. Evaluation of 10 representative open- and closed-source VLMs reveals the gap of more than 50% compared to average human performance, and it is even lower than the random baseline in some cases. Although additional experiments show that Chain-of-Thought reasoning can boost model capabilities by 5.82% on average, the overall performance of VLMs remains limited. Our findings underscore the critical need for enhanced model capability in top-view spatial reasoning and set a foundation for further research towards human-level proficiency of VLMs in real-world multimodal tasks.

Explainability has become an important topic in computer science and artificial intelligence, leading to a subfield called Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). The goal of providing or seeking explanations is to achieve (better) 'understanding' on the part of the explainee. However, what it means to 'understand' is still not clearly defined, and the concept itself is rarely the subject of scientific investigation. This conceptual article aims to present a model of forms of understanding for XAI-explanations and beyond. From an interdisciplinary perspective bringing together computer science, linguistics, sociology, philosophy and psychology, a definition of understanding and its forms, assessment, and dynamics during the process of giving everyday explanations are explored. Two types of understanding are considered as possible outcomes of explanations, namely enabledness, 'knowing how' to do or decide something, and comprehension, 'knowing that' -- both in different degrees (from shallow to deep). Explanations regularly start with shallow understanding in a specific domain and can lead to deep comprehension and enabledness of the explanandum, which we see as a prerequisite for human users to gain agency. In this process, the increase of comprehension and enabledness are highly interdependent. Against the background of this systematization, special challenges of understanding in XAI are discussed.

Multi-view spatial reasoning remains difficult for current vision-language models. Even when multiple viewpoints are available, models often underutilize cross-view relations and instead rely on single-image shortcuts, leading to fragile performance on viewpoint transformation and occlusion-sensitive cases. We present ViewFusion, a two-stage framework that explicitly separates cross-view spatial pre-alignment from question answering. In the first stage, the model performs deliberate spatial pre-thinking to infer viewpoint relations and spatial transformations across views, forming an intermediate workspace that goes beyond a simple re-description. In the second stage, the model conducts question-driven reasoning conditioned on this workspace to produce the final prediction. We train ViewFusion with synthetic reasoning supervision followed by reinforcement learning using GRPO, which improves answer correctness while stabilizing the intended two-stage generation behavior. On MMSI-Bench, ViewFusion improves accuracy by 5.3\% over Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct, with the largest gains on examples that require genuine cross-view alignment.

3D spatial reasoning is the ability to analyze and interpret the positions, orientations, and spatial relationships of objects within the 3D space. This allows models to develop a comprehensive understanding of the 3D scene, enabling their applicability to a broader range of areas, such as autonomous navigation, robotics, and AR/VR. While large multi-modal models (LMMs) have achieved remarkable progress in a wide range of image and video understanding tasks, their capabilities to perform 3D spatial reasoning on diverse natural images are less studied. In this work we present the first comprehensive 3D spatial reasoning benchmark, 3DSRBench, with 2,772 manually annotated visual question-answer pairs across 12 question types. We conduct robust and thorough evaluation of 3D spatial reasoning capabilities by balancing the data distribution and adopting a novel FlipEval strategy. To further study the robustness of 3D spatial reasoning w.r.t. camera 3D viewpoints, our 3DSRBench includes two subsets with 3D spatial reasoning questions on paired images with common and uncommon viewpoints. We benchmark a wide range of open-sourced and proprietary LMMs, uncovering their limitations in various aspects of 3D awareness, such as height, orientation, location, and multi-object reasoning, as well as their degraded performance on images with uncommon camera viewpoints. Our 3DSRBench provide valuable findings and insights about the future development of LMMs with strong 3D reasoning capabilities. Our project page and dataset is available https://3dsrbench.github.io.

Text-to-image diffusion models understand spatial relationship between objects, but do they represent the true 3D structure of the world from only 2D supervision? We demonstrate that yes, 3D knowledge is encoded in 2D image diffusion models like Stable Diffusion, and we show that this structure can be exploited for 3D vision tasks. Our method, Viewpoint Neural Textual Inversion (ViewNeTI), controls the 3D viewpoint of objects in generated images from frozen diffusion models. We train a small neural mapper to take camera viewpoint parameters and predict text encoder latents; the latents then condition the diffusion generation process to produce images with the desired camera viewpoint. ViewNeTI naturally addresses Novel View Synthesis (NVS). By leveraging the frozen diffusion model as a prior, we can solve NVS with very few input views; we can even do single-view novel view synthesis. Our single-view NVS predictions have good semantic details and photorealism compared to prior methods. Our approach is well suited for modeling the uncertainty inherent in sparse 3D vision problems because it can efficiently generate diverse samples. Our view-control mechanism is general, and can even change the camera view in images generated by user-defined prompts.

Understanding 3D scenes from multi-view inputs has been proven to alleviate the view discrepancy issue in 3D visual grounding. However, existing methods normally neglect the view cues embedded in the text modality and fail to weigh the relative importance of different views. In this paper, we propose ViewRefer, a multi-view framework for 3D visual grounding exploring how to grasp the view knowledge from both text and 3D modalities. For the text branch, ViewRefer leverages the diverse linguistic knowledge of large-scale language models, e.g., GPT, to expand a single grounding text to multiple geometry-consistent descriptions. Meanwhile, in the 3D modality, a transformer fusion module with inter-view attention is introduced to boost the interaction of objects across views. On top of that, we further present a set of learnable multi-view prototypes, which memorize scene-agnostic knowledge for different views, and enhance the framework from two perspectives: a view-guided attention module for more robust text features, and a view-guided scoring strategy during the final prediction. With our designed paradigm, ViewRefer achieves superior performance on three benchmarks and surpasses the second-best by +2.8%, +1.5%, and +1.35% on Sr3D, Nr3D, and ScanRefer.

Three-dimensional (3D) understanding of objects and scenes play a key role in humans' ability to interact with the world and has been an active area of research in computer vision, graphics, and robotics. Large scale synthetic and object-centric 3D datasets have shown to be effective in training models that have 3D understanding of objects. However, applying a similar approach to real-world objects and scenes is difficult due to a lack of large-scale data. Videos are a potential source for real-world 3D data, but finding diverse yet corresponding views of the same content has shown to be difficult at scale. Furthermore, standard videos come with fixed viewpoints, determined at the time of capture. This restricts the ability to access scenes from a variety of more diverse and potentially useful perspectives. We argue that large scale 360 videos can address these limitations to provide: scalable corresponding frames from diverse views. In this paper, we introduce 360-1M, a 360 video dataset, and a process for efficiently finding corresponding frames from diverse viewpoints at scale. We train our diffusion-based model, Odin, on 360-1M. Empowered by the largest real-world, multi-view dataset to date, Odin is able to freely generate novel views of real-world scenes. Unlike previous methods, Odin can move the camera through the environment, enabling the model to infer the geometry and layout of the scene. Additionally, we show improved performance on standard novel view synthesis and 3D reconstruction benchmarks.

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

The task of perspective-aware classification introduces a bottleneck in terms of parametric efficiency that did not get enough recognition in existing studies. In this article, we aim to address this issue by applying an existing architecture, the hypernetwork+adapters combination, to perspectivist classification. Ultimately, we arrive at a solution that can compete with specialized models in adopting user perspectives on hate speech and toxicity detection, while also making use of considerably fewer parameters. Our solution is architecture-agnostic and can be applied to a wide range of base models out of the box.

Vision foundation models, particularly the ViT family, have revolutionized image understanding by providing rich semantic features. However, despite their success in 2D comprehension, their abilities on grasping 3D spatial relationships are still unclear. In this work, we evaluate and enhance the 3D awareness of ViT-based models. We begin by systematically assessing their ability to learn 3D equivariant features, specifically examining the consistency of semantic embeddings across different viewpoints. Our findings indicate that improved 3D equivariance leads to better performance on various downstream tasks, including pose estimation, tracking, and semantic transfer. Building on this insight, we propose a simple yet effective finetuning strategy based on 3D correspondences, which significantly enhances the 3D correspondence understanding of existing vision models. Remarkably, even finetuning on a single object for just one iteration results in substantial performance gains. All code and resources will be made publicly available to support further advancements in 3D-aware vision models. Our code is available at https://github.com/qq456cvb/3DCorrEnhance.

As fine-grained visual classification (FGVC) being developed for decades, great works related have exposed a key direction -- finding discriminative local regions and revealing subtle differences. However, unlike identifying visual contents within static images, for recognizing objects in the real physical world, discriminative information is not only present within seen local regions but also hides in other unseen perspectives. In other words, in addition to focusing on the distinguishable part from the whole, for efficient and accurate recognition, it is required to infer the key perspective with a few glances, e.g., people may recognize a "Benz AMG GT" with a glance of its front and then know that taking a look at its exhaust pipe can help to tell which year's model it is. In this paper, back to reality, we put forward the problem of active fine-grained recognition (AFGR) and complete this study in three steps: (i) a hierarchical, multi-view, fine-grained vehicle dataset is collected as the testbed, (ii) a simple experiment is designed to verify that different perspectives contribute differently for FGVC and different categories own different discriminative perspective, (iii) a policy-gradient-based framework is adopted to achieve efficient recognition with active view selection. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method delivers a better performance-efficient trade-off than previous FGVC methods and advanced neural networks.

The advances in remote sensing technologies have boosted applications for Earth observation. These technologies provide multiple observations or views with different levels of information. They might contain static or temporary views with different levels of resolution, in addition to having different types and amounts of noise due to sensor calibration or deterioration. A great variety of deep learning models have been applied to fuse the information from these multiple views, known as deep multi-view or multi-modal fusion learning. However, the approaches in the literature vary greatly since different terminology is used to refer to similar concepts or different illustrations are given to similar techniques. This article gathers works on multi-view fusion for Earth observation by focusing on the common practices and approaches used in the literature. We summarize and structure insights from several different publications concentrating on unifying points and ideas. In this manuscript, we provide a harmonized terminology while at the same time mentioning the various alternative terms that are used in literature. The topics covered by the works reviewed focus on supervised learning with the use of neural network models. We hope this review, with a long list of recent references, can support future research and lead to a unified advance in the area.

