# StateVLM: A State-Aware Vision-Language Model for Robotic Affordance Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.03927 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03927/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Spatial and embodied reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 51 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 May 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 51)

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- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01691/) (2022)
- [Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12966/) (2023)
- [Qwen2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10671/) (2024)
- [Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07058/) (2021)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [Flickr30k Entities: Collecting Region-to-Phrase Correspondences for Richer Image-to-Sentence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04870/) (2015)
- [Shikra: Unleashing Multimodal LLM's Referential Dialogue Magic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15195/) (2023)
- [Generation and Comprehension of Unambiguous Object Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02283/) (2015)
- [OFA: Unifying Architectures, Tasks, and Modalities Through a Simple Sequence-to-Sequence Learning Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03052/) (2022)
- [CogVLM: Visual Expert for Pretrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03079/) (2023)
- [SpatialVLM: Endowing Vision-Language Models with Spatial Reasoning Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12168/) (2024)
- [MiniGPT-v2: large language model as a unified interface for vision-language multi-task learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09478/) (2023)
- [Ferret: Refer and Ground Anything Anywhere at Any Granularity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07704/) (2023)
- [VisionLLM: Large Language Model is also an Open-Ended Decoder for Vision-Centric Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11175/) (2023)
- [MAttNet: Modular Attention Network for Referring Expression Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08186/) (2018)
- [Pix2seq: A Language Modeling Framework for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10852/) (2021)
- [Large-Scale Adversarial Training for Vision-and-Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06195/) (2020)
- [Robots That Ask For Help: Uncertainty Alignment for Large Language Model Planners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01928/) (2023)
- [TransVG: End-to-End Visual Grounding with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08541/) (2021)
- [What's "up" with vision-language models? Investigating their struggle with spatial reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19785/) (2023)
- [ManipLLM: Embodied Multimodal Large Language Model for Object-Centric Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16217/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-language models have demonstrated strong performance across robotic perception and instruction-following tasks. However, they still struggle with precise spatial reasoning, particularly in predicting object locations and fine-grained object states. We propose StateVLM, a vision-language model designed to learn fine-grained object representations, including object localization and grasp-relevant region prediction. We introduce a joint training objective that integrates an auxiliary regression loss (ARL) with the standard causal language modeling (CLM) objective to improve numerical reasoning and spatial understanding. To evaluate whether models can move beyond category-level grounding toward state-aware spatial understanding, we introduce an open-source benchmark, Object State Affordance Reasoning (OSAR), comprising 1,172 scenes with 7,746 individual objects and their corresponding bounding boxes. Empirical experiments on the Referring Expression Comprehension datasets demonstrate that integrating ARL improves model performance compared with CLM only. Experiments on the OSAR benchmark further demonstrate that StateVLM with ARL achieves an average improvement of 5.2% over models trained with CLM only. These results show that ARL is particularly beneficial for the complex affordance reasoning tasks that require object state understanding. The joint training objective in StateVLM demonstrates that integrating an auxiliary regression objective into VLM training improves numerical reasoning, and the OSAR benchmark provides a new testbed for understanding object state affordances in robotics.