# TinyGiantVLM: A Lightweight Vision-Language Architecture for Spatial Reasoning under Resource Constraints

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17595 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17595/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Spatial and embodied reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 26 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Aug 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Spatial and embodied reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/spatial-and-embodied-reasoning/)
- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Embodied and 3D vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/embodied-and-3d-vision-language-models/)
- Mixture-of-experts / [Vision mixture-of-experts](https://mlsanity.com/moe/vision-mixture-of-experts/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06538/) (2017)
- [SpatialVLM: Endowing Vision-Language Models with Spatial Reasoning Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12168/) (2024)
- [PointCLIP: Point Cloud Understanding by CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02413/) (2021)
- [PointLLM: Empowering Large Language Models to Understand Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16911/) (2023)
- [SpatialRGPT: Grounded Spatial Reasoning in Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01584/) (2024)
- [RoboPoint: A Vision-Language Model for Spatial Affordance Prediction for Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10721/) (2024)
- [Uni3D: Exploring Unified 3D Representation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06773/) (2023)
- [Point-Bind & Point-LLM: Aligning Point Cloud with Multi-modality for 3D Understanding, Generation, and Instruction Following](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00615/) (2023)
- [PointCLIP V2: Prompting CLIP and GPT for Powerful 3D Open-world Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11682/) (2022)
- [LLaVA-3D: A Simple yet Effective Pathway to Empowering LMMs with 3D-awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18125/) (2024)
- [Chat-Scene: Bridging 3D Scene and Large Language Models with Object Identifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08168/) (2023)
- [Habitat Synthetic Scenes Dataset (HSSD-200): An Analysis of 3D Scene Scale and Realism Tradeoffs for ObjectGoal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11290/) (2023)
- [ShapeLLM: Universal 3D Object Understanding for Embodied Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17766/) (2024)
- [Chat-3D: Data-efficiently Tuning Large Language Model for Universal Dialogue of 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08769/) (2023)
- [Sparse Mixture-of-Experts are Domain Generalizable Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04046/) (2022)
- [GPT4Point: A Unified Framework for Point-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02980/) (2023)
- [FuseMoE: Mixture-of-Experts Transformers for Fleximodal Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03226/) (2024)
- [MiniGPT-3D: Efficiently Aligning 3D Point Clouds with Large Language Models using 2D Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01413/) (2024)
- [ScanReason: Empowering 3D Visual Grounding with Reasoning Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01525/) (2024)
- [MultiPLY: A Multisensory Object-Centric Embodied Large Language Model in 3D World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08577/) (2024)
- [CounterCurate: Enhancing Physical and Semantic Visio-Linguistic Compositional Reasoning via Counterfactual Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13254/) (2024)
- [Agent3D-Zero: An Agent for Zero-shot 3D Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11835/) (2024)
- [The 9th AI City Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13564/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Reasoning about fine-grained spatial relationships in warehouse-scale environments poses a significant challenge for existing vision-language models (VLMs), which often struggle to comprehend 3D layouts, object arrangements, and multimodal cues in real-world industrial settings. In this paper, we present TinyGiantVLM, a lightweight and modular two-stage framework designed for physical spatial reasoning, distinguishing itself from traditional geographic reasoning in complex logistics scenes. Our approach encodes both global and region-level features from RGB and depth modalities using pretrained visual backbones. To effectively handle the complexity of high-modality inputs and diverse question types, we incorporate a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) fusion module, which dynamically combines spatial representations to support downstream reasoning tasks and improve convergence. Training is conducted in a two-phase strategy: the first phase focuses on generating free-form answers to enhance spatial reasoning ability, while the second phase uses normalized answers for evaluation. Evaluated on Track 3 of the AI City Challenge 2025, our 64M-parameter base model achieved 5th place on the leaderboard with a score of 66.8861, demonstrating strong performance in bridging visual perception and spatial understanding in industrial environments. We further present an 80M-parameter variant with expanded MoE capacity, which demonstrates improved performance on spatial reasoning tasks.