We present a novel bird's-eye-view (BEV) detector with perspective supervision, which converges faster and better suits modern image backbones. Existing state-of-the-art BEV detectors are often tied to certain depth pre-trained backbones like VoVNet, hindering the synergy between booming image backbones and BEV detectors. To address this limitation, we prioritize easing the optimization of BEV detectors by introducing perspective space supervision. To this end, we propose a two-stage BEV detector, where proposals from the perspective head are fed into the bird's-eye-view head for final predictions. To evaluate the effectiveness of our model, we conduct extensive ablation studies focusing on the form of supervision and the generality of the proposed detector. The proposed method is verified with a wide spectrum of traditional and modern image backbones and achieves new SoTA results on the large-scale nuScenes dataset. The code shall be released soon.

Visual understanding is inherently intention-driven - humans selectively focus on different regions of a scene based on their goals. Recent advances in large multimodal models (LMMs) enable flexible expression of such intentions through natural language, allowing queries to guide visual reasoning processes. Frameworks like Visual Chain-of-Thought have demonstrated the benefit of incorporating explicit reasoning steps, where the model predicts a focus region before answering a query. However, existing approaches rely heavily on supervised training with annotated intermediate bounding boxes, which severely limits scalability due to the combinatorial explosion of intention-region pairs. To overcome this limitation, we propose VisRL, the first framework that applies reinforcement learning (RL) to the problem of intention-driven visual perception. VisRL optimizes the entire visual reasoning process using only reward signals. By treating intermediate focus selection as an internal decision optimized through trial-and-error, our method eliminates the need for costly region annotations while aligning more closely with how humans learn to perceive the world. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks show that VisRL consistently outperforms strong baselines, demonstrating both its effectiveness and its strong generalization across different LMMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhangquanchen/VisRL.

Vision Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate remarkable proficiency in addressing a wide array of visual questions, which requires strong perception and reasoning faculties. Assessing these two competencies independently is crucial for model refinement, despite the inherent difficulty due to the intertwined nature of seeing and reasoning in existing VLMs. To tackle this issue, we present Prism, an innovative framework designed to disentangle the perception and reasoning processes involved in visual question solving. Prism comprises two distinct stages: a perception stage that utilizes a VLM to extract and articulate visual information in textual form, and a reasoning stage that formulates responses based on the extracted visual information using a Large Language Model (LLM). This modular design enables the systematic comparison and assessment of both proprietary and open-source VLM for their perception and reasoning strengths. Our analytical framework provides several valuable insights, underscoring Prism's potential as a cost-effective solution for vision-language tasks. By combining a streamlined VLM focused on perception with a powerful LLM tailored for reasoning, Prism achieves superior results in general vision-language tasks while substantially cutting down on training and operational expenses. Quantitative evaluations show that Prism, when configured with a vanilla 2B LLaVA and freely accessible GPT-3.5, delivers performance on par with VLMs 10 times larger on the rigorous multimodal benchmark MMStar. The project is released at: https://github.com/SparksJoe/Prism.

Answering complex visual questions like `Which red furniture can be used for sitting?' requires multi-step reasoning, including object recognition, attribute filtering, and relational understanding. Recent work improves interpretability in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) by decomposing tasks into sub-task programs, but these methods are computationally expensive and less accurate due to poor adaptation to target data. To address this, we introduce VISTAR (Visually Interpretable Subtask-Aware Reasoning Model), a subtask-driven training framework that enhances both interpretability and reasoning by generating textual and visual explanations within MLLMs. Instead of relying on external models, VISTAR fine-tunes MLLMs to produce structured Subtask-of-Thought rationales (step-by-step reasoning sequences). Experiments on two benchmarks show that VISTAR consistently improves reasoning accuracy while maintaining interpretability. Our code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/ChengJade/VISTAR.

Unified multimodal models are envisioned to bridge the gap between understanding and generation. Yet, to achieve competitive performance, state-of-the-art models adopt largely decoupled understanding and generation components. This design, while effective for individual tasks, weakens the connection required for mutual enhancement, leaving the potential synergy empirically uncertain. We propose to explicitly restore this synergy by introducing Understanding-Oriented Post-Training (UNO), a lightweight framework that treats understanding not only as a distinct task, but also a direct supervisory signal to steer generative representations. By incorporating objectives that encode semantic abstraction (captioning) and structural details (visual regression), we enable effective gradient flow from understanding to generation. Extensive experiments on image generation and editing demonstrate that understanding can serve as an effective catalyst for generation.

We humans are good at translating third-person observations of hand-object interactions (HOI) into an egocentric view. However, current methods struggle to replicate this ability of view adaptation from third-person to first-person. Although some approaches attempt to learn view-agnostic representation from large-scale video datasets, they ignore the relationships among multiple third-person views. To this end, we propose a Prompt-Oriented View-agnostic learning (POV) framework in this paper, which enables this view adaptation with few egocentric videos. Specifically, We introduce interactive masking prompts at the frame level to capture fine-grained action information, and view-aware prompts at the token level to learn view-agnostic representation. To verify our method, we establish two benchmarks for transferring from multiple third-person views to the egocentric view. Our extensive experiments on these benchmarks demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our POV framework and prompt tuning techniques in terms of view adaptation and view generalization. Our code is available at https://github.com/xuboshen/pov_acmmm2023.

Objects undergo varying amounts of perspective distortion as they move across a camera's field of view. Models for predicting 3D from a single image often work with crops around the object of interest and ignore the location of the object in the camera's field of view. We note that ignoring this location information further exaggerates the inherent ambiguity in making 3D inferences from 2D images and can prevent models from even fitting to the training data. To mitigate this ambiguity, we propose Intrinsics-Aware Positional Encoding (KPE), which incorporates information about the location of crops in the image and camera intrinsics. Experiments on three popular 3D-from-a-single-image benchmarks: depth prediction on NYU, 3D object detection on KITTI & nuScenes, and predicting 3D shapes of articulated objects on ARCTIC, show the benefits of KPE.

Current Vision Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate a critical gap between surface-level recognition and deep narrative reasoning when processing sequential visual storytelling. Through a comprehensive investigation of manga narrative understanding, we reveal that while recent large multimodal models excel at individual panel interpretation, they systematically fail at temporal causality and cross-panel cohesion, core requirements for coherent story comprehension. We introduce a novel evaluation framework that combines fine-grained multimodal annotation, cross-modal embedding analysis, and retrieval-augmented assessment to systematically characterize these limitations. Our methodology includes (i) a rigorous annotation protocol linking visual elements to narrative structure through aligned light novel text, (ii) comprehensive evaluation across multiple reasoning paradigms, including direct inference and retrieval-augmented generation, and (iii) cross-modal similarity analysis revealing fundamental misalignments in current VLMs' joint representations. Applying this framework to Re:Zero manga across 11 chapters with 308 annotated panels, we conduct the first systematic study of long-form narrative understanding in VLMs through three core evaluation axes: generative storytelling, contextual dialogue grounding, and temporal reasoning. Our findings demonstrate that current models lack genuine story-level intelligence, struggling particularly with non-linear narratives, character consistency, and causal inference across extended sequences. This work establishes both the foundation and practical methodology for evaluating narrative intelligence, while providing actionable insights into the capability of deep sequential understanding of Discrete Visual Narratives beyond basic recognition in Multimodal Models. Project Page: https://re-verse.vercel.app

Knowing others' intentions and taking others' perspectives are two core components of human intelligence that are considered to be instantiations of theory-of-mind. Infiltrating machines with these abilities is an important step towards building human-level artificial intelligence. Here, to investigate intentionality understanding and level-2 perspective-taking in Vision Language Models (VLMs), we constructed the IntentBench and PerspectBench, which together contains over 300 cognitive experiments grounded in real-world scenarios and classic cognitive tasks. We found VLMs achieving high performance on intentionality understanding but low performance on level-2 perspective-taking. This suggests a potential dissociation between simulation-based and theory-based theory-of-mind abilities in VLMs, highlighting the concern that they are not capable of using model-based reasoning to infer others' mental states. See https://growing-ai-like-a-child.github.io/{Website}

Multi-view visual reasoning is essential for intelligent systems that must understand complex environments from sparse and discrete viewpoints, yet existing research has largely focused on single-image or temporally dense video settings. In real-world scenarios, reasoning across views requires integrating partial observations without explicit guidance, while collecting large-scale multi-view data with accurate geometric and semantic annotations remains challenging. To address this gap, we leverage physically grounded simulation to construct diverse, high-fidelity 3D scenes with precise per-view metadata, enabling scalable data generation that remains transferable to real-world settings. Based on this engine, we introduce VIEW2SPACE, a multi-dimensional benchmark for sparse multi-view reasoning, together with a scalable, disjoint training split supporting millions of grounded question-answer pairs. Using this benchmark, a comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art vision-language and spatial models reveals that multi-view reasoning remains largely unsolved, with most models performing only marginally above random guessing. We further investigate whether training can bridge this gap. Our proposed Grounded Chain-of-Thought with Visual Evidence substantially improves performance under moderate difficulty, and generalizes to real-world data, outperforming existing approaches in cross-dataset evaluation. We further conduct difficulty-aware scaling analyses across model size, data scale, reasoning depth, and visibility constraints, indicating that while geometric perception can benefit from scaling under sufficient visibility, deep compositional reasoning across sparse views remains a fundamental challenge.

Automatic radiology report generation is booming due to its huge application potential for the healthcare industry. However, existing computer vision and natural language processing approaches to tackle this problem are limited in two aspects. First, when extracting image features, most of them neglect multi-view reasoning in vision and model single-view structure of medical images, such as space-view or channel-view. However, clinicians rely on multi-view imaging information for comprehensive judgment in daily clinical diagnosis. Second, when generating reports, they overlook context reasoning with multi-modal information and focus on pure textual optimization utilizing retrieval-based methods. We aim to address these two issues by proposing a model that better simulates clinicians' perspectives and generates more accurate reports. Given the above limitation in feature extraction, we propose a Globally-intensive Attention (GIA) module in the medical image encoder to simulate and integrate multi-view vision perception. GIA aims to learn three types of vision perception: depth view, space view, and pixel view. On the other hand, to address the above problem in report generation, we explore how to involve multi-modal signals to generate precisely matched reports, i.e., how to integrate previously predicted words with region-aware visual content in next word prediction. Specifically, we design a Visual Knowledge-guided Decoder (VKGD), which can adaptively consider how much the model needs to rely on visual information and previously predicted text to assist next word prediction. Hence, our final Intensive Vision-guided Network (IVGN) framework includes a GIA-guided Visual Encoder and the VKGD. Experiments on two commonly-used datasets IU X-Ray and MIMIC-CXR demonstrate the superior ability of our method compared with other state-of-the-art approaches.

