Holistic Evaluation of Multimodal LLMs on Spatial Intelligence
On the map: Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models → Embodied and 3D vision-language models
Abstract (arXiv)
Multimodal models have achieved remarkable progress in recent years. Nevertheless, they continue to exhibit notable limitations in spatial understanding and reasoning, the very capability that anchors artificial general intelligence in the physical world. With the recent release of GPT-5, allegedly the most powerful AI model to date, it is timely to examine where the leading models (GPT, Gemini, Grok, Seed, Qwen, and Intern) stand on the path toward spatial intelligence (SI). We thus propose EASI for holistic Evaluation of multimodAl LLMs on Spatial Intelligence. EASI conceptualizes a comprehensive taxonomy of spatial tasks that unifies existing benchmarks and a growing collection of newly curated ones, enabling systematic evaluation of state-of-the-art models. In this report, we conduct the study across eight key benchmarks, at a cost exceeding ten billion total tokens. Our empirical study then reveals that (1) GPT-5 demonstrates unprecedented strength in SI, yet (2) still falls short of human performance significantly across a broad spectrum of SI-tasks. Moreover, we (3) show that SI-tasks expose greater model capability deficiency than non-SI tasks, to the extent that (4) proprietary models do not exhibit a decisive advantage when facing the most difficult ones. In addition, we conduct a qualitative evaluation across a diverse set of scenarios that are intuitive for humans, yet fail the most advanced multimodal models. EASI is an ongoing community effort: we have open-sourced the EASI codebase that provides a one-stop and reproducible solution with standardized interfaces, integrated protocols and prompts that significantly reduce the friction of configuring and running multiple benchmarks; we have also launched an accompanying EASI leaderboard to provide a continually updated snapshot of model performance across the full SI spectrum, accelerating collective progress toward robust SI.
Key facts. Cited by 28 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Embodied and 3D vision-language models, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models. Builds on 64 of its 78 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 18 Aug 2025.
Builds on
64 of 78 references.
Closest ancestors · 22
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Other references · 42
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Citing papers per year: 2025: 5; 2026: 23.
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- 2025Think with 3D: Geometric Imagination Grounded Spatial Reasoning from Limited Viewscited by 58
- 2025ThinkMorph: Emergent Properties in Multimodal Interleaved Chain-of-Thought Reasoningcited by 55
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- 2026SpatialImaginer: Towards Adaptive Visual Imagination for Spatial Reasoningcited by 0
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- 2026VGenST-Bench: A Benchmark for Spatio-Temporal Reasoning via Active Video Synthesiscited by 0
- 2026Dual-Pathway Geometry-Aware MLLM for Spatial Intelligencecited by 0
- 2026The Art of Interrogation: Consistency Amplifies Factuality in Spatial Reasoningcited by 0
- 2026Chain of Spatial Thoughts: Modality-Agnostic Spatial Grounding for Vision Language Modelscited by 0
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- 2026Metric-Bench: Exploring In-context Spatial Metric Reasoning in VLMs for Indoor Scenes22 Sep 2026
- 2026Chain of Spatial Thoughts: Modality-Agnostic Spatial Grounding for Vision Language Models10 Aug 2026
- 2026The Art of Interrogation: Consistency Amplifies Factuality in Spatial Reasoning10 Jun 2026
- 2026SpatialWorld: Benchmarking Interactive Spatial Reasoning of Multimodal Agents in Real-World Tasks8 Jun 2026
- 2026Dual-Pathway Geometry-Aware MLLM for Spatial Intelligence25 May 2026
- 2026VGenST-Bench: A Benchmark for Spatio-Temporal Reasoning via Active Video Synthesis21 May 2026
- 2026GeoWeaver: Grounding Visual Tokens with Geometric Evidence before Scene Reasoning21 May 2026
- 2026SpaceDG: Benchmarking Spatial Intelligence under Visual Degradation21 May 2026
- 2026SenseNova-U1: Unifying Multimodal Understanding and Generation with NEO-unify Architecture12 May 2026
