mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

SpatialClaw: Rethinking Action Interface for Agentic Spatial Reasoning

arXiv 2606.13673 ↗First posted 11 Jun 2026cs.CV cs.AIcited by 13

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

  1. 2026Make Geometry Matter for Spatial Reasoning27 Mar
  2. 2026RieMind: Geometry-Grounded Spatial Agent for Scene Understanding16 Mar
  3. 2026pySpatial: Generating 3D Visual Programs for Zero-Shot Spatial Reasoning1 Mar
  4. 2026Think3D: Thinking with Space for Spatial Reasoning19 Jan
  5. 2025From Indoor to Open World: Revealing the Spatial Reasoning Gap in MLLMs22 Dec
  6. 2025SpaceTools: Tool-Augmented Spatial Reasoning via Double Interactive RL3 Dec
  7. 2025Geometrically-Constrained Agent for Spatial Reasoning27 Nov
  8. 2025G2VLM: Geometry Grounded Vision Language Model with Unified 3D Reconstruction and Spatial Reasoning26 Nov
  9. 2025TIGeR: Tool-Integrated Geometric Reasoning in Vision-Language Models for Robotics8 Oct
  10. 2025OmniSpatial: Towards Comprehensive Spatial Reasoning Benchmark for Vision Language Models3 Jun
  11. 2025MMSI-Bench: A Benchmark for Multi-Image Spatial Intelligence29 May
  12. 2025ViewSpatial-Bench: Evaluating Multi-perspective Spatial Localization in Vision-Language Models27 May
4 more
  1. 2025Visual Agentic AI for Spatial Reasoning with a Dynamic API10 Feb
  2. 2024Thinking in Space: How Multimodal Large Language Models See, Remember, and Recall Spaces18 Dec
  3. 2024SpatialRGPT: Grounded Spatial Reasoning in Vision Language Models3 Jun
  4. 2024SpatialVLM: Endowing Vision-Language Models with Spatial Reasoning Capabilities22 Jan

Other references · 28

  1. 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,393
  2. 2020End-to-End Object Detection with Transformerscited by 7,384
  3. 2023Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttentioncited by 5,767
  4. 2024SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videoscited by 2,784
  5. 2024Video-MME: The First-Ever Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark of Multi-modal LLMs in Video Analysiscited by 1,375
  6. 2023HuggingGPT: Solving AI Tasks with ChatGPT and its Friends in Hugging Facecited by 1,173
  7. 2025SAM 3: Segment Anything with Conceptscited by 835
  8. 2025Depth Anything 3: Recovering the Visual Space from Any Viewscited by 626
  9. 2023ViperGPT: Visual Inference via Python Execution for Reasoningcited by 591
  10. 2024Executable Code Actions Elicit Better LLM Agentscited by 537
  11. 2024BLINK: Multimodal Large Language Models Can See but Not Perceivecited by 529
  12. 2022Visual Programming: Compositional visual reasoning without trainingcited by 507
16 more
  1. 2025π3: Permutation-Equivariant Visual Geometry Learningcited by 292
  2. 2025VLM-3R: Vision-Language Models Augmented with Instruction-Aligned 3D Reconstructioncited by 154
  3. 2024RoboSpatial: Teaching Spatial Understanding to 2D and 3D Vision-Language Models for Roboticscited by 133
  4. 2025From Flatland to Space: Teaching Vision-Language Models to Perceive and Reason in 3Dcited by 127
  5. 2025PyVision: Agentic Vision with Dynamic Toolingcited by 71
  6. 2025OctoTools: An Agentic Framework with Extensible Tools for Complex Reasoningcited by 69
  7. 2025Eagle 2.5: Boosting Long-Context Post-Training for Frontier Vision-Language Modelscited by 62
  8. 2025SpatialBench: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models for Spatial Cognitioncited by 35
  9. 2025MMSI-Video-Bench: A Holistic Benchmark for Video-Based Spatial Intelligencecited by 34
  10. 2025PAI-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark For Physical AIcited by 30
  11. 2025Benchmark Designers Should "Train on the Test Set" to Expose Exploitable Non-Visual Shortcutscited by 26
  12. 2025DSI-Bench: A Benchmark for Dynamic Spatial Intelligencecited by 20
  13. 2025CVBench: Benchmarking Cross-Video Synergies for Complex Multimodal Reasoningcited by 14
  14. 2025SpatialTree: How Spatial Abilities Branch Out in MLLMscited by 11
  15. 2026PerceptionComp: A Video Benchmark for Complex Perception-Centric Reasoningcited by 3
  16. 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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  1. 2026SpatialAct: Probing Spatial Reasoning-to-Action Capabilities of VLM Agents in 3D Scenes
  2. 2026SpatialCLI: Learning to Reason With Spatial Tools, Then Without Them
  3. 2026Active Exploring like a Pigeon: Reinforcing Spatial Reasoning via Agentic Vision-Language Models
  4. 2025SpatialCoT: Advancing Spatial Reasoning through Coordinate Alignment and Chain-of-Thought for Embodied Task Planning
  5. 2026Perceive, Interact, Reason: Building Tool-Augmented Visual Agents for Spatial Reasoning
  6. 2026From Perception to Action: Spatial AI Agents and World Models
  7. 2026S-Agent: Spatial Tool-Use Elicits Reasoning for Spatial Intelligence
  8. 2026SpatialWorld: Benchmarking Interactive Spatial Reasoning of Multimodal Agents in Real-World Tasks