Embodied question answering (EQA) in 3D environments often requires collecting context that is distributed across multiple viewpoints and partially occluded. However, most recent vision--language models (VLMs) are constrained to a fixed and finite set of input views, which limits their ability to acquire question-relevant context at inference time and hinders complex spatial reasoning. We propose Chain-of-View (CoV) prompting, a training-free, test-time reasoning framework that transforms a VLM into an active viewpoint reasoner through a coarse-to-fine exploration process. CoV first employs a View Selection agent to filter redundant frames and identify question-aligned anchor views. It then performs fine-grained view adjustment by interleaving iterative reasoning with discrete camera actions, obtaining new observations from the underlying 3D scene representation until sufficient context is gathered or a step budget is reached. We evaluate CoV on OpenEQA across four mainstream VLMs and obtain an average +11.56\% improvement in LLM-Match, with a maximum gain of +13.62\% on Qwen3-VL-Flash. CoV further exhibits test-time scaling: increasing the minimum action budget yields an additional +2.51\% average improvement, peaking at +3.73\% on Gemini-2.5-Flash. On ScanQA and SQA3D, CoV delivers strong performance (e.g., 116 CIDEr / 31.9 EM@1 on ScanQA and 51.1 EM@1 on SQA3D). Overall, these results suggest that question-aligned view selection coupled with open-view search is an effective, model-agnostic strategy for improving spatial reasoning in 3D EQA without additional training.

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.

While perspective is a well-studied topic in art, it is generally taken for granted in images. However, for the recent wave of high-quality image synthesis methods such as latent diffusion models, perspective accuracy is not an explicit requirement. Since these methods are capable of outputting a wide gamut of possible images, it is difficult for these synthesized images to adhere to the principles of linear perspective. We introduce a novel geometric constraint in the training process of generative models to enforce perspective accuracy. We show that outputs of models trained with this constraint both appear more realistic and improve performance of downstream models trained on generated images. Subjective human trials show that images generated with latent diffusion models trained with our constraint are preferred over images from the Stable Diffusion V2 model 70% of the time. SOTA monocular depth estimation models such as DPT and PixelFormer, fine-tuned on our images, outperform the original models trained on real images by up to 7.03% in RMSE and 19.3% in SqRel on the KITTI test set for zero-shot transfer.

Our understanding of the visual world is centered around various concept axes, characterizing different aspects of visual entities. While different concept axes can be easily specified by language, e.g. color, the exact visual nuances along each axis often exceed the limitations of linguistic articulations, e.g. a particular style of painting. In this work, our goal is to learn a language-informed visual concept representation, by simply distilling large pre-trained vision-language models. Specifically, we train a set of concept encoders to encode the information pertinent to a set of language-informed concept axes, with an objective of reproducing the input image through a pre-trained Text-to-Image (T2I) model. To encourage better disentanglement of different concept encoders, we anchor the concept embeddings to a set of text embeddings obtained from a pre-trained Visual Question Answering (VQA) model. At inference time, the model extracts concept embeddings along various axes from new test images, which can be remixed to generate images with novel compositions of visual concepts. With a lightweight test-time finetuning procedure, it can also generalize to novel concepts unseen at training.

Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show great potential in natural image understanding. Yet, they perform well, mainly on reasoning in-view contents within the image frame. This paper presents the first study on out-of-view (OOV) understanding, i.e., the ability to reason objects, activities, and scenes beyond the visible frame of a perspective view. Our technical contributions are threefold. First, we design OpenView, a four-stage pipeline to massively generate multi-choice VQA by leveraging panoramic imagery to enable context-rich and spatial-grounded VQA synthesis with free-view framing. Second, we curate OpenView-Dataset, a high-quality synthetic dataset from diverse real-world panoramas to empower MLLMs upon supervised fine-tuning. Third, we build OpenView-Bench, a benchmark that jointly measures choice and rationale accuracy for interpretable and diagnosable evaluation. Experimental results show that despite having a large gap from human performance in OOV VQA answer selection, upon empowered by OpenView, multiple MLLMs can consistently boost their performance, uplifted from 48.6% to 64.1% on average. Code, benchmark, and data will be available at https://github.com/q1xiangchen/OpenView.

We present Muskie, a native multi-view vision backbone designed for 3D vision tasks. Unlike existing models, which are frame-wise and exhibit limited multi-view consistency, Muskie is designed to process multiple views simultaneously and introduce multi-view consistency in pre-training stage. Muskie is trained to reconstruct heavily masked content in one view by finding and utilizing geometric correspondences from other views. Through this pretext task and our proposed aggressive masking strategy, the model implicitly to learn view-invariant features and develop strong geometric understanding without any 3D supervision. Compared with state-of-the-art frame-wise backbones such as DINO, Muskie achieves higher multi-view correspondence accuracy. Furthermore, we demonstrate that using Muskie as a backbone consistently enhances performance on downstream 3D tasks, including camera pose estimation and pointmap reconstruction. Codes are publicly available at https://leo-frank.github.io/Muskie/

Humans are able to accurately reason in 3D by gathering multi-view observations of the surrounding world. Inspired by this insight, we introduce a new large-scale benchmark for 3D multi-view visual question answering (3DMV-VQA). This dataset is collected by an embodied agent actively moving and capturing RGB images in an environment using the Habitat simulator. In total, it consists of approximately 5k scenes, 600k images, paired with 50k questions. We evaluate various state-of-the-art models for visual reasoning on our benchmark and find that they all perform poorly. We suggest that a principled approach for 3D reasoning from multi-view images should be to infer a compact 3D representation of the world from the multi-view images, which is further grounded on open-vocabulary semantic concepts, and then to execute reasoning on these 3D representations. As the first step towards this approach, we propose a novel 3D concept learning and reasoning (3D-CLR) framework that seamlessly combines these components via neural fields, 2D pre-trained vision-language models, and neural reasoning operators. Experimental results suggest that our framework outperforms baseline models by a large margin, but the challenge remains largely unsolved. We further perform an in-depth analysis of the challenges and highlight potential future directions.

3D spatial understanding is essential in real-world applications such as robotics, autonomous vehicles, virtual reality, and medical imaging. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs), having demonstrated remarkable success across various domains, have been leveraged to enhance 3D understanding tasks, showing potential to surpass traditional computer vision methods. In this survey, we present a comprehensive review of methods integrating LLMs with 3D spatial understanding. We propose a taxonomy that categorizes existing methods into three branches: image-based methods deriving 3D understanding from 2D visual data, point cloud-based methods working directly with 3D representations, and hybrid modality-based methods combining multiple data streams. We systematically review representative methods along these categories, covering data representations, architectural modifications, and training strategies that bridge textual and 3D modalities. Finally, we discuss current limitations, including dataset scarcity and computational challenges, while highlighting promising research directions in spatial perception, multi-modal fusion, and real-world applications.

Current research in multimodal models faces a key challenge where enhancing generative capabilities often comes at the expense of understanding, and vice versa. We analyzed this trade-off and identify the primary cause might be the potential conflict between generation and understanding, which creates a competitive dynamic within the model. To address this, we propose the Reason-Reflect-Refine (R3) framework. This innovative algorithm re-frames the single-step generation task into a multi-step process of "generate-understand-regenerate". By explicitly leveraging the model's understanding capability during generation, we successfully mitigate the optimization dilemma, achieved stronger generation results and improved understanding ability which are related to the generation process. This offers valuable insights for designing next-generation unified multimodal models. Code is available at https://github.com/sen-ye/R3.

Multi-view understanding, the ability to reconcile visual information across diverse viewpoints for effective navigation, manipulation, and 3D scene comprehension, is a fundamental challenge in Multi-Modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to be used as embodied agents. While recent MLLMs have shown impressive advances in high-level reasoning and planning, they frequently fall short when confronted with multi-view geometric consistency and cross-view correspondence. To comprehensively evaluate the challenges of MLLMs in multi-view scene reasoning, we propose All-Angles Bench, a benchmark of over 2,100 human carefully annotated multi-view question-answer pairs across 90 diverse real-world scenes. Our six tasks (counting, attribute identification, relative distance, relative direction, object manipulation, and camera pose estimation) specifically test model's geometric correspondence and the capacity to align information consistently across views. Our extensive experiments, benchmark on 27 representative MLLMs including Gemini-2.0-Flash, Claude-3.7-Sonnet, and GPT-4o against human evaluators reveals a substantial performance gap, indicating that current MLLMs remain far from human-level proficiency. Through in-depth analysis, we show that MLLMs are particularly underperforming under two aspects: (1) cross-view correspondence for partially occluded views and (2) establishing the coarse camera poses. These findings highlight the necessity of domain-specific refinements or modules that embed stronger multi-view awareness. We believe that our All-Angles Bench offers valuable insights and contribute to bridging the gap between MLLMs and human-level multi-view understanding. The project and benchmark are publicly available at https://danielchyeh.github.io/All-Angles-Bench/.

Spatial understanding is a fundamental aspect of computer vision and integral for human-level reasoning about images, making it an important component for grounded language understanding. While recent text-to-image synthesis (T2I) models have shown unprecedented improvements in photorealism, it is unclear whether they have reliable spatial understanding capabilities. We investigate the ability of T2I models to generate correct spatial relationships among objects and present VISOR, an evaluation metric that captures how accurately the spatial relationship described in text is generated in the image. To benchmark existing models, we introduce a dataset, SR_{2D}, that contains sentences describing two or more objects and the spatial relationships between them. We construct an automated evaluation pipeline to recognize objects and their spatial relationships, and employ it in a large-scale evaluation of T2I models. Our experiments reveal a surprising finding that, although state-of-the-art T2I models exhibit high image quality, they are severely limited in their ability to generate multiple objects or the specified spatial relations between them. Our analyses demonstrate several biases and artifacts of T2I models such as the difficulty with generating multiple objects, a bias towards generating the first object mentioned, spatially inconsistent outputs for equivalent relationships, and a correlation between object co-occurrence and spatial understanding capabilities. We conduct a human study that shows the alignment between VISOR and human judgement about spatial understanding. We offer the SR_{2D} dataset and the VISOR metric to the community in support of T2I reasoning research.

