SpatialClaw: Rethinking Action Interface for Agentic Spatial Reasoning
On the map: LLM reasoning → Spatial and embodied reasoning
also in 2 more
Abstract (arXiv)
Spatial reasoning, the ability to determine where objects are, how they relate, and how they move in 3D, remains a fundamental challenge for vision-language models (VLMs). Tool-augmented agents attempt to address this by augmenting VLMs with specialist perception modules, yet their effectiveness is bounded by the action interface through which those tools are invoked. In this work, we study how the design of this interface shapes the agent's capacity for open-ended spatial reasoning. Existing spatial agents either employ single-pass code execution, which commits to a full analysis strategy before any intermediate result is observed, or rely on a structured tool-call interface that often offers less flexibility for freely composing operations or tailoring the analysis to each task. Both designs offer limited flexibility for open-ended, complex 3D/4D spatial reasoning. We therefore propose SpatialClaw, a training-free framework for spatial reasoning that adopts code as the action interface. SpatialClaw maintains a stateful Python kernel pre-loaded with input frames and a suite of perception and geometry primitives, letting a VLM-backed agent write one executable cell per step conditioned on all prior outputs, enabling the agent to flexibly compose and manipulate perception results and adapt its analysis to both intermediate text and visual observations and the demands of each problem. Evaluated across 20 spatial reasoning benchmarks spanning a broad range of static and dynamic 3D/4D spatial reasoning tasks, SpatialClaw achieves 59.9% average accuracy, outperforming the recent spatial agent by +11.2 points, with consistent gains across six VLM backbones from two model families without any benchmark- or model-specific adaptation.
Key facts. Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Spatial and embodied reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 44 of its 59 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 11 Jun 2026.
Builds on
44 of 59 references.
Closest ancestors · 16
Same direction, newest first
- 2026Make Geometry Matter for Spatial Reasoning27 Mar
- 2026RieMind: Geometry-Grounded Spatial Agent for Scene Understanding16 Mar
- 2026pySpatial: Generating 3D Visual Programs for Zero-Shot Spatial Reasoning1 Mar
- 2026Think3D: Thinking with Space for Spatial Reasoning19 Jan
- 2025From Indoor to Open World: Revealing the Spatial Reasoning Gap in MLLMs22 Dec
- 2025SpaceTools: Tool-Augmented Spatial Reasoning via Double Interactive RL3 Dec
- 2025Geometrically-Constrained Agent for Spatial Reasoning27 Nov
- 2025G2VLM: Geometry Grounded Vision Language Model with Unified 3D Reconstruction and Spatial Reasoning26 Nov
- 2025TIGeR: Tool-Integrated Geometric Reasoning in Vision-Language Models for Robotics8 Oct
- 2025OmniSpatial: Towards Comprehensive Spatial Reasoning Benchmark for Vision Language Models3 Jun
- 2025MMSI-Bench: A Benchmark for Multi-Image Spatial Intelligence29 May
- 2025ViewSpatial-Bench: Evaluating Multi-perspective Spatial Localization in Vision-Language Models27 May
4 more
- 2025Visual Agentic AI for Spatial Reasoning with a Dynamic API10 Feb
- 2024Thinking in Space: How Multimodal Large Language Models See, Remember, and Recall Spaces18 Dec
- 2024SpatialRGPT: Grounded Spatial Reasoning in Vision Language Models3 Jun
- 2024SpatialVLM: Endowing Vision-Language Models with Spatial Reasoning Capabilities22 Jan
Other references · 28
- 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,393