- 2026Proxy3D: Efficient 3D Representations for Vision-Language Models via Semantic Clustering and Alignment8 May 2026
- 2026SpatialImaginer: Towards Adaptive Visual Imagination for Spatial Reasoning19 Apr 2026
- 2026Limits of Spatial Imagery Reasoning in Frontier LLM Models25 Mar 2026
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- 2026Vision Language Models Cannot Reason About Physical Transformation7 Mar 2026
- 2026TimeSpot: Benchmarking Geo-Temporal Understanding in Vision-Language Models in Real-World Settings4 Mar 2026
- 2026SSR: Pushing the Limit of Spatial Intelligence with Structured Scene Reasoning28 Feb 2026
- 2026MapTab: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Long-Horizon Multi-Criteria Multimodal Reasoning on Heterogeneous Topological Graphs20 Feb 2026
- 2026Thinking with Geometry: Active Geometry Integration for Spatial Reasoning5 Feb 2026
- 2026SpatiaLab: Can Vision-Language Models Perform Spatial Reasoning in the Wild?3 Feb 2026
- 2026MCERF: Advancing Multimodal LLM Evaluation of Engineering Documentation with Enhanced Retrieval31 Jan 2026
- 2026SokoBench: Evaluating Long-Horizon Planning and Reasoning in Large Language Models28 Jan 2026
- 2026CityCube: Benchmarking Cross-view Spatial Reasoning on Vision-Language Models in Urban Environments20 Jan 2026
- 2025QuantiPhy: A Quantitative Benchmark Evaluating Physical Reasoning Abilities of Vision-Language Models22 Dec 2025
- 2025SpatialDreamer: Incentivizing Spatial Reasoning via Active Mental Imagery8 Dec 2025
- 2025MASS: Motion-Aware Spatial-Temporal Grounding for Physics Reasoning and Comprehension in Vision-Language Models23 Nov 2025
- 2025ThinkMorph: Emergent Properties in Multimodal Interleaved Chain-of-Thought Reasoning30 Oct 2025
- 2025Think with 3D: Geometric Imagination Grounded Spatial Reasoning from Limited Views21 Oct 2025
- 2025Think with 3D: Geometric Imagination Grounded Spatial Reasoning from Limited Viewscited by 58
- 2025ThinkMorph: Emergent Properties in Multimodal Interleaved Chain-of-Thought Reasoningcited by 55
- 2025QuantiPhy: A Quantitative Benchmark Evaluating Physical Reasoning Abilities of Vision-Language Modelscited by 19
- 2026Thinking with Geometry: Active Geometry Integration for Spatial Reasoningcited by 14
- 2025SpatialDreamer: Incentivizing Spatial Reasoning via Active Mental Imagerycited by 10
- 2026SpatiaLab: Can Vision-Language Models Perform Spatial Reasoning in the Wild?cited by 10
- 2026CityCube: Benchmarking Cross-view Spatial Reasoning on Vision-Language Models in Urban Environmentscited by 8
- 2026SpatialWorld: Benchmarking Interactive Spatial Reasoning of Multimodal Agents in Real-World Taskscited by 6
- 2025MASS: Motion-Aware Spatial-Temporal Grounding for Physics Reasoning and Comprehension in Vision-Language Modelscited by 5
- 2026Vision Language Models Cannot Reason About Physical Transformationcited by 4
- 20263ViewSense: Spatial and Mental Perspective Reasoning from Orthographic Views in Vision-Language Modelscited by 4
- 2026MapTab: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Long-Horizon Multi-Criteria Multimodal Reasoning on Heterogeneous Topological Graphscited by 3
12 most cited of 22 All 22 (JSON)
- 2026Metric-Bench: Exploring In-context Spatial Metric Reasoning in VLMs for Indoor Scenes22 Sep 2026
- 2026Chain of Spatial Thoughts: Modality-Agnostic Spatial Grounding for Vision Language Models10 Aug 2026
- 2026The Art of Interrogation: Consistency Amplifies Factuality in Spatial Reasoning10 Jun 2026
- 2026SpatialWorld: Benchmarking Interactive Spatial Reasoning of Multimodal Agents in Real-World Tasks8 Jun 2026
- 2026VGenST-Bench: A Benchmark for Spatio-Temporal Reasoning via Active Video Synthesis21 May 2026
- 2026GeoWeaver: Grounding Visual Tokens with Geometric Evidence before Scene Reasoning21 May 2026
- 2026SpaceDG: Benchmarking Spatial Intelligence under Visual Degradation21 May 2026
- 2026SpatialImaginer: Towards Adaptive Visual Imagination for Spatial Reasoning19 Apr 2026
- 2026Limits of Spatial Imagery Reasoning in Frontier LLM Models25 Mar 2026
- 20263ViewSense: Spatial and Mental Perspective Reasoning from Orthographic Views in Vision-Language Models8 Mar 2026
- 2026Vision Language Models Cannot Reason About Physical Transformation7 Mar 2026
- 2026SSR: Pushing the Limit of Spatial Intelligence with Structured Scene Reasoning28 Feb 2026
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