# SPARGen: Unifying Spatial Perception and Reasoning through Native Multimodal Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14138 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.14138/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [DUSt3R: Geometric 3D Vision Made Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14132/) (2023)
- [LoFTR: Detector-Free Local Feature Matching with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00680/) (2021)
- [Chameleon: Mixed-Modal Early-Fusion Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09818/) (2024)
- [Emerging Properties in Unified Multimodal Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14683/) (2025)
- [SpatialVLM: Endowing Vision-Language Models with Spatial Reasoning Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12168/) (2024)
- [Depth Anything 3: Recovering the Visual Space from Any Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10647/) (2025)
- [Common Objects in 3D: Large-Scale Learning and Evaluation of Real-life 3D Category Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00512/) (2021)
- [Continuous 3D Perception Model with Persistent State](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12387/) (2025)
- [Janus: Decoupling Visual Encoding for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13848/) (2024)
- [Fast3R: Towards 3D Reconstruction of 1000+ Images in One Forward Pass](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13928/) (2025)
- [GMFlow: Learning Optical Flow via Global Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13680/) (2021)
- [MoGe: Unlocking Accurate Monocular Geometry Estimation for Open-Domain Images with Optimal Training Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19115/) (2024)
- [FlowFormer: A Transformer Architecture for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16194/) (2022)
- [Visual Geometry Grounded Deep Structure From Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04563/) (2023)
- [Spatial-MLLM: Boosting MLLM Capabilities in Visual-based Spatial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23747/) (2025)
- [FLARE: Feed-forward Geometry, Appearance and Camera Estimation from Uncalibrated Sparse Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12138/) (2025)
- [DKM: Dense Kernelized Feature Matching for Geometry Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.00667/) (2022)
- [Chat-Scene: Bridging 3D Scene and Large Language Models with Object Identifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08168/) (2023)
- [From Flatland to Space: Teaching Vision-Language Models to Perceive and Reason in 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22976/) (2025)
- [Grounded 3D-LLM with Referent Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10370/) (2024)
- [TransformerFusion: Monocular RGB Scene Reconstruction using Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02191/) (2021)
- [3D-LLaVA: Towards Generalist 3D LMMs with Omni Superpoint Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01163/) (2025)
- [G2VLM: Geometry Grounded Vision Language Model with Unified 3D Reconstruction and Spatial Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21688/) (2025)
- [UFM: A Simple Path towards Unified Dense Correspondence with Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09278/) (2025)
- [OST-Bench: Evaluating the Capabilities of MLLMs in Online Spatio-temporal Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07984/) (2025)
- [UniUGG: Unified 3D Understanding and Generation via Geometric-Semantic Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11952/) (2025)
- [Flow3r: Factored Flow Prediction for Scalable Visual Geometry Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20157/) (2026)
- [Edit2Perceive: Image Editing Diffusion Models Are Strong Dense Perceivers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18673/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Spatial perception and reasoning from visual observations require recovering geometric structure, establishing correspondences, and understanding spatial relations. Existing approaches typically address these capabilities separately using task-specific architectures or external geometric modules, limiting knowledge transfer among complementary representations of the same physical scene. We introduce SPARGen, a unified multimodal framework that casts 3D reconstruction, dense correspondence, and spatial reasoning as instruction-conditioned generation tasks. SPARGen serializes compact structured and linguistic outputs as token sequences while generating dense geometric fields in image-aligned forms, enabling spatial supervision to jointly shape shared representations within a native multimodal generative model. Experiments across benchmarks for 3D reconstruction, correspondence, and spatial reasoning show that SPARGen achieves competitive performance across heterogeneous spatial tasks within a single native multimodal generative framework.