# CLiViS: Unleashing Cognitive Map through Linguistic-Visual Synergy for Embodied Visual Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17629 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17629/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Spatial and embodied reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 42 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 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 42)

- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12966/) (2023)
- [PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03378/) (2023)
- [InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10479/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02858/) (2023)
- [MemGPT: Towards LLMs as Operating Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08560/) (2023)
- [ImageBind: One Embedding Space To Bind Them All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05665/) (2023)
- [EgoSchema: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Very Long-form Video Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09126/) (2023)
- [MovieChat: From Dense Token to Sparse Memory for Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16449/) (2023)
- [VideoLLaMA 3: Frontier Multimodal Foundation Models for Image and Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13106/) (2025)
- [Socratic Models: Composing Zero-Shot Multimodal Reasoning with Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00598/) (2022)
- [Video-R1: Reinforcing Video Reasoning in MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21776/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Deep Learning Techniques for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07738/) (2019)
- [Character-LLM: A Trainable Agent for Role-Playing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10158/) (2023)
- [Embodied Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11543/) (2017)
- [A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14093/) (2024)
- [VTimeLLM: Empower LLM to Grasp Video Moments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18445/) (2023)
- [VideoTree: Adaptive Tree-based Video Representation for LLM Reasoning on Long Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19209/) (2024)
- [VideoAgent: A Memory-augmented Multimodal Agent for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11481/) (2024)
- [Aligning Cyber Space with Physical World: A Comprehensive Survey on Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06886/) (2024)
- [ChatDB: Augmenting LLMs with Databases as Their Symbolic Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03901/) (2023)
- [EgoTaskQA: Understanding Human Tasks in Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03929/) (2022)
- [LightTrack: Finding Lightweight Neural Networks for Object Tracking via One-Shot Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14545/) (2021)
- [ReMEmbR: Building and Reasoning Over Long-Horizon Spatio-Temporal Memory for Robot Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13682/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Multimodal Spatial Reasoning in the Large Model Era: A Survey and Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25760/) (2025)
- [Explain Before You Answer: A Survey on Compositional Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17298/) (2025)
- [EgoCross: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models for Cross-Domain Egocentric Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10729/) (2025)
- [EgoNight: Towards Egocentric Vision Understanding at Night with a Challenging Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06218/) (2025)
- [V2-SAM: Marrying SAM2 with Multi-Prompt Experts for Cross-View Object Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20886/) (2025)
- [StreamEQA: Towards Streaming Video Understanding for Embodied Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04451/) (2025)
- [EgoSound: Benchmarking Sound Understanding in Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14122/) (2026)
- [ToG-Bench: Task-Oriented Spatio-Temporal Grounding in Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03666/) (2025)
- [Think, Then Verify: A Hypothesis-Verification Multi-Agent Framework for Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04977/) (2026)
- [StreamingClaw Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22120/) (2026)
- [Spatiotemporal Knowledge Graphs as Persistent Scene Memory for Embodied Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01483/) (2025)
- [CVSearch: Empowering Multimodal LLMs with Cognitive Visual Search for High-Resolution Image Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23655/) (2026)
- [The First EgoCross Challenge at EgoVis 2026: Cross-Domain Egocentric Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.04589/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Embodied Visual Reasoning (EVR) seeks to follow complex, free-form instructions based on egocentric video, enabling semantic understanding and spatiotemporal reasoning in dynamic environments. Despite its promising potential, EVR encounters significant challenges stemming from the diversity of complex instructions and the intricate spatiotemporal dynamics in long-term egocentric videos. Prior solutions either employ Large Language Models (LLMs) over static video captions, which often omit critical visual details, or rely on end-to-end Vision-Language Models (VLMs) that struggle with stepwise compositional reasoning. Consider the complementary strengths of LLMs in reasoning and VLMs in perception, we propose CLiViS. It is a novel training-free framework that leverages LLMs for high-level task planning and orchestrates VLM-driven open-world visual perception to iteratively update the scene context. Building on this synergy, the core of CLiViS is a dynamic Cognitive Map that evolves throughout the reasoning process. This map constructs a structured representation of the embodied scene, bridging low-level perception and high-level reasoning. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of CLiViS, especially in handling long-term visual dependencies. Code is available at https://github.com/Teacher-Tom/CLiViS.