# MindJourney: Test-Time Scaling with World Models for Spatial Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12508 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12508/

## Key facts

- Cited by 50 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in World models for language agents, one of 11 directions in World models.
- Builds on 58 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jul 2025.

## Placed in

- World models / [World models for language agents](https://mlsanity.com/wm/world-models-for-language-agents/)
- LLM reasoning / [Spatial and embodied reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/spatial-and-embodied-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 58)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [Scaling LLM Test-Time Compute Optimally can be More Effective than Scaling Model Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03314/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Grounded Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03857/) (2021)
- [MiniCPM-V: A GPT-4V Level MLLM on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01800/) (2024)
- [AI2-THOR: An Interactive 3D Environment for Visual AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05474/) (2017)
- [Genie: Generative Interactive Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15391/) (2024)
- [CogVLM: Visual Expert for Pretrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03079/) (2023)
- [SpatialVLM: Endowing Vision-Language Models with Spatial Reasoning Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12168/) (2024)
- [Thinking in Space: How Multimodal Large Language Models See, Remember, and Recall Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14171/) (2024)
- [DL3DV-10K: A Large-Scale Scene Dataset for Deep Learning-based 3D Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16256/) (2023)
- [Learning Universal Policies via Text-Guided Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00111/) (2023)
- [CameraCtrl: Enabling Camera Control for Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02101/) (2024)
- [Learning Interactive Real-World Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06114/) (2023)
- [GLaMM: Pixel Grounding Large Multimodal Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03356/) (2023)
- [Vista: A Generalizable Driving World Model with High Fidelity and Versatile Controllability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17398/) (2024)
- [Light Field Networks: Neural Scene Representations with Single-Evaluation Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02634/) (2021)
- [InternLM-XComposer2: Mastering Free-form Text-Image Composition and Comprehension in Vision-Language Large Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16420/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Cambrian-S: Towards Spatial Supersensing in Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04670/) (2025)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on World Models for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16732/) (2025)
- [WoW: Towards a World omniscient World model Through Embodied Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22642/) (2025)
- [Do World Action Models Generalize Better than VLAs? A Robustness Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22078/) (2026)
- [Think3D: Thinking with Space for Spatial Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13029/) (2026)
- [Can World Simulators Reason? Gen-ViRe: A Generative Visual Reasoning Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13853/) (2025)
- [When and How Much to Imagine: Adaptive Test-Time Scaling with World Models for Visual Spatial Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08236/) (2026)
- [Robotic Video World Models: A Survey of Applications, Research Challenges, Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07823/) (2026)
- [SpatialDreamer: Incentivizing Spatial Reasoning via Active Mental Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07733/) (2025)
- [An Efficient and Multi-Modal Navigation System with One-Step World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12277/) (2026)
- [Beyond Flatlands: Unlocking Spatial Intelligence by Decoupling 3D Reasoning from Numerical Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.11239/) (2025)
- [Abstract 3D Perception for Spatial Intelligence in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10946/) (2025)
- [H-WM: Robotic Task and Motion Planning Guided by Hierarchical World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11291/) (2026)
- [Toward Ambulatory Vision: Learning Visually-Grounded Active View Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13250/) (2025)
- [Aligning Agentic World Models via Knowledgeable Experience Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13247/) (2026)
- [Allocentric Perceiver: Disentangling Allocentric Reasoning from Egocentric Visual Priors via Frame Instantiation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05789/) (2026)
- [See, Remember, Explore: A Benchmark and Baselines for Streaming Spatial Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23864/) (2026)
- [World2VLM: Distilling World Model Imagination into VLMs for Dynamic Spatial Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.26934/) (2026)
- [Towards Spatial Supersensing in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13681/) (2026)
- [Video4Spatial: Towards Visuospatial Intelligence with Context-Guided Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03040/) (2025)
- [OpenView: Empowering MLLMs with Out-of-view VQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18563/) (2025)
- [HIMM: Human-Inspired Long-Term Memory Modeling for Embodied Exploration and Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15513/) (2026)
- [SPACENUM: Revisiting Spatial Numerical Understanding in VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23898/) (2026)
- [Pondering the Way: Spatial-perceiving World Action Model for Embodied Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.29908/) (2026)
- [What if? Emulative Simulation with World Models for Situated Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06445/) (2026)
- [WorldMAP: Bootstrapping Vision-Language Navigation Trajectory Prediction with Generative World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07957/) (2026)
- [World Models Meet Language Models: On the Complementarity of Concrete and Abstract Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03603/) (2026)
- [Predicting Camera Pose from Perspective Descriptions for Spatial Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06041/) (2026)
- [From Where Things Are to What They Are For: Benchmarking Spatial-Functional Intelligence in Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02130/) (2026)
- [MCP-Cosmos: World Model-Augmented Agents for Complex Task Execution in MCP Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09131/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Spatial reasoning in 3D space is central to human cognition and indispensable for embodied tasks such as navigation and manipulation. However, state-of-the-art vision-language models (VLMs) struggle frequently with tasks as simple as anticipating how a scene will look after an egocentric motion: they perceive 2D images but lack an internal model of 3D dynamics. We therefore propose MindJourney, a test-time scaling framework that grants a VLM with this missing capability by coupling it to a controllable world model based on video diffusion. The VLM iteratively sketches a concise camera trajectory, while the world model synthesizes the corresponding view at each step. The VLM then reasons over this multi-view evidence gathered during the interactive exploration. Without any fine-tuning, our MindJourney achieves over an average 7.7% performance boost on the representative spatial reasoning benchmark SAT, showing that pairing VLMs with world models for test-time scaling offers a simple, plug-and-play route to robust 3D reasoning. Meanwhile, our method also improves upon the test-time inference VLMs trained through reinforcement learning, which demonstrates the potential of our method that utilizes world models for test-time scaling.