- 2020End-to-End Object Detection with Transformerscited by 7,384
- 2023Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttentioncited by 5,767
- 2024SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videoscited by 2,784
- 2024Video-MME: The First-Ever Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark of Multi-modal LLMs in Video Analysiscited by 1,375
- 2023HuggingGPT: Solving AI Tasks with ChatGPT and its Friends in Hugging Facecited by 1,173
- 2025SAM 3: Segment Anything with Conceptscited by 835
- 2025Depth Anything 3: Recovering the Visual Space from Any Viewscited by 626
- 2023ViperGPT: Visual Inference via Python Execution for Reasoningcited by 591
- 2024Executable Code Actions Elicit Better LLM Agentscited by 537
- 2024BLINK: Multimodal Large Language Models Can See but Not Perceivecited by 529
- 2022Visual Programming: Compositional visual reasoning without trainingcited by 507
16 more
- 2025π3: Permutation-Equivariant Visual Geometry Learningcited by 292
- 2025VLM-3R: Vision-Language Models Augmented with Instruction-Aligned 3D Reconstructioncited by 154
- 2024RoboSpatial: Teaching Spatial Understanding to 2D and 3D Vision-Language Models for Roboticscited by 133
- 2025From Flatland to Space: Teaching Vision-Language Models to Perceive and Reason in 3Dcited by 127
- 2025PyVision: Agentic Vision with Dynamic Toolingcited by 71
- 2025OctoTools: An Agentic Framework with Extensible Tools for Complex Reasoningcited by 69
- 2025Eagle 2.5: Boosting Long-Context Post-Training for Frontier Vision-Language Modelscited by 62
- 2025SpatialBench: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models for Spatial Cognitioncited by 35
- 2025MMSI-Video-Bench: A Holistic Benchmark for Video-Based Spatial Intelligencecited by 34
- 2025PAI-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark For Physical AIcited by 30
- 2025Benchmark Designers Should "Train on the Test Set" to Expose Exploitable Non-Visual Shortcutscited by 26
- 2025DSI-Bench: A Benchmark for Dynamic Spatial Intelligencecited by 20
- 2025CVBench: Benchmarking Cross-Video Synergies for Complex Multimodal Reasoningcited by 14
- 2025SpatialTree: How Spatial Abilities Branch Out in MLLMscited by 11
- 2026PerceptionComp: A Video Benchmark for Complex Perception-Centric Reasoningcited by 3
- 20264DP-QA: Scalable QA for 4D Perception in Vision Language Modelscited by 1
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 13.
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- 2026Evolution Fine-Tuning: Learning to Discover Across 371 Optimization Taskscited by 4
- 2026Self-Evolving Neuro-Symbolic Skills for Tool-Augmented Spatial Reasoningcited by 2
- 2026R3D: Quantitative 3D Spatial Reasoning for Egocentric Wearablescited by 0
- 2026Spatial Memory Agent: Experience-Grounded Procedure Memory for Spatial Intelligencecited by 0
- 2026PhysAI-Bench: A Benchmark for LLM-Based Agentic Decision-Making in Autonomous UAV-Centric Physical AIcited by 0
- 2026KeyRec: Bounded Visual Memory for Streaming and Long-Video Understandingcited by 0
- 2026Agentic Relative Camera Pose Estimation via Learned Ranking and Verificationcited by 0
- 2026Mid-Harness: Scaling Actions Between Model and Harness for Terminal Agentscited by 0
- 2026Are Frontier VLM Agents Ready to Be Robot Generalists? An Empirical Study with the Embodied Agent Arenacited by 0
- 2026From Reasoning Failures to Composable Video Spatial Intelligencecited by 0
- 2026SpatialOPSD: Self-Distilling Spatial Intelligence from Verified Coding Agent Tracescited by 0
- 2026Seek-and-View Reasoning for Multi-View Spatial Understandingcited by 0
1 more
