# pySpatial: Generating 3D Visual Programs for Zero-Shot Spatial Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.00905 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00905/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Spatial and embodied reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 54 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Mar 2026.

## 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 54)

- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (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)
- [DocVQA: A Dataset for VQA on Document Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00398/) (2020)
- [MM-Vet: Evaluating Large Multimodal Models for Integrated Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02490/) (2023)
- [HuggingGPT: Solving AI Tasks with ChatGPT and its Friends in Hugging Face](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17580/) (2023)
- [Language Models as Zero-Shot Planners: Extracting Actionable Knowledge for Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07207/) (2022)
- [Grounding Image Matching in 3D with MASt3R](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09756/) (2024)
- [Cambrian-1: A Fully Open, Vision-Centric Exploration of Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16860/) (2024)
- [DeepSeek-VL: Towards Real-World Vision-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05525/) (2024)
- [Open3D: A Modern Library for 3D Data Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09847/) (2018)
- [SpatialVLM: Endowing Vision-Language Models with Spatial Reasoning Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12168/) (2024)
- [pixelSplat: 3D Gaussian Splats from Image Pairs for Scalable Generalizable 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12337/) (2023)
- [Visual ChatGPT: Talking, Drawing and Editing with Visual Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04671/) (2023)
- [Thinking in Space: How Multimodal Large Language Models See, Remember, and Recall Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14171/) (2024)
- [ViperGPT: Visual Inference via Python Execution for Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08128/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-Video: Video Instruction Tuning With Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02713/) (2024)
- [Perceiver-Actor: A Multi-Task Transformer for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05451/) (2022)
- [Continuous 3D Perception Model with Persistent State](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12387/) (2025)
- [MM-REACT: Prompting ChatGPT for Multimodal Reasoning and Action](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11381/) (2023)
- [Visual Programming: Compositional visual reasoning without training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11559/) (2022)
- [Visual Language Maps for Robot Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05714/) (2022)
- [An Embodied Generalist Agent in 3D World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12871/) (2023)
- [SQA3D: Situated Question Answering in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07474/) (2022)
- [SpatialRGPT: Grounded Spatial Reasoning in Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01584/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [SpatialClaw: Rethinking Action Interface for Agentic Spatial Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.13673/) (2026)
- [Evolving Contextual Safety in Multi-Modal Large Language Models via Inference-Time Self-Reflective Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15800/) (2026)
- [AlloSpatial: Agentic Harness Framework for Spatial Reasoning in Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08952/) (2026)
- [SATURN: Symbolic Spatial Reasoning for Multi-Perspective Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22694/) (2026)
- [OmniView-Space: Reinforcing Spatial Reasoning via Multi-Perspective Spatial Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00881/) (2026)
- [Spatial Memory Agent: Experience-Grounded Procedure Memory for Spatial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.12743/) (2026)
- [World2Mind: Cognition Toolkit for Allocentric Spatial Reasoning in Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09774/) (2026)
- [Reasmory: 3D Reconstruction as Explicit Memory for VLMs Spatial Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00963/) (2026)
- [R3D: Quantitative 3D Spatial Reasoning for Egocentric Wearables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02921/) (2026)
- [Video2Skill: From Streaming Experience to Reusable Embodied Skills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36691/) (2026)
- [Exemplar2VQA: A Scalable Exemplar-Driven Visual Question Answering Generation Framework via Multi-Agent Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37655/) (2026)
- [SpatialOPSD: Self-Distilling Spatial Intelligence from Verified Coding Agent Traces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.11366/) (2026)
- [S-Space: Exploring Spatial Workspace in Multimodal Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13527/) (2026)
- [EvoSpatial: Experience-Driven Skill and Tool Evolution for Spatial Reasoning Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.16679/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in general-purpose perception and reasoning, but they still struggle with tasks that require spatial understanding of the 3D world. To address this, we introduce pySpatial, a visual programming framework that equips MLLMs with the ability to interface with spatial tools via Python code generation. Given an image sequence and a natural-language query, the model composes function calls to spatial tools including 3D reconstruction, camera-pose recovery, novel-view rendering, etc. These operations convert raw 2D inputs into an explorable 3D scene, enabling MLLMs to reason explicitly over structured spatial representations. Notably, pySpatial requires no gradient-based fine-tuning and operates in a fully zero-shot setting. Experimental evaluations on the challenging MindCube and Omni3D-Bench benchmarks demonstrate that our framework pySpatial consistently surpasses strong MLLM baselines; for instance, it outperforms GPT-4.1-mini by 12.94% on MindCube. Furthermore, we conduct real-world indoor navigation experiments where the robot can successfully traverse complex environments using route plans generated by pySpatial, highlighting the practical effectiveness of our approach.