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.

Geometric camera calibration is often required for applications that understand the perspective of the image. We propose perspective fields as a representation that models the local perspective properties of an image. Perspective Fields contain per-pixel information about the camera view, parameterized as an up vector and a latitude value. This representation has a number of advantages as it makes minimal assumptions about the camera model and is invariant or equivariant to common image editing operations like cropping, warping, and rotation. It is also more interpretable and aligned with human perception. We train a neural network to predict Perspective Fields and the predicted Perspective Fields can be converted to calibration parameters easily. We demonstrate the robustness of our approach under various scenarios compared with camera calibration-based methods and show example applications in image compositing.

In this paper, we delve into the intricate dynamics of Fine-Grained Sketch-Based Image Retrieval (FG-SBIR) by addressing a critical yet overlooked aspect -- the choice of viewpoint during sketch creation. Unlike photo systems that seamlessly handle diverse views through extensive datasets, sketch systems, with limited data collected from fixed perspectives, face challenges. Our pilot study, employing a pre-trained FG-SBIR model, highlights the system's struggle when query-sketches differ in viewpoint from target instances. Interestingly, a questionnaire however shows users desire autonomy, with a significant percentage favouring view-specific retrieval. To reconcile this, we advocate for a view-aware system, seamlessly accommodating both view-agnostic and view-specific tasks. Overcoming dataset limitations, our first contribution leverages multi-view 2D projections of 3D objects, instilling cross-modal view awareness. The second contribution introduces a customisable cross-modal feature through disentanglement, allowing effortless mode switching. Extensive experiments on standard datasets validate the effectiveness of our method.

In recent years, cross-modal reasoning (CMR), the process of understanding and reasoning across different modalities, has emerged as a pivotal area with applications spanning from multimedia analysis to healthcare diagnostics. As the deployment of AI systems becomes more ubiquitous, the demand for transparency and comprehensibility in these systems' decision-making processes has intensified. This survey delves into the realm of interpretable cross-modal reasoning (I-CMR), where the objective is not only to achieve high predictive performance but also to provide human-understandable explanations for the results. This survey presents a comprehensive overview of the typical methods with a three-level taxonomy for I-CMR. Furthermore, this survey reviews the existing CMR datasets with annotations for explanations. Finally, this survey summarizes the challenges for I-CMR and discusses potential future directions. In conclusion, this survey aims to catalyze the progress of this emerging research area by providing researchers with a panoramic and comprehensive perspective, illuminating the state of the art and discerning the opportunities. The summarized methods, datasets, and other resources are available at https://github.com/ZuyiZhou/Awesome-Interpretable-Cross-modal-Reasoning.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have witnessed significant progress on visual understanding tasks. However, they often prioritize language knowledge over image information on visual reasoning tasks, incurring performance degradation. To tackle this issue, we first identify the drawbacks of existing solutions (i.e., insufficient and irrelevant visual descriptions, and limited multi-modal capacities). We then decompose visual reasoning process into two stages: visual perception (i.e., eyesight) and textual reasoning (i.e., wisdom), and introduce a novel visual reasoning framework named ProReason. This framework features multi-run proactive perception and decoupled vision-reasoning capabilities. Briefly, given a multi-modal question, ProReason iterates proactive information collection and reasoning until the answer can be concluded with necessary and sufficient visual descriptions. Notably, the disassociation of capabilities allows seamless integration of existing large language models (LLMs) to compensate for the reasoning deficits of LVLMs. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that ProReason outperforms both existing multi-step reasoning frameworks and passive peer methods on a wide range of benchmarks for both open-source and closed-source models. In addition, with the assistance of LLMs, ProReason achieves a performance improvement of up to 15% on MMMU benchmark. Our insights into existing solutions and the decoupled perspective for feasible integration of LLMs illuminate future research on visual reasoning techniques, especially LLM-assisted ones.

Captioning is a crucial and challenging task for video understanding. In videos that involve active agents such as humans, the agent's actions can bring about myriad changes in the scene. Observable changes such as movements, manipulations, and transformations of the objects in the scene, are reflected in conventional video captioning. Unlike images, actions in videos are also inherently linked to social aspects such as intentions (why the action is taking place), effects (what changes due to the action), and attributes that describe the agent. Thus for video understanding, such as when captioning videos or when answering questions about videos, one must have an understanding of these commonsense aspects. We present the first work on generating commonsense captions directly from videos, to describe latent aspects such as intentions, effects, and attributes. We present a new dataset "Video-to-Commonsense (V2C)" that contains sim9k videos of human agents performing various actions, annotated with 3 types of commonsense descriptions. Additionally we explore the use of open-ended video-based commonsense question answering (V2C-QA) as a way to enrich our captions. Both the generation task and the QA task can be used to enrich video captions.

Image descriptions can help visually impaired people to quickly understand the image content. While we made significant progress in automatically describing images and optical character recognition, current approaches are unable to include written text in their descriptions, although text is omnipresent in human environments and frequently critical to understand our surroundings. To study how to comprehend text in the context of an image we collect a novel dataset, TextCaps, with 145k captions for 28k images. Our dataset challenges a model to recognize text, relate it to its visual context, and decide what part of the text to copy or paraphrase, requiring spatial, semantic, and visual reasoning between multiple text tokens and visual entities, such as objects. We study baselines and adapt existing approaches to this new task, which we refer to as image captioning with reading comprehension. Our analysis with automatic and human studies shows that our new TextCaps dataset provides many new technical challenges over previous datasets.

Learning powerful representations in bird's-eye-view (BEV) for perception tasks is trending and drawing extensive attention both from industry and academia. Conventional approaches for most autonomous driving algorithms perform detection, segmentation, tracking, etc., in a front or perspective view. As sensor configurations get more complex, integrating multi-source information from different sensors and representing features in a unified view come of vital importance. BEV perception inherits several advantages, as representing surrounding scenes in BEV is intuitive and fusion-friendly; and representing objects in BEV is most desirable for subsequent modules as in planning and/or control. The core problems for BEV perception lie in (a) how to reconstruct the lost 3D information via view transformation from perspective view to BEV; (b) how to acquire ground truth annotations in BEV grid; (c) how to formulate the pipeline to incorporate features from different sources and views; and (d) how to adapt and generalize algorithms as sensor configurations vary across different scenarios. In this survey, we review the most recent works on BEV perception and provide an in-depth analysis of different solutions. Moreover, several systematic designs of BEV approach from the industry are depicted as well. Furthermore, we introduce a full suite of practical guidebook to improve the performance of BEV perception tasks, including camera, LiDAR and fusion inputs. At last, we point out the future research directions in this area. We hope this report will shed some light on the community and encourage more research effort on BEV perception. We keep an active repository to collect the most recent work and provide a toolbox for bag of tricks at https://github.com/OpenDriveLab/Birds-eye-view-Perception

Understanding and reasoning about the physical world requires spatial intelligence: the ability to interpret geometry, perspective, and spatial relations beyond 2D perception. While recent vision large models (VLMs) excel at visual understanding, they remain fundamentally 2D perceivers and struggle with genuine 3D reasoning. We introduce Think3D, a framework that enables VLM agents to think with 3D space. By leveraging 3D reconstruction models that recover point clouds and camera poses from images or videos, Think3D allows the agent to actively manipulate space through camera-based operations and ego/global-view switching, transforming spatial reasoning into an interactive 3D chain-of-thought process. Without additional training, Think3D significantly improves the spatial reasoning performance of advanced models such as GPT-4.1 and Gemini 2.5 Pro, yielding average gains of +7.8% on BLINK Multi-view and MindCube, and +4.7% on VSI-Bench. We further show that smaller models, which struggle with spatial exploration, benefit significantly from a reinforcement learning policy that enables the model to select informative viewpoints and operations. With RL, the benefit from tool usage increases from +0.7% to +6.8%. Our findings demonstrate that training-free, tool-augmented spatial exploration is a viable path toward more flexible and human-like 3D reasoning in multimodal agents, establishing a new dimension of multimodal intelligence. Code and weights are released at https://github.com/zhangzaibin/spagent.

In Marius von Senden's Space and Sight, a newly sighted blind patient describes the experience of a corner as lemon-like, because corners "prick" sight like lemons prick the tongue. Prickliness, here, is a dimension in the feature space of sensory experience, an effect of the perceived on the perceiver that arises where the two interact. In the account of the newly sighted, an effect familiar from one interaction translates to a novel context. Perception serves as the vehicle for generalization, in that an effect shared across different experiences produces a concrete abstraction grounded in those experiences. Cezanne and the post-impressionists, fluent in the language of experience translation, realized that the way to paint a concrete form that best reflected reality was to paint not what they saw, but what it was like to see. We envision a future of creation using AI where what it is like to see is replicable, transferrable, manipulable - part of the artist's palette that is both grounded in a particular context, and generalizable beyond it. An active line of research maps human-interpretable features onto directions in GAN latent space. Supervised and self-supervised approaches that search for anticipated directions or use off-the-shelf classifiers to drive image manipulation in embedding space are limited in the variety of features they can uncover. Unsupervised approaches that discover useful new directions show that the space of perceptually meaningful directions is nowhere close to being fully mapped. As this space is broad and full of creative potential, we want tools for direction discovery that capture the richness and generalizability of human perception. Our approach puts creators in the discovery loop during real-time tool use, in order to identify directions that are perceptually meaningful to them, and generate interpretable image translations along those directions.

