# RieMind: Geometry-Grounded Spatial Agent for Scene Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15386 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15386/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Spatial and embodied reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 24 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 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/)
- LLM agents and tool use / [Multimodal and embodied agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/multimodal-and-embodied-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [A Survey on Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13549/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Thinking in Space: How Multimodal Large Language Models See, Remember, and Recall Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14171/) (2024)
- [HallusionBench: An Advanced Diagnostic Suite for Entangled Language Hallucination and Visual Illusion in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14566/) (2023)
- [ARKitScenes: A Diverse Real-World Dataset For 3D Indoor Scene Understanding Using Mobile RGB-D Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08897/) (2021)
- [Spatial-MLLM: Boosting MLLM Capabilities in Visual-based Spatial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23747/) (2025)
- [Hierarchical Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Graphs for Language-Grounded Robot Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17846/) (2024)
- [Hydra: A Real-time Spatial Perception System for 3D Scene Graph Construction and Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.13360/) (2022)
- [VLM-3R: Vision-Language Models Augmented with Instruction-Aligned 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20279/) (2025)
- [SpaceR: Reinforcing MLLMs in Video Spatial Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01805/) (2025)
- [Learning from Videos for 3D World: Enhancing MLLMs with 3D Vision Geometry Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24625/) (2025)
- [VideoHallucer: Evaluating Intrinsic and Extrinsic Hallucinations in Large Video-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16338/) (2024)
- [SpatialLadder: Progressive Training for Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08531/) (2025)
- [MM-Spatial: Exploring 3D Spatial Understanding in Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13111/) (2025)
- [Language-Grounded Dynamic Scene Graphs for Interactive Object Search with Mobile Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08605/) (2024)
- [GraphEQA: Using 3D Semantic Scene Graphs for Real-time Embodied Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14480/) (2024)
- [CogNav: Cognitive Process Modeling for Object Goal Navigation with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10439/) (2024)
- [Search3D: Hierarchical Open-Vocabulary 3D Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18431/) (2024)
- [TIGeR: Tool-Integrated Geometric Reasoning in Vision-Language Models for Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07181/) (2025)
- [SpatialScore: Towards Comprehensive Evaluation for Spatial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17012/) (2025)
- [EGOILLUSION: Benchmarking Hallucinations in Egocentric Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12687/) (2025)
- [Video Spatial Reasoning with Object-Centric 3D Rollout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13190/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [SpatialClaw: Rethinking Action Interface for Agentic Spatial Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.13673/) (2026)
- [Skill-3D: Evolving Scene-Aware Skills for Agentic 3D Spatial Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07436/) (2026)
- [R3D: Quantitative 3D Spatial Reasoning for Egocentric Wearables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02921/) (2026)
- [From Reasoning Failures to Composable Video Spatial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.01999/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visual Language Models (VLMs) have increasingly become the main paradigm for understanding indoor scenes, but they still struggle with metric and spatial reasoning. Current approaches rely on end-to-end video understanding or large-scale spatial question answering fine-tuning, inherently coupling perception and reasoning. In this paper, we investigate whether decoupling perception and reasoning leads to improved spatial reasoning. We propose an agentic framework for static 3D indoor scene reasoning that grounds an LLM in an explicit 3D scene graph (3DSG). Rather than ingesting videos directly, each scene is represented as a persistent 3DSG constructed by a dedicated perception module. To isolate reasoning performance, we instantiate the 3DSG from ground-truth annotations. The agent interacts with the scene exclusively through structured geometric tools that expose fundamental properties such as object dimensions, distances, poses, and spatial relationships. The results we obtain on the static split of VSI-Bench provide an upper bound under ideal perceptual conditions on the spatial reasoning performance, and we find that it is significantly higher than previous works, by up to 16%, without task specific fine-tuning. Compared to base VLMs, our agentic variant achieves significantly better performance, with average improvements between 33% to 50%. These findings indicate that explicit geometric grounding substantially improves spatial reasoning performance, and suggest that structured representations offer a compelling alternative to purely end-to-end visual reasoning.