- 2026Distilling Routed 3D Privilege for Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language Models8 Oct 2026
- 2026Seek-and-View Reasoning for Multi-View Spatial Understanding8 Oct 2026
- 2026SpatialOPSD: Self-Distilling Spatial Intelligence from Verified Coding Agent Traces8 Oct 2026
- 2026From Reasoning Failures to Composable Video Spatial Intelligence1 Oct 2026
- 2026Are Frontier VLM Agents Ready to Be Robot Generalists? An Empirical Study with the Embodied Agent Arena1 Oct 2026
- 2026Mid-Harness: Scaling Actions Between Model and Harness for Terminal Agents30 Sep 2026
- 2026Agentic Relative Camera Pose Estimation via Learned Ranking and Verification30 Sep 2026
- 2026KeyRec: Bounded Visual Memory for Streaming and Long-Video Understanding26 Sep 2026
- 2026PhysAI-Bench: A Benchmark for LLM-Based Agentic Decision-Making in Autonomous UAV-Centric Physical AI20 Sep 2026
- 2026Spatial Memory Agent: Experience-Grounded Procedure Memory for Spatial Intelligence13 Aug 2026
- 2026Self-Evolving Neuro-Symbolic Skills for Tool-Augmented Spatial Reasoning8 Aug 2026
- 2026R3D: Quantitative 3D Spatial Reasoning for Egocentric Wearables3 Jul 2026
1 more
- 2026Spatial Memory Agent: Experience-Grounded Procedure Memory for Spatial Intelligencecited by 0
- 2026PhysAI-Bench: A Benchmark for LLM-Based Agentic Decision-Making in Autonomous UAV-Centric Physical AIcited by 0
- 2026Mid-Harness: Scaling Actions Between Model and Harness for Terminal Agentscited by 0
- 2026Mid-Harness: Scaling Actions Between Model and Harness for Terminal Agents30 Sep 2026
- 2026PhysAI-Bench: A Benchmark for LLM-Based Agentic Decision-Making in Autonomous UAV-Centric Physical AI20 Sep 2026
- 2026Spatial Memory Agent: Experience-Grounded Procedure Memory for Spatial Intelligence13 Aug 2026
- 2026Evolution Fine-Tuning: Learning to Discover Across 371 Optimization Taskscited by 4
- 2026R3D: Quantitative 3D Spatial Reasoning for Egocentric Wearablescited by 0
- 2026Agentic Relative Camera Pose Estimation via Learned Ranking and Verificationcited by 0
- 2026SpatialOPSD: Self-Distilling Spatial Intelligence from Verified Coding Agent Tracescited by 0
- 2026Seek-and-View Reasoning for Multi-View Spatial Understandingcited by 0
- 2026Distilling Routed 3D Privilege for Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language Modelscited by 0
- 2026Distilling Routed 3D Privilege for Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language Models8 Oct 2026
- 2026Seek-and-View Reasoning for Multi-View Spatial Understanding8 Oct 2026
- 2026SpatialOPSD: Self-Distilling Spatial Intelligence from Verified Coding Agent Traces8 Oct 2026
- 2026Agentic Relative Camera Pose Estimation via Learned Ranking and Verification30 Sep 2026
- 2026R3D: Quantitative 3D Spatial Reasoning for Egocentric Wearables3 Jul 2026
- 2026Evolution Fine-Tuning: Learning to Discover Across 371 Optimization Tasks27 Jun 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026SpatialAct: Probing Spatial Reasoning-to-Action Capabilities of VLM Agents in 3D Scenes
- 2026SpatialCLI: Learning to Reason With Spatial Tools, Then Without Them
- 2026Active Exploring like a Pigeon: Reinforcing Spatial Reasoning via Agentic Vision-Language Models
- 2025SpatialCoT: Advancing Spatial Reasoning through Coordinate Alignment and Chain-of-Thought for Embodied Task Planning
- 2026Perceive, Interact, Reason: Building Tool-Augmented Visual Agents for Spatial Reasoning
- 2026From Perception to Action: Spatial AI Agents and World Models
- 2026S-Agent: Spatial Tool-Use Elicits Reasoning for Spatial Intelligence
- 2026SpatialWorld: Benchmarking Interactive Spatial Reasoning of Multimodal Agents in Real-World Tasks