Providing asynchronous feedback is a critical step in the 3D design workflow. A common approach to providing feedback is to pair textual comments with companion reference images, which helps illustrate the gist of text. Ideally, feedback providers should possess 3D and image editing skills to create reference images that can effectively describe what they have in mind. However, they often lack such skills, so they have to resort to sketches or online images which might not match well with the current 3D design. To address this, we introduce MemoVis, a text editor interface that assists feedback providers in creating reference images with generative AI driven by the feedback comments. First, a novel real-time viewpoint suggestion feature, based on a vision-language foundation model, helps feedback providers anchor a comment with a camera viewpoint. Second, given a camera viewpoint, we introduce three types of image modifiers, based on pre-trained 2D generative models, to turn a text comment into an updated version of the 3D scene from that viewpoint. We conducted a within-subjects study with feedback providers, demonstrating the effectiveness of MemoVis. The quality and explicitness of the companion images were evaluated by another eight participants with prior 3D design experience.

In the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, multi-modal large language models are emerging as a significant area of interest. These models, which combine various forms of data input, are becoming increasingly popular. However, understanding their internal mechanisms remains a complex task. Numerous advancements have been made in the field of explainability tools and mechanisms, yet there is still much to explore. In this work, we present a novel interactive application aimed towards understanding the internal mechanisms of large vision-language models. Our interface is designed to enhance the interpretability of the image patches, which are instrumental in generating an answer, and assess the efficacy of the language model in grounding its output in the image. With our application, a user can systematically investigate the model and uncover system limitations, paving the way for enhancements in system capabilities. Finally, we present a case study of how our application can aid in understanding failure mechanisms in a popular large multi-modal model: LLaVA.

Large diffusion models demonstrate remarkable zero-shot capabilities in novel view synthesis from a single image. However, these models often face challenges in maintaining consistency across novel and reference views. A crucial factor leading to this issue is the limited utilization of contextual information from reference views. Specifically, when there is an overlap in the viewing frustum between two views, it is essential to ensure that the corresponding regions maintain consistency in both geometry and appearance. This observation leads to a simple yet effective approach, where we propose to use epipolar geometry to locate and retrieve overlapping information from the input view. This information is then incorporated into the generation of target views, eliminating the need for training or fine-tuning, as the process requires no learnable parameters. Furthermore, to enhance the overall consistency of generated views, we extend the utilization of epipolar attention to a multi-view setting, allowing retrieval of overlapping information from the input view and other target views. Qualitative and quantitative experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in significantly improving the consistency of synthesized views without the need for any fine-tuning. Moreover, This enhancement also boosts the performance of downstream applications such as 3D reconstruction. The code is available at https://github.com/botaoye/ConsisSyn.

We propose LENS, a modular approach for tackling computer vision problems by leveraging the power of large language models (LLMs). Our system uses a language model to reason over outputs from a set of independent and highly descriptive vision modules that provide exhaustive information about an image. We evaluate the approach on pure computer vision settings such as zero- and few-shot object recognition, as well as on vision and language problems. LENS can be applied to any off-the-shelf LLM and we find that the LLMs with LENS perform highly competitively with much bigger and much more sophisticated systems, without any multimodal training whatsoever. We open-source our code at https://github.com/ContextualAI/lens and provide an interactive demo.

While recent advancements in vision-language models have revolutionized multi-modal understanding, it remains unclear whether they possess the capabilities of comprehending the generated images. Compared to real data, synthetic images exhibit a higher degree of diversity in both content and style, for which there are significant difficulties for the models to fully apprehend. To this end, we present a large-scale dataset, JourneyDB, for multi-modal visual understanding in generative images. Our curated dataset covers 4 million diverse and high-quality generated images paired with the text prompts used to produce them. We further design 4 benchmarks to quantify the performance of generated image understanding in terms of both content and style interpretation. These benchmarks include prompt inversion, style retrieval, image captioning and visual question answering. Lastly, we assess the performance of current state-of-the-art multi-modal models when applied to JourneyDB, and provide an in-depth analysis of their strengths and limitations in generated content understanding. We hope the proposed dataset and benchmarks will facilitate the research in the field of generative content understanding. The dataset will be available on https://journeydb.github.io.

Sequential vision-to-language or visual storytelling has recently been one of the areas of focus in computer vision and language modeling domains. Though existing models generate narratives that read subjectively well, there could be cases when these models miss out on generating stories that account and address all prospective human and animal characters in the image sequences. Considering this scenario, we propose a model that implicitly learns relationships between provided characters and thereby generates stories with respective characters in scope. We use the VIST dataset for this purpose and report numerous statistics on the dataset. Eventually, we describe the model, explain the experiment and discuss our current status and future work.

Affordance understanding, the task of identifying actionable regions on 3D objects, plays a vital role in allowing robotic systems to engage with and operate within the physical world. Although Visual Language Models (VLMs) have excelled in high-level reasoning and long-horizon planning for robotic manipulation, they still fall short in grasping the nuanced physical properties required for effective human-robot interaction. In this paper, we introduce PAVLM (Point cloud Affordance Vision-Language Model), an innovative framework that utilizes the extensive multimodal knowledge embedded in pre-trained language models to enhance 3D affordance understanding of point cloud. PAVLM integrates a geometric-guided propagation module with hidden embeddings from large language models (LLMs) to enrich visual semantics. On the language side, we prompt Llama-3.1 models to generate refined context-aware text, augmenting the instructional input with deeper semantic cues. Experimental results on the 3D-AffordanceNet benchmark demonstrate that PAVLM outperforms baseline methods for both full and partial point clouds, particularly excelling in its generalization to novel open-world affordance tasks of 3D objects. For more information, visit our project site: pavlm-source.github.io.

The rapid development of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) for 2D images and videos has spurred efforts to adapt these models for interpreting 3D scenes. However, the absence of large-scale 3D vision-language datasets has posed a significant obstacle. To address this issue, typical approaches focus on injecting 3D awareness into 2D LMMs by designing 3D input-level scene representations. This work provides a new perspective. We introduce reconstructive visual instruction tuning with 3D-awareness (Ross3D), which integrates 3D-aware visual supervision into the training procedure. Specifically, it incorporates cross-view and global-view reconstruction. The former requires reconstructing masked views by aggregating overlapping information from other views. The latter aims to aggregate information from all available views to recover Bird's-Eye-View images, contributing to a comprehensive overview of the entire scene. Empirically, Ross3D achieves state-of-the-art performance across various 3D scene understanding benchmarks. More importantly, our semi-supervised experiments demonstrate significant potential in leveraging large amounts of unlabeled 3D vision-only data.

We present SpinBench, a cognitively grounded diagnostic benchmark for evaluating spatial reasoning in vision language models (VLMs). SpinBench is designed around the core challenge of spatial reasoning: perspective taking, the ability to reason about how scenes and object relations change under viewpoint transformation. Since perspective taking requires multiple cognitive capabilities, such as recognizing objects across views, relative positions grounding, and mentally simulating transformations, SpinBench introduces a set of fine-grained diagnostic categories. Our categories target translation, rotation, object relative pose, and viewpoint change, and are progressively structured so that single-object simpler tasks scaffold toward the most demanding multi-object perspective-taking setting. We evaluate 37 state-of-the-art VLMs, both proprietary and open source. Results reveal systematic weaknesses: strong egocentric bias, poor rotational understanding, and inconsistencies under symmetrical and syntactic reformulations. Scaling analysis shows both smooth improvements and emergent capabilities. While human subjects achieve high accuracy (91.2\%), task difficulty as measured by human response time shows strong correlation with VLM accuracy, indicating that SpinBench captures spatial reasoning challenges shared across humans and VLMs. We believe SpinBench provides critical insights into spatial reasoning in VLMs and highlights key gaps in their ability to reason about physical space. Our website can be found at https://spinbench25.github.io/.

Frontier models are transitioning from multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that merely ingest visual information to unified multimodal models (UMMs) capable of native interleaved generation. This shift has sparked interest in using intermediate visualizations as a reasoning aid, akin to human mental imagery. Central to this idea is the ability to form, maintain, and manipulate visual representations in a goal-oriented manner. To evaluate and probe this capability, we develop MentisOculi, a procedural, stratified suite of multi-step reasoning problems amenable to visual solution, tuned to challenge frontier models. Evaluating visual strategies ranging from latent tokens to explicit generated imagery, we find they generally fail to improve performance. Analysis of UMMs specifically exposes a critical limitation: While they possess the textual reasoning capacity to solve a task and can sometimes generate correct visuals, they suffer from compounding generation errors and fail to leverage even ground-truth visualizations. Our findings suggest that despite their inherent appeal, visual thoughts do not yet benefit model reasoning. MentisOculi establishes the necessary foundation to analyze and close this gap across diverse model families.

Visual-Language Models (VLMs) have become a powerful tool for bridging the gap between visual and linguistic understanding. However, the conventional learning approaches for VLMs often suffer from limitations, such as the high resource requirements of collecting and training image-text paired data. Recent research has suggested that language understanding plays a crucial role in the performance of VLMs, potentially indicating that text-only training could be a viable approach. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of enhancing fine-grained visual understanding in VLMs through text-only training. Inspired by how humans develop visual concept understanding, where rich textual descriptions can guide visual recognition, we hypothesize that VLMs can also benefit from leveraging text-based representations to improve their visual recognition abilities. We conduct comprehensive experiments on two distinct domains: fine-grained species classification and cultural visual understanding tasks. Our findings demonstrate that text-only training can be comparable to conventional image-text training while significantly reducing computational costs. This suggests a more efficient and cost-effective pathway for advancing VLM capabilities, particularly valuable in resource-constrained environments.

This paper presents Omni-View, which extends the unified multimodal understanding and generation to 3D scenes based on multiview images, exploring the principle that "generation facilitates understanding". Consisting of understanding model, texture module, and geometry module, Omni-View jointly models scene understanding, novel view synthesis, and geometry estimation, enabling synergistic interaction between 3D scene understanding and generation tasks. By design, it leverages the spatiotemporal modeling capabilities of its texture module responsible for appearance synthesis, alongside the explicit geometric constraints provided by its dedicated geometry module, thereby enriching the model's holistic understanding of 3D scenes. Trained with a two-stage strategy, Omni-View achieves a state-of-the-art score of 55.4 on the VSI-Bench benchmark, outperforming existing specialized 3D understanding models, while simultaneously delivering strong performance in both novel view synthesis and 3D scene generation.

