# SIMS-V: Simulated Instruction-Tuning for Spatial Video Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04668 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04668/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Spatial and embodied reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 50 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Nov 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/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [Qwen2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10671/) (2024)
- [Expanding Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Multimodal Models with Model, Data, and Test-Time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05271/) (2024)
- [Objaverse: A Universe of Annotated 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08051/) (2022)
- [Domain Randomization for Transferring Deep Neural Networks from Simulation to the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06907/) (2017)
- [Video-MME: The First-Ever Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark of Multi-modal LLMs in Video Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21075/) (2024)
- [Kosmos-2: Grounding Multimodal Large Language Models to the World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14824/) (2023)
- [HowTo100M: Learning a Text-Video Embedding by Watching Hundred Million Narrated Video Clips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03327/) (2019)
- [AI2-THOR: An Interactive 3D Environment for Visual AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05474/) (2017)
- [Cambrian-1: A Fully Open, Vision-Centric Exploration of Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16860/) (2024)
- [MDETR -- Modulated Detection for End-to-End Multi-Modal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12763/) (2021)
- [Janus-Pro: Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation with Data and Model Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17811/) (2025)
- [SpatialVLM: Endowing Vision-Language Models with Spatial Reasoning Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12168/) (2024)
- [EgoSchema: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Very Long-form Video Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09126/) (2023)
- [FLAVA: A Foundational Language And Vision Alignment Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04482/) (2021)
- [Thinking in Space: How Multimodal Large Language Models See, Remember, and Recall Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14171/) (2024)
- [LLaVA-Video: Video Instruction Tuning With Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02713/) (2024)
- [BLINK: Multimodal Large Language Models Can See but Not Perceive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12390/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [MolmoAct2: Action Reasoning Models for Real-world Deployment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02881/) (2026)
- [Beyond Language Modeling: An Exploration of Multimodal Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03276/) (2026)
- [InfiniBench: Infinite Benchmarking for Visual Spatial Reasoning with Customizable Scene Complexity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18200/) (2025)
- [Cambrian-P: Pose-Grounded Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22819/) (2026)
- [See, Remember, Explore: A Benchmark and Baselines for Streaming Spatial Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23864/) (2026)
- [ReMoT: Reinforcement Learning with Motion Contrast Triplets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00461/) (2026)
- [LychSim: A Controllable and Interactive Simulation Framework for Vision Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12449/) (2026)
- [MosaicThinker: On-Device Visual Spatial Reasoning for Embodied AI via Iterative Construction of Space Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07082/) (2026)
- [Visionary: The World Model Carrier Built on WebGPU-Powered Gaussian Splatting Platform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08478/) (2025)
- [M3-Verse: A "Spot the Difference" Challenge for Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18735/) (2025)
- [3D-RFT: Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Video-based 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04976/) (2026)
- [UniWAM: Unified World-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02054/) (2026)
- [Lifting Unlabeled Internet-level Data for 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01907/) (2026)
- [ChainSpace: A Chained-Reasoning Paradigm for Spatial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15788/) (2026)
- [PhysBrain 1.5: From Vision-Language Models to Physical Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.14973/) (2026)
- [SYNCR: Diagnosing and Learning Cross-Video Reasoning from Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37918/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite impressive high-level video comprehension, multimodal language models struggle with spatial reasoning across time and space. While current spatial training approaches rely on real-world video data, obtaining diverse footage with precise spatial annotations remains a bottleneck. To alleviate this bottleneck, we present SIMS-V -- a systematic data-generation framework that leverages the privileged information of 3D simulators to create spatially-rich video training data for multimodal language models. Using this framework, we investigate which properties of simulated data drive effective real-world transfer through systematic ablations of question types, mixes, and scales. We identify a minimal set of three question categories (metric measurement, perspective-dependent reasoning, and temporal tracking) that prove most effective for developing transferable spatial intelligence, outperforming comprehensive coverage despite using fewer question types. These insights enable highly efficient training: our 7B-parameter video LLM fine-tuned on just 25K simulated examples outperforms the larger 72B baseline and achieves competitive performance with proprietary models on rigorous real-world spatial reasoning benchmarks. Our approach demonstrates robust generalization, maintaining performance on general video understanding while showing substantial improvements on embodied and real-world spatial tasks.