mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

World2Mind: Cognition Toolkit for Allocentric Spatial Reasoning in Foundation Models

arXiv 2603.09774 ↗First posted 10 Mar 2026cs.AIcited by 1

On the map: LLM reasoning → Spatial and embodied reasoning

Abstract (arXiv)

Achieving robust spatial reasoning remains a fundamental challenge for current Multimodal Foundation Models (MFMs). Existing methods either overfit statistical shortcuts via 3D grounding data or remain confined to 2D visual perception, limiting both spatial reasoning accuracy and generalization in unseen scenarios. Inspired by the spatial cognitive mapping mechanisms of biological intelligence, we propose World2Mind, a training-free spatial intelligence toolkit. At its core, World2Mind leverages 3D reconstruction and instance segmentation models to construct structured spatial cognitive maps, empowering MFMs to proactively acquire targeted spatial knowledge regarding interested landmarks and routes of interest. To provide robust geometric-topological priors, World2Mind synthesizes an Allocentric-Spatial Tree (AST) that uses elliptical parameters to model the top-down layout of landmarks accurately. To mitigate the inherent inaccuracies of 3D reconstruction, we introduce a three-stage reasoning chain comprising tool invocation assessment, modality-decoupled cue collection, and geometry-semantics interwoven reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that World2Mind boosts the performance of frontier models, such as GPT-5.2, by 5%~18%. Astonishingly, relying solely on the AST-structured text, purely text-only foundation models can perform complex 3D spatial reasoning, achieving performance approaching that of advanced multimodal models.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Spatial and embodied reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 19 of its 36 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 10 Mar 2026.

Builds on

19 of 36 references.

Closest ancestors · 9

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026pySpatial: Generating 3D Visual Programs for Zero-Shot Spatial Reasoning1 Mar
  2. 2026Think3D: Thinking with Space for Spatial Reasoning19 Jan
  3. 2025From Indoor to Open World: Revealing the Spatial Reasoning Gap in MLLMs22 Dec
  4. 2025N3D-VLM: Native 3D Grounding Enables Accurate Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language Models18 Dec
  5. 2025SpaceTools: Tool-Augmented Spatial Reasoning via Double Interactive RL3 Dec
  6. 2025SURPRISE3D: A Dataset for Spatial Understanding and Reasoning in Complex 3D Scenes10 Jul
  7. 2025SpatialReasoner: Towards Explicit and Generalizable 3D Spatial Reasoning28 Apr
  8. 2025The Point, the Vision and the Text: Does Point Cloud Boost Spatial Reasoning of Large Language Models? A Bias-Controlled Study6 Apr
  9. 2025Beyond Semantics: Rediscovering Spatial Awareness in Vision-Language Models21 Mar

Other references · 10

  1. 2025Qwen3-VL Technical Reportcited by 2,793
  2. 2025OpenAI GPT-5 System Cardcited by 989
  3. 2025SAM 3: Segment Anything with Conceptscited by 906
  4. 2025Depth Anything 3: Recovering the Visual Space from Any Viewscited by 692
  5. 2025π3: Permutation-Equivariant Visual Geometry Learningcited by 319
  6. 2025Thinking with Images for Multimodal Reasoning: Foundations, Methods, and Future Frontierscited by 199
  7. 2024Does Spatial Cognition Emerge in Frontier Models?cited by 66
  8. 2025MMSI-Video-Bench: A Holistic Benchmark for Video-Based Spatial Intelligencecited by 38
  9. 2025SD-VLM: Spatial Measuring and Understanding with Depth-Encoded Vision-Language Modelscited by 25
  10. 2025SI-Bench: Benchmarking Social Intelligence of Large Language Models in Human-to-Human Conversationscited by 7

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.

1 paper.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025Video2Layout: Recall and Reconstruct Metric-Grounded Cognitive Map for Spatial Reasoning
  2. 2025Spatial Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models: A Survey of Tasks, Benchmarks and Methods
  3. 2025SpatialBench: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models for Spatial Cognition
  4. 2026AlloSpatial: Agentic Harness Framework for Spatial Reasoning in Foundation Models
  5. 2026OmniView-Space: Reinforcing Spatial Reasoning via Multi-Perspective Spatial Mapping
  6. 2026Spatial-IQ: Deconstructing Spatial Intelligence via Hierarchical Capability Tests
  7. 2025Reasoning Path and Latent State Analysis for Multi-view Visual Spatial Reasoning: A Cognitive Science Perspective
  8. 2025Unfolding Spatial Cognition: Evaluating Multimodal Models on Visual Simulations