One characteristic that makes humans superior to modern artificially intelligent models is the ability to interpret images beyond what is visually apparent. Consider the following two natural language search queries - (i) "a queue of customers patiently waiting to buy ice cream" and (ii) "a queue of tourists going to see a famous Mughal architecture in India." Interpreting these queries requires one to reason with (i) Commonsense such as interpreting people as customers or tourists, actions as waiting to buy or going to see; and (ii) Fact or world knowledge associated with named visual entities, for example, whether the store in the image sells ice cream or whether the landmark in the image is a Mughal architecture located in India. Such reasoning goes beyond just visual recognition. To enable both commonsense and factual reasoning in the image search, we present a unified framework, namely Knowledge Retrieval-Augmented Multimodal Transformer (KRAMT), that treats the named visual entities in an image as a gateway to encyclopedic knowledge and leverages them along with natural language query to ground relevant knowledge. Further, KRAMT seamlessly integrates visual content and grounded knowledge to learn alignment between images and search queries. This unified framework is then used to perform image search requiring commonsense and factual reasoning. The retrieval performance of KRAMT is evaluated and compared with related approaches on a new dataset we introduce - namely COFAR. We make our code and dataset available at https://vl2g.github.io/projects/cofar

Large Vision-Language models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities in tasks requiring a fine-grained understanding of literal images and text, such as visual question-answering or visual entailment. However, there has been little exploration of these models' capabilities when presented with images and captions containing figurative phenomena such as metaphors or humor, the meaning of which is often implicit. To close this gap, we propose a new task and a high-quality dataset: Visual Figurative Language Understanding with Textual Explanations (V-FLUTE). We frame the visual figurative language understanding problem as an explainable visual entailment task, where the model has to predict whether the image (premise) entails a claim (hypothesis) and justify the predicted label with a textual explanation. Using a human-AI collaboration framework, we build a high-quality dataset, V-FLUTE, that contains 6,027 <image, claim, label, explanation> instances spanning five diverse multimodal figurative phenomena: metaphors, similes, idioms, sarcasm, and humor. The figurative phenomena can be present either in the image, the caption, or both. We further conduct both automatic and human evaluations to assess current VLMs' capabilities in understanding figurative phenomena.

The ability to use natural language to talk about visual events is at the core of human intelligence and a crucial feature of any artificial intelligence system. In recent years, a substantial body of work in visually grounded NLP has focused on describing content depicted in single images. By contrast, comparatively less attention has been devoted to exhaustively modeling scenarios in which natural language is employed to interpret and talk about events presented through videos or sequences of images. In this position paper, we argue that any NLG task dealing with sequences of images or frames is an instance of the broader, more general problem of modeling the intricate relationships between visual events unfolding over time and the features of the language used to interpret, describe, or narrate them. Therefore, solving these tasks requires models to be capable of identifying and managing such intricacies. We consider five seemingly different tasks, which we argue are compelling instances of this broader multimodal problem. Consistently, we claim that these tasks pose a common set of challenges and share similarities in terms of modeling and evaluation approaches. Building on this perspective, we identify key open questions and propose several research directions for future investigation. We claim that improving language-and-vision models' understanding of visual events is both timely and essential, given their growing applications. Additionally, this challenge offers significant scientific insight, advancing model development through principles of human cognition and language use.

Recent Text-to-Video (T2V) models have demonstrated powerful capability in visual simulation of real-world geometry and physical laws, indicating its potential as implicit world models. Inspired by this, we explore the feasibility of leveraging the video generation prior for viewpoint planning from given 4D scenes, since videos internally accompany dynamic scenes with natural viewpoints. To this end, we propose a two-stage paradigm to adapt pre-trained T2V models for viewpoint prediction, in a compatible manner. First, we inject the 4D scene representation into the pre-trained T2V model via an adaptive learning branch, where the 4D scene is viewpoint-agnostic and the conditional generated video embeds the viewpoints visually. Then, we formulate viewpoint extraction as a hybrid-condition guided camera extrinsic denoising process. Specifically, a camera extrinsic diffusion branch is further introduced onto the pre-trained T2V model, by taking the generated video and 4D scene as input. Experimental results show the superiority of our proposed method over existing competitors, and ablation studies validate the effectiveness of our key technical designs. To some extent, this work proves the potential of video generation models toward 4D interaction in real world.

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation has been an efficient approach to transferring the semantic segmentation model across data distributions. Meanwhile, the recent Open-vocabulary Semantic Scene understanding based on large-scale vision language models is effective in open-set settings because it can learn diverse concepts and categories. However, these prior methods fail to generalize across different camera views due to the lack of cross-view geometric modeling. At present, there are limited studies analyzing cross-view learning. To address this problem, we introduce a novel Unsupervised Cross-view Adaptation Learning approach to modeling the geometric structural change across views in Semantic Scene Understanding. First, we introduce a novel Cross-view Geometric Constraint on Unpaired Data to model structural changes in images and segmentation masks across cameras. Second, we present a new Geodesic Flow-based Correlation Metric to efficiently measure the geometric structural changes across camera views. Third, we introduce a novel view-condition prompting mechanism to enhance the view-information modeling of the open-vocabulary segmentation network in cross-view adaptation learning. The experiments on different cross-view adaptation benchmarks have shown the effectiveness of our approach in cross-view modeling, demonstrating that we achieve State-of-the-Art (SOTA) performance compared to prior unsupervised domain adaptation and open-vocabulary semantic segmentation methods.

Multi-view representation learning aims to derive robust representations that are both view-consistent and view-specific from diverse data sources. This paper presents an in-depth analysis of existing approaches in this domain, highlighting a commonly overlooked aspect: the redundancy between view-consistent and view-specific representations. To this end, we propose an innovative framework for multi-view representation learning, which incorporates a technique we term 'distilled disentangling'. Our method introduces the concept of masked cross-view prediction, enabling the extraction of compact, high-quality view-consistent representations from various sources without incurring extra computational overhead. Additionally, we develop a distilled disentangling module that efficiently filters out consistency-related information from multi-view representations, resulting in purer view-specific representations. This approach significantly reduces redundancy between view-consistent and view-specific representations, enhancing the overall efficiency of the learning process. Our empirical evaluations reveal that higher mask ratios substantially improve the quality of view-consistent representations. Moreover, we find that reducing the dimensionality of view-consistent representations relative to that of view-specific representations further refines the quality of the combined representations. Our code is accessible at: https://github.com/Guanzhou-Ke/MRDD.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable visual understanding performance on both vision-language and vision-centric tasks. However, they often fall short in integrating advanced, task-specific capabilities for compositional reasoning, which hinders their progress toward truly competent general vision models. To address this, we present a unified visual reasoning mechanism that enables LMMs to solve complicated compositional problems by leveraging their intrinsic capabilities (e.g. grounding and visual understanding capabilities). Different from the previous shortcut learning mechanism, our approach introduces a human-like understanding-thinking-answering process, allowing the model to complete all steps in a single pass forwarding without the need for multiple inferences or external tools. This design bridges the gap between foundational visual capabilities and general question answering, encouraging LMMs to generate faithful and traceable responses for complex visual reasoning. Meanwhile, we curate 334K visual instruction samples covering both general scenes and text-rich scenes and involving multiple foundational visual capabilities. Our trained model, Griffon-R, has the ability of end-to-end automatic understanding, self-thinking, and reasoning answers. Comprehensive experiments show that Griffon-R not only achieves advancing performance on complex visual reasoning benchmarks including VSR and CLEVR, but also enhances multimodal capabilities across various benchmarks like MMBench and ScienceQA. Data, models, and codes will be release at https://github.com/jefferyZhan/Griffon/tree/master/Griffon-R soon.

Dramatic progress has been witnessed in basic vision tasks involving low-level perception, such as object recognition, detection, and tracking. Unfortunately, there is still an enormous performance gap between artificial vision systems and human intelligence in terms of higher-level vision problems, especially ones involving reasoning. Earlier attempts in equipping machines with high-level reasoning have hovered around Visual Question Answering (VQA), one typical task associating vision and language understanding. In this work, we propose a new dataset, built in the context of Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM) and aimed at lifting machine intelligence by associating vision with structural, relational, and analogical reasoning in a hierarchical representation. Unlike previous works in measuring abstract reasoning using RPM, we establish a semantic link between vision and reasoning by providing structure representation. This addition enables a new type of abstract reasoning by jointly operating on the structure representation. Machine reasoning ability using modern computer vision is evaluated in this newly proposed dataset. Additionally, we also provide human performance as a reference. Finally, we show consistent improvement across all models by incorporating a simple neural module that combines visual understanding and structure reasoning.

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown strong capabilities in multimodal understanding and reasoning, yet they are primarily constrained by text-based reasoning processes. However, achieving seamless integration of visual and textual reasoning which mirrors human cognitive processes remains a significant challenge. In particular, effectively incorporating advanced visual input processing into reasoning mechanisms is still an open question. Thus, in this paper, we explore the interleaved multimodal reasoning paradigm and introduce DeepEyes, a model with "thinking with images" capabilities incentivized through end-to-end reinforcement learning without the need for cold-start SFT. Notably, this ability emerges natively within the model itself, leveraging its inherent grounding ability as a tool instead of depending on separate specialized models. Specifically, we propose a tool-use-oriented data selection mechanism and a reward strategy to encourage successful tool-assisted reasoning trajectories. DeepEyes achieves significant performance gains on fine-grained perception and reasoning benchmarks and also demonstrates improvement in grounding, hallucination, and mathematical reasoning tasks. Interestingly, we observe the distinct evolution of tool-calling behavior from initial exploration to efficient and accurate exploitation, and diverse thinking patterns that closely mirror human visual reasoning processes. Code is available at https://github.com/Visual-Agent/DeepEyes.

