SITE: towards Spatial Intelligence Thorough Evaluation
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Abstract (arXiv)
Spatial intelligence (SI) represents a cognitive ability encompassing the visualization, manipulation, and reasoning about spatial relationships, underpinning disciplines from neuroscience to robotics. We introduce SITE, a benchmark dataset towards SI Thorough Evaluation in a standardized format of multi-choice visual question-answering, designed to assess large vision-language models' spatial intelligence across diverse visual modalities (single-image, multi-image, and video) and SI factors (figural to environmental scales, spatial visualization and orientation, intrinsic and extrinsic, static and dynamic). Our approach to curating the benchmark combines a bottom-up survey about 31 existing datasets and a top-down strategy drawing upon three classification systems in cognitive science, which prompt us to design two novel types of tasks about view-taking and dynamic scenes. Extensive experiments reveal that leading models fall behind human experts especially in spatial orientation, a fundamental SI factor. Moreover, we demonstrate a positive correlation between a model's spatial reasoning proficiency and its performance on an embodied AI task.
Key facts. Cited by 29 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 62 of its 91 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 8 May 2025.
Builds on
62 of 91 references.
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Citing papers per year: 2025: 8; 2026: 21.
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- 2026OrientSAM: Mitigating Camera-Centric Shortcut in Multimodal Spatial Reasoning via Orientation-Aware Spatial Alignment20 Jul 2026
- 2026Eliciting Complex Spatial Reasoning in MLLMs through Wide-Baseline Matching2 Jun 2026
- 2026SpatialAct: Probing Spatial Reasoning-to-Action Capabilities of VLM Agents in 3D Scenes29 May 2026
- 2026Boosting MLLM Spatial Reasoning with Geometrically Referenced 3D Scene Representations9 Mar 2026
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- 2025How Far are VLMs from Visual Spatial Intelligence? A Benchmark-Driven Perspective23 Sep 2025
- 2025Mind Meets Space: Rethinking Agentic Spatial Intelligence from a Neuroscience-inspired Perspective11 Sep 2025
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- 2026From Pixels to Words -- Towards Native One-Vision Models at Scale27 May 2026
- 2026SpaceMind++: Toward Allocentric Cognitive Maps for Spatially Grounded Video MLLMs10 May 2026
- 2025Holistic Evaluation of Multimodal LLMs on Spatial Intelligence18 Aug 2025
- 2025SpatialScore: Towards Comprehensive Evaluation for Spatial Intelligence22 May 2025
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- 2026Stepping VLMs onto the Court: Benchmarking Spatial Intelligence in Sportscited by 2
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- 2026Space as an Interventional Invariant: Cross-Modal Predictive Geometry for Stratified Cities and Em-Spaced Intelligence10 Aug 2026
- 2026MultiView-Bench: A Diagnostic Benchmark for World-Centric Multi-View Integration in VLMs9 Jul 2026
- 2026PinpointQA: A Benchmark for Small Object-Centric Spatial Understanding in Indoor Videos10 Apr 2026
- 2026Are VLMs Lost Between Sky and Space? LinkS2Bench for UAV-Satellite Dynamic Cross-View Spatial Intelligence2 Apr 2026
- 2026Stepping VLMs onto the Court: Benchmarking Spatial Intelligence in Sports10 Mar 2026
- 2025SpatialTree: How Spatial Abilities Branch Out in MLLMs23 Dec 2025
- 2025Mull-Tokens: Modality-Agnostic Latent Thinking11 Dec 2025
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