# SIRI-Bench: Challenging VLMs' Spatial Intelligence through Complex Reasoning Tasks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14512 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14512/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Spatial and embodied reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 62 of its 81 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jun 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Spatial and embodied reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/spatial-and-embodied-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 62)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03874/) (2021)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Let's Verify Step by Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20050/) (2023)
- [RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15818/) (2023)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06281/) (2023)
- [MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16502/) (2023)
- [RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06817/) (2022)
- [MetaGPT: Meta Programming for A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00352/) (2023)
- [MathVista: Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning of Foundation Models in Visual Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02255/) (2023)
- [Expanding Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Multimodal Models with Model, Data, and Test-Time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05271/) (2024)
- [Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07058/) (2021)
- [Competition-Level Code Generation with AlphaCode](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07814/) (2022)
- [CLEVR: A Diagnostic Dataset for Compositional Language and Elementary Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06890/) (2016)
- [Video-LLaVA: Learning United Visual Representation by Alignment Before Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10122/) (2023)
- [Solving Quantitative Reasoning Problems with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14858/) (2022)
- [Qwen2.5-Math Technical Report: Toward Mathematical Expert Model via Self-Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12122/) (2024)
- [Video-ChatGPT: Towards Detailed Video Understanding via Large Vision and Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05424/) (2023)
- [Are We on the Right Way for Evaluating Large Vision-Language Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20330/) (2024)
- [Open X-Embodiment: Robotic Learning Datasets and RT-X Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08864/) (2023)
- [SpatialVLM: Endowing Vision-Language Models with Spatial Reasoning Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12168/) (2024)
- [EgoSchema: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Very Long-form Video Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09126/) (2023)
- [MathQA: Towards Interpretable Math Word Problem Solving with Operation-Based Formalisms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13319/) (2019)
- [Thinking in Space: How Multimodal Large Language Models See, Remember, and Recall Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14171/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Holistic Evaluation of Multimodal LLMs on Spatial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13142/) (2025)
- [Video-STAR: Reinforcing Open-Vocabulary Action Recognition with Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08480/) (2025)
- [From Indoor to Open World: Revealing the Spatial Reasoning Gap in MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.19683/) (2025)
- [RADAR: Benchmarking Vision-Language-Action Generalization via Real-World Dynamics, Spatial-Physical Intelligence, and Autonomous Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.10980/) (2026)
- [VepAgent: Bridging Causal-Transition via Tool-Augmented Reinforcement Learning for Video Event Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.06293/) (2026)
- [X-Ragent: Tool-Augmented Reinforcement Learning for Evidence-Grounded Chest X-Ray Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.16811/) (2026)
- [PhySGA: A Physics-Space Grounded Agentic Framework for Generalizable and Interactive 3D Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.20560/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have undergone rapid progress, largely attributed to reinforcement learning on complex reasoning tasks. In contrast, while spatial intelligence is fundamental for Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in real-world interaction, the systematic study of their complex spatial reasoning remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce SIRI-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate VLMs' structural spatial intelligence through spatial-grounded reasoning tasks. SIRI-Bench comprises 9,000 video-question-answer triplets, where each problem is embedded in a realistic 3D scene. The benchmark is carefully designed so that solving each problem requires both spatial comprehension and structural reasoning. To facilitate large-scale data synthesis, we develop an Automatic Scene Creation Engine that employs collaborative LLM agents to translate abstract mathematical problems into faithful 3D scenes. Experimental results reveal that state-of-the-art VLMs struggle significantly on SIRI-Bench, underscoring the challenge of structural spatial reasoning. We hope that our study will bring researchers' attention to spatially grounded reasoning and advance VLMs in visual problem-solving.