Most prior art in visual understanding relies solely on analyzing the "what" (e.g., event recognition) and "where" (e.g., event localization), which in some cases, fails to describe correct contextual relationships between events or leads to incorrect underlying visual attention. Part of what defines us as human and fundamentally different from machines is our instinct to seek causality behind any association, say an event Y that happened as a direct result of event X. To this end, we propose iPerceive, a framework capable of understanding the "why" between events in a video by building a common-sense knowledge base using contextual cues to infer causal relationships between objects in the video. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique using the dense video captioning (DVC) and video question answering (VideoQA) tasks. Furthermore, while most prior work in DVC and VideoQA relies solely on visual information, other modalities such as audio and speech are vital for a human observer's perception of an environment. We formulate DVC and VideoQA tasks as machine translation problems that utilize multiple modalities. By evaluating the performance of iPerceive DVC and iPerceive VideoQA on the ActivityNet Captions and TVQA datasets respectively, we show that our approach furthers the state-of-the-art. Code and samples are available at: iperceive.amanchadha.com.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are expected to be capable of reasoning with commonsense knowledge as human beings. One example is that humans can reason where and when an image is taken based on their knowledge. This makes us wonder if, based on visual cues, Vision-Language Models that are pre-trained with large-scale image-text resources can achieve and even outperform human's capability in reasoning times and location. To address this question, we propose a two-stage \recognition\space and \reasoning\space probing task, applied to discriminative and generative VLMs to uncover whether VLMs can recognize times and location-relevant features and further reason about it. To facilitate the investigation, we introduce WikiTiLo, a well-curated image dataset compromising images with rich socio-cultural cues. In the extensive experimental studies, we find that although VLMs can effectively retain relevant features in visual encoders, they still fail to make perfect reasoning. We will release our dataset and codes to facilitate future studies.

Spatial understanding is a crucial capability for robots to make grounded decisions based on their environment. This foundational skill enables robots not only to perceive their surroundings but also to reason about and interact meaningfully within the world. In modern robotics, these capabilities are taken on by visual language models, and they face significant challenges when applied to spatial reasoning context due to their training data sources. These sources utilize general-purpose image datasets, and they often lack sophisticated spatial scene understanding capabilities. For example, the datasets do not address reference frame comprehension - spatial relationships require clear contextual understanding, whether from an ego-centric, object-centric, or world-centric perspective, which allow for effective real-world interaction. To address this issue, we introduce RoboSpatial, a large-scale spatial understanding dataset consisting of real indoor and tabletop scenes captured as 3D scans and egocentric images, annotated with rich spatial information relevant to robotics. The dataset includes 1M images, 5K 3D scans, and 3M annotated spatial relationships, with paired 2D egocentric images and 3D scans to make it both 2D and 3D ready. Our experiments show that models trained with RoboSpatial outperform baselines on downstream tasks such as spatial affordance prediction, spatial relationship prediction, and robotics manipulation.

Visual recognition models are not invariant to viewpoint changes in the 3D world, as different viewing directions can dramatically affect the predictions given the same object. Although many efforts have been devoted to making neural networks invariant to 2D image translations and rotations, viewpoint invariance is rarely investigated. As most models process images in the perspective view, it is challenging to impose invariance to 3D viewpoint changes based only on 2D inputs. Motivated by the success of adversarial training in promoting model robustness, we propose Viewpoint-Invariant Adversarial Training (VIAT) to improve viewpoint robustness of common image classifiers. By regarding viewpoint transformation as an attack, VIAT is formulated as a minimax optimization problem, where the inner maximization characterizes diverse adversarial viewpoints by learning a Gaussian mixture distribution based on a new attack GMVFool, while the outer minimization trains a viewpoint-invariant classifier by minimizing the expected loss over the worst-case adversarial viewpoint distributions. To further improve the generalization performance, a distribution sharing strategy is introduced leveraging the transferability of adversarial viewpoints across objects. Experiments validate the effectiveness of VIAT in improving the viewpoint robustness of various image classifiers based on the diversity of adversarial viewpoints generated by GMVFool.

Visual understanding is inherently contextual -- what we focus on in an image depends on the task at hand. For instance, given an image of a person holding a bouquet of flowers, we may focus on either the person such as their clothing, or the type of flowers, depending on the context of interest. Yet, most existing image encoding paradigms represent an image as a fixed, generic feature vector, overlooking the potential needs of prioritizing varying visual information for different downstream use cases. In this work, we introduce FocalLens, a conditional visual encoding method that produces different representations for the same image based on the context of interest, expressed flexibly through natural language. We leverage vision instruction tuning data and contrastively finetune a pretrained vision encoder to take natural language instructions as additional inputs for producing conditional image representations. Extensive experiments validate that conditional image representation from FocalLens better pronounce the visual features of interest compared to generic features produced by standard vision encoders like CLIP. In addition, we show FocalLens further leads to performance improvements on a range of downstream tasks including image-image retrieval, image classification, and image-text retrieval, with an average gain of 5 and 10 points on the challenging SugarCrepe and MMVP-VLM benchmarks, respectively.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in integrating visual perception with language understanding. However, effective multimodal reasoning requires both accurate perception and robust reasoning, and weakness in either limits the performance of VLMs. Prior efforts to enhance reasoning often depend on high-quality chain-of-thought (CoT) data, obtained via labor-intensive human annotations, costly proprietary models, or self-training methods that overlook perception. To address these limitations, we propose a simple yet effective self-training framework called See-Think-Learn (STL). At its core, STL introduces a structured reasoning template that encourages the model to see before thinking, first extracting visual attributes in textual form, then using them to guide reasoning. The framework jointly improves perception and reasoning by having the model generate and learn from its own structured rationales in a self-training loop. Furthermore, we augment the training data with negative rationales, i.e. explanations that justify why certain answer choices are incorrect, to enhance the model's ability to distinguish between correct and misleading responses. This fosters more discriminative and robust learning. Experiments across diverse domains show that STL consistently outperforms baselines trained directly only on answers or self-generated reasoning, while qualitative analysis confirms the high quality of its rationales. STL thus provides a cost-effective solution to enhance multimodal reasoning ability of VLMs.

The traditional i.i.d.-based learning paradigm faces inherent challenges in addressing causal relationships, which has become increasingly evident with the rise of applications in causal representation learning. Our understanding of causality naturally requires a perspective as the creator rather than observer, as the ``what...if'' questions only hold within the possible world we conceive. The traditional perspective limits capturing dynamic causal outcomes and leads to compensatory efforts such as the reliance on hidden confounders. This paper lays the groundwork for the new perspective, which enables the relation-first modeling paradigm for causality. Also, it introduces the Relation-Indexed Representation Learning (RIRL) as a practical implementation, supported by experiments that validate its efficacy.

Vision Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly used for tasks like medical report generation and visual question answering. However, fluent diagnostic text does not guarantee safe visual understanding. In clinical practice, interpretation begins with pre-diagnostic sanity checks: verifying that the input is valid to read (correct modality and anatomy, plausible viewpoint and orientation, and no obvious integrity violations). Existing benchmarks largely assume this step is solved, and therefore miss a critical failure mode: a model can produce plausible narratives even when the input is inconsistent or invalid. We introduce MedObvious, a 1,880-task benchmark that isolates input validation as a set-level consistency capability over small multi-panel image sets: the model must identify whether any panel violates expected coherence. MedObvious spans five progressive tiers, from basic orientation/modality mismatches to clinically motivated anatomy/viewpoint verification and triage-style cues, and includes five evaluation formats to test robustness across interfaces. Evaluating 17 different VLMs, we find that sanity checking remains unreliable: several models hallucinate anomalies on normal (negative-control) inputs, performance degrades when scaling to larger image sets, and measured accuracy varies substantially between multiple-choice and open-ended settings. These results show that pre-diagnostic verification remains unsolved for medical VLMs and should be treated as a distinct, safety-critical capability before deployment.

Interpreting the internal reasoning of vision-language models is essential for deploying AI in safety-critical domains. Concept-based explainability provides a human-aligned lens by representing a model's behavior through semantically meaningful components. However, existing methods are largely restricted to images and overlook the cross-modal interactions. Text-image embeddings, such as those produced by CLIP, suffer from a modality gap, where visual and textual features follow distinct distributions, limiting interpretability. Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) offers a principled way to align features from different distributions, but has not been leveraged for multi-modal concept-level analysis. We show that the objectives of CCA and InfoNCE are closely related, such that optimizing CCA implicitly optimizes InfoNCE, providing a simple, training-free mechanism to enhance cross-modal alignment without affecting the pre-trained InfoNCE objective. Motivated by this observation, we couple concept-based explainability with CCA, introducing Concept CCA (CoCCA), a framework that aligns cross-modal embeddings while enabling interpretable concept decomposition. We further extend it and propose Sparse Concept CCA (SCoCCA), which enforces sparsity to produce more disentangled and discriminative concepts, facilitating improved activation, ablation, and semantic manipulation. Our approach generalizes concept-based explanations to multi-modal embeddings and achieves state-of-the-art performance in concept discovery, evidenced by reconstruction and manipulation tasks such as concept ablation.

The rapid development of large language and vision models (LLVMs) has been driven by advances in visual instruction tuning. Recently, open-source LLVMs have curated high-quality visual instruction tuning datasets and utilized additional vision encoders or multiple computer vision models in order to narrow the performance gap with powerful closed-source LLVMs. These advancements are attributed to multifaceted information required for diverse capabilities, including fundamental image understanding, real-world knowledge about common-sense and non-object concepts (e.g., charts, diagrams, symbols, signs, and math problems), and step-by-step procedures for solving complex questions. Drawing from the multifaceted information, we present a new efficient LLVM, Mamba-based traversal of rationales (Meteor), which leverages multifaceted rationale to enhance understanding and answering capabilities. To embed lengthy rationales containing abundant information, we employ the Mamba architecture, capable of processing sequential data with linear time complexity. We introduce a new concept of traversal of rationale that facilitates efficient embedding of rationale. Subsequently, the backbone multimodal language model (MLM) is trained to generate answers with the aid of rationale. Through these steps, Meteor achieves significant improvements in vision language performances across multiple evaluation benchmarks requiring diverse capabilities, without scaling up the model size or employing additional vision encoders and computer vision models.

Masked Image Modeling (MIM) has recently been established as a potent pre-training paradigm. A pretext task is constructed by masking patches in an input image, and this masked content is then predicted by a neural network using visible patches as sole input. This pre-training leads to state-of-the-art performance when finetuned for high-level semantic tasks, e.g. image classification and object detection. In this paper we instead seek to learn representations that transfer well to a wide variety of 3D vision and lower-level geometric downstream tasks, such as depth prediction or optical flow estimation. Inspired by MIM, we propose an unsupervised representation learning task trained from pairs of images showing the same scene from different viewpoints. More precisely, we propose the pretext task of cross-view completion where the first input image is partially masked, and this masked content has to be reconstructed from the visible content and the second image. In single-view MIM, the masked content often cannot be inferred precisely from the visible portion only, so the model learns to act as a prior influenced by high-level semantics. In contrast, this ambiguity can be resolved with cross-view completion from the second unmasked image, on the condition that the model is able to understand the spatial relationship between the two images. Our experiments show that our pretext task leads to significantly improved performance for monocular 3D vision downstream tasks such as depth estimation. In addition, our model can be directly applied to binocular downstream tasks like optical flow or relative camera pose estimation, for which we obtain competitive results without bells and whistles, i.e., using a generic architecture without any task-specific design.

