# Spatial Reasoning in Foundation Models: Benchmarking Object-Centric Spatial Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21922 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21922/

## 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 17 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Sep 2025.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [Gemma 3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19786/) (2025)
- [DINO: DETR with Improved DeNoising Anchor Boxes for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03605/) (2022)
- [Open-vocabulary Object Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13921/) (2021)
- [Florence: A New Foundation Model for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11432/) (2021)
- [OpenFlamingo: An Open-Source Framework for Training Large Autoregressive Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01390/) (2023)
- [SmolVLM: Redefining small and efficient multimodal models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05299/) (2025)
- [Building and better understanding vision-language models: insights and future directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12637/) (2024)
- [F-VLM: Open-Vocabulary Object Detection upon Frozen Vision and Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15639/) (2022)
- [Grounding DINO 1.5: Advance the "Edge" of Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10300/) (2024)
- [D-FINE: Redefine Regression Task in DETRs as Fine-grained Distribution Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13842/) (2024)
- [Mind the Gap: Benchmarking Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19707/) (2025)
- [How Well Does GPT-4o Understand Vision? Evaluating Multimodal Foundation Models on Standard Computer Vision Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01955/) (2025)
- [VL-CLIP: Enhancing Multimodal Recommendations via Visual Grounding and LLM-Augmented CLIP Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17080/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Spatial understanding is a critical capability for vision foundation models. While recent advances in large vision models or vision-language models (VLMs) have expanded recognition capabilities, most benchmarks emphasize localization accuracy rather than whether models capture how objects are arranged and related within a scene. This gap is consequential; effective scene understanding requires not only identifying objects, but reasoning about their relative positions, groupings, and depth. In this paper, we present a systematic benchmark for object-centric spatial reasoning in foundation models. Using a controlled synthetic dataset, we evaluate state-of-the-art vision models (e.g., GroundingDINO, Florence-2, OWLv2) and large VLMs (e.g., InternVL, LLaVA, GPT-4o) across three tasks: spatial localization, spatial reasoning, and downstream retrieval tasks. We find a stable trade-off: detectors such as GroundingDINO and OWLv2 deliver precise boxes with limited relational reasoning, while VLMs like SmolVLM and GPT-4o provide coarse layout cues and fluent captions but struggle with fine-grained spatial context. Our study highlights the gap between localization and true spatial understanding, and pointing toward the need for spatially-aware foundation models in the community.