# Perceptio: Perception Enhanced Vision Language Models via Spatial Token Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.18795 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18795/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Embodied and 3D vision-language models, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 42 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Mar 2026.

## Placed in

- 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 42)

- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12966/) (2023)
- [MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06281/) (2023)
- [Learn to Explain: Multimodal Reasoning via Thought Chains for Science Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09513/) (2022)
- [MME: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13394/) (2023)
- [Expanding Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Multimodal Models with Model, Data, and Test-Time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05271/) (2024)
- [Show, Attend and Tell: Neural Image Caption Generation with Visual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03044/) (2015)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [Video-LLaVA: Learning United Visual Representation by Alignment Before Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10122/) (2023)
- [Modeling Context in Referring Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00272/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Are We on the Right Way for Evaluating Large Vision-Language Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20330/) (2024)
- [Generation and Comprehension of Unambiguous Object Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02283/) (2015)
- [A Diagram Is Worth A Dozen Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.07396/) (2016)
- [LISA: Reasoning Segmentation via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00692/) (2023)
- [Eyes Wide Shut? Exploring the Visual Shortcomings of Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06209/) (2024)
- [MiniGPT-v2: large language model as a unified interface for vision-language multi-task learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09478/) (2023)
- [BLINK: Multimodal Large Language Models Can See but Not Perceive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12390/) (2024)
- [VisionLLM: Large Language Model is also an Open-Ended Decoder for Vision-Centric Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11175/) (2023)
- [GLaMM: Pixel Grounding Large Multimodal Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03356/) (2023)
- [mPLUG-Owl3: Towards Long Image-Sequence Understanding in Multi-Modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04840/) (2024)
- [PixelLM: Pixel Reasoning with Large Multimodal Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02228/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-Plus: Learning to Use Tools for Creating Multimodal Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05437/) (2023)
- [Sa2VA: Marrying SAM2 with MLLM for Dense Grounded Understanding of Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04001/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [TPS-Drive: Task-Guided Representation Purification for VLM-based Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.27038/) (2026)
- [DepthEvidence: Unifying Metric Depth Prediction and Geometric Reasoning in Multimodal Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.31103/) (2026)
- [GeoScaffold: Learning Compact Geometric Latents via Reconstruction for Efficient Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02697/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) excel at semantic understanding but struggle with fine grained spatial grounding, as the model must implicitly infer complex geometry without ever producing a spatial interpretation. We present Perceptio, a perception enhanced LVLM with 2D and 3D spatial reasoning abilities, enabled via explicit semantic segmentation tokens and depth tokens generated directly within the autoregressive sequence. Concretely, we (i) distill a VQVAE depth codebook from a strong monocular teacher to tokenize dense depth into compact sequences, and (ii) integrate SAM2 based semantic segmentation tokens and VQ-VAE depth tokens inside the LLM so the model first emits spatial tokens and then answers. To stabilize depth token generation, we introduce novel composite depth-token objectives (marker, token, and count losses) and a soft-merging technique for differentiable reconstruction. We adopt a multi-task co-training strategy across diverse datasets, letting the model learn perception tokens to tackle multiple downstream tasks. Building on InternVL, Perceptio achieves state-of-the-art performance across benchmarks: improving referring expression segmentation by +0.8/+1.4/+1.1 cIoU on RefCOCO/+/g HardBLINK spatial understanding accuracy by 10.3%, and MMBench accuracy by 1.0%, demonstrating that explicit spatial chain-of-thought materially strengthens spatial grounding in LVLMs.