Accessing 3D models remains challenging for Screen Reader (SR) users. While some existing 3D viewers allow creators to provide alternative text, they often lack sufficient detail about the 3D models. Grounded on a formative study, this paper introduces SweeperBot, a system that enables SR users to leverage visual question answering to explore and compare 3D models. SweeperBot answers SR users' visual questions by combining an optimal view selection technique with the strength of generative- and recognition-based foundation models. An expert review with 10 Blind and Low-Vision (BLV) users with SR experience demonstrated the feasibility of using SweeperBot to assist BLV users in exploring and comparing 3D models. The quality of the descriptions generated by SweeperBot was validated by a second survey study with 30 sighted participants.

We present a method that achieves state-of-the-art results for synthesizing novel views of complex scenes by optimizing an underlying continuous volumetric scene function using a sparse set of input views. Our algorithm represents a scene using a fully-connected (non-convolutional) deep network, whose input is a single continuous 5D coordinate (spatial location (x,y,z) and viewing direction (theta, phi)) and whose output is the volume density and view-dependent emitted radiance at that spatial location. We synthesize views by querying 5D coordinates along camera rays and use classic volume rendering techniques to project the output colors and densities into an image. Because volume rendering is naturally differentiable, the only input required to optimize our representation is a set of images with known camera poses. We describe how to effectively optimize neural radiance fields to render photorealistic novel views of scenes with complicated geometry and appearance, and demonstrate results that outperform prior work on neural rendering and view synthesis. View synthesis results are best viewed as videos, so we urge readers to view our supplementary video for convincing comparisons.

Visual arguments, often used in advertising or social causes, rely on images to persuade viewers to do or believe something. Understanding these arguments requires selective vision: only specific visual stimuli within an image are relevant to the argument, and relevance can only be understood within the context of a broader argumentative structure. While visual arguments are readily appreciated by human audiences, we ask: are today's AI capable of similar understanding? We collect and release VisArgs, an annotated corpus designed to make explicit the (usually implicit) structures underlying visual arguments. VisArgs includes 1,611 images accompanied by three types of textual annotations: 5,112 visual premises (with region annotations), 5,574 commonsense premises, and reasoning trees connecting them to a broader argument. We propose three tasks over VisArgs to probe machine capacity for visual argument understanding: localization of premises, identification of premises, and deduction of conclusions. Experiments demonstrate that 1) machines cannot fully identify the relevant visual cues. The top-performing model, GPT-4-O, achieved an accuracy of only 78.5%, whereas humans reached 98.0%. All models showed a performance drop, with an average decrease in accuracy of 19.5%, when the comparison set was changed from objects outside the image to irrelevant objects within the image. Furthermore, 2) this limitation is the greatest factor impacting their performance in understanding visual arguments. Most models improved the most when given relevant visual premises as additional inputs, compared to other inputs, for deducing the conclusion of the visual argument.

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.

The ubiquity of mobile phones makes mobile GUI understanding an important task. Most previous works in this domain require human-created metadata of screens (e.g. View Hierarchy) during inference, which unfortunately is often not available or reliable enough for GUI understanding. Inspired by the impressive success of Transformers in NLP tasks, targeting for purely vision-based GUI understanding, we extend the concepts of Words/Sentence to Pixel-Words/Screen-Sentence, and propose a mobile GUI understanding architecture: Pixel-Words to Screen-Sentence (PW2SS). In analogy to the individual Words, we define the Pixel-Words as atomic visual components (text and graphic components), which are visually consistent and semantically clear across screenshots of a large variety of design styles. The Pixel-Words extracted from a screenshot are aggregated into Screen-Sentence with a Screen Transformer proposed to model their relations. Since the Pixel-Words are defined as atomic visual components, the ambiguity between their visual appearance and semantics is dramatically reduced. We are able to make use of metadata available in training data to auto-generate high-quality annotations for Pixel-Words. A dataset, RICO-PW, of screenshots with Pixel-Words annotations is built based on the public RICO dataset, which will be released to help to address the lack of high-quality training data in this area. We train a detector to extract Pixel-Words from screenshots on this dataset and achieve metadata-free GUI understanding during inference. We conduct experiments and show that Pixel-Words can be well extracted on RICO-PW and well generalized to a new dataset, P2S-UI, collected by ourselves. The effectiveness of PW2SS is further verified in the GUI understanding tasks including relation prediction, clickability prediction, screen retrieval, and app type classification.

Self-reflection mechanisms that rely on purely text-based rethinking processes perform well in most multimodal tasks. However, when directly applied to long-form video understanding scenarios, they exhibit clear limitations. The fundamental reasons for this lie in two points: (1)long-form video understanding involves richer and more dynamic visual input, meaning rethinking only the text information is insufficient and necessitates a further rethinking process specifically targeting visual information; (2) purely text-based reflection mechanisms lack cross-modal interaction capabilities, preventing them from fully integrating visual information during reflection. Motivated by these insights, we propose REVISOR (REflective VIsual Segment Oriented Reasoning), a novel framework for tool-augmented multimodal reflection. REVISOR enables MLLMs to collaboratively construct introspective reflection processes across textual and visual modalities, significantly enhancing their reasoning capability for long-form video understanding. To ensure that REVISOR can learn to accurately review video segments highly relevant to the question during reinforcement learning, we designed the Dual Attribution Decoupled Reward (DADR) mechanism. Integrated into the GRPO training strategy, this mechanism enforces causal alignment between the model's reasoning and the selected video evidence. Notably, the REVISOR framework significantly enhances long-form video understanding capability of MLLMs without requiring supplementary supervised fine-tuning or external models, achieving impressive results on four benchmarks including VideoMME, LongVideoBench, MLVU, and LVBench.

When working around other agents such as humans, it is important to model their perception capabilities to predict and make sense of their behavior. In this work, we consider agents whose perception capabilities are determined by their limited field of view, viewing range, and the potential to miss objects within their viewing range. By considering the perception capabilities and observation model of agents independently from their motion policy, we show that we can better predict the agents' behavior; i.e., by reasoning about the perception capabilities of other agents, one can better make sense of their actions. We perform a user study where human operators navigate a cluttered scene while scanning the region for obstacles with a limited field of view and range. We show that by reasoning about the limited observation space of humans, a robot can better learn a human's strategy for navigating an environment and navigate with minimal collision with dynamic and static obstacles. We also show that this learned model helps it successfully navigate a physical hardware vehicle in real-time. Code available at https://github.com/labicon/HRMotion-RestrictedView.

While recent advancements in vision-language models have improved video understanding, diagnosing their capacity for deep, narrative comprehension remains a challenge. Existing benchmarks often test short-clip recognition or use template-based questions, leaving a critical gap in evaluating fine-grained reasoning over long-form narrative content. To address these gaps, we introduce Cinacute{easte}, a comprehensive benchmark for long-form movie understanding. Our dataset comprises 3,119 multiple-choice question-answer pairs derived from 1,805 scenes across 200 diverse movies, spanning five novel fine-grained contextual reasoning categories. We use GPT-4o to generate diverse, context-rich questions by integrating visual descriptions, captions, scene titles, and summaries, which require deep narrative understanding. To ensure high-quality evaluation, our pipeline incorporates a two-stage filtering process: Context-Independence filtering ensures questions require video context, while Contextual Veracity filtering validates factual consistency against the movie content, mitigating hallucinations. Experiments show that existing MLLMs struggle on Cinacute{easte}; our analysis reveals that long-range temporal reasoning is a primary bottleneck, with the top open-source model achieving only 63.15\% accuracy. This underscores significant challenges in fine-grained contextual understanding and the need for advancements in long-form movie comprehension.

Large multimodal language models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in understanding and manipulating images. However, many of these models struggle with comprehending intensive textual contents embedded within the images, primarily due to the limited text recognition and layout understanding ability. To understand the sources of these limitations, we perform an exploratory analysis showing the drawbacks of classical visual encoders on visual text understanding. Hence, we present LLaVA-Read, a multimodal large language model that utilizes dual visual encoders along with a visual text encoder. Our model surpasses existing state-of-the-art models in various text-rich image understanding tasks, showcasing enhanced comprehension of textual content within images. Together, our research suggests visual text understanding remains an open challenge and an efficient visual text encoder is crucial for future successful multimodal systems.

The emergence of multimodal large models (MLMs) has significantly advanced the field of visual understanding, offering remarkable capabilities in the realm of visual question answering (VQA). Yet, the true challenge lies in the domain of knowledge-intensive VQA tasks, which necessitate not just recognition of visual elements, but also a deep comprehension of the visual information in conjunction with a vast repository of learned knowledge. To uncover such capabilities of MLMs, particularly the newly introduced GPT-4V and Gemini, we provide an in-depth evaluation from three perspectives: 1) Commonsense Knowledge, which assesses how well models can understand visual cues and connect to general knowledge; 2) Fine-grained World Knowledge, which tests the model's skill in reasoning out specific knowledge from images, showcasing their proficiency across various specialized fields; 3) Comprehensive Knowledge with Decision-making Rationales, which examines model's capability to provide logical explanations for its inference, facilitating a deeper analysis from the interpretability perspective. Additionally, we utilize a visual knowledge-enhanced training strategy and multimodal retrieval-augmented generation approach to enhance MLMs, highlighting the future need for advancements in this research direction. Extensive experiments indicate that: a) GPT-4V demonstrates enhanced explanation generation when using composite images as few-shots; b) GPT-4V and other MLMs produce severe hallucinations when dealing with world knowledge; c) Visual knowledge enhanced training and prompting technicals present potential to improve performance. Codes: https://github.com/HITsz-TMG/Cognitive-Visual-Language-Mapper