# Vision-Language Memory for Spatial Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20644 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20644/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Spatial and embodied reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 76 of its 87 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 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 76)

- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [Qwen2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10671/) (2024)
- [MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16502/) (2023)
- [Expanding Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Multimodal Models with Model, Data, and Test-Time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05271/) (2024)
- [DUSt3R: Geometric 3D Vision Made Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14132/) (2023)
- [VGGT: Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11651/) (2025)
- [Video-MME: The First-Ever Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark of Multi-modal LLMs in Video Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21075/) (2024)
- [ZeRO: Memory Optimizations Toward Training Trillion Parameter Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02054/) (2019)
- [How Far Are We to GPT-4V? Closing the Gap to Commercial Multimodal Models with Open-Source Suites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16821/) (2024)
- [Cambrian-1: A Fully Open, Vision-Centric Exploration of Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16860/) (2024)
- [ScanNet++: A High-Fidelity Dataset of 3D Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11417/) (2023)
- [SpatialVLM: Endowing Vision-Language Models with Spatial Reasoning Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12168/) (2024)
- [VILA: On Pre-training for Visual Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07533/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Continuous 3D Perception Model with Persistent State](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12387/) (2025)
- [MovieChat: From Dense Token to Sparse Memory for Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16449/) (2023)
- [Long Context Transfer from Language to Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16852/) (2024)
- [ARKitScenes: A Diverse Real-World Dataset For 3D Indoor Scene Understanding Using Mobile RGB-D Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08897/) (2021)
- [An Embodied Generalist Agent in 3D World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12871/) (2023)
- [LMMs-Eval: Reality Check on the Evaluation of Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12772/) (2024)
- [ScanQA: 3D Question Answering for Spatial Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10482/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Vesta: A Generalist Embodied Reasoning Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.20905/) (2026)
- [Q-GeoMem: Question-Guided Geometric Memory for Video Spatial Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.27318/) (2026)
- [SPATIOROUTE: Dynamic Prompt Routing for Zero-Shot Spatial Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18209/) (2026)
- [Probing Collision Grounding in Vision-Language Models for Safe Human-Robot Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.31196/) (2026)
- [Dual-Latent Memory Routing for Vision-Language Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.05539/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Spatial reasoning is a critical capability for intelligent robots, yet current vision-language models (VLMs) still fall short of human-level performance in video-based spatial reasoning. This gap mainly stems from two challenges: a semantic-geometric misalignment that prevents consistent 3D understanding, and the absence of persistent memory to retain 3D representation and understanding across frames. To address these limitations, we present VLM2, a Vision-Language Model with persistent Memory for spatial reasoning with a view-consistent, 3D-aware representation purely from 2D videos. Specifically, we incorporate a dual-memory module consisting of a working memory that operates as a sliding window to focus on immediate context, and an episodic memory that consolidates and stores critical information across frames. This design enables bounded and efficient spatial reasoning under a fixed computational cost. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks show that VLM2 achieves state-of-the-art performance among video-based models, significantly advancing the frontier of visual-spatial intelligence.