mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Unfold The World: Factorize 4D Properties in Reinforcing Spatial Reasoning

arXiv 2609.03729 ↗First posted 3 Sep 2026cs.CVcited by 0

On the map: LLM reasoning → Spatial and embodied reasoning

also in 1 more
Abstract (arXiv)

Despite the remarkable prowess of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in general multimodal tasks, they remain fundamentally ``flat'' when reasoning about the physical world. We argue that this spatial bottleneck stems from a profound dimensional mismatch: while VLMs are trained to interpret 2D projections, true spatial reasoning demands the recovery of latent 3D geometry and temporal continuity. To conquer this high-dimensional complexity, we advocate a shift from monolithic learning to a ``divide and conquer'' paradigm. We present FactoSR, a factorized reinforcement learning framework that explicitly interpret the dimensions collapsed by visual projection. At its core, FactoSR decomposes the monolithic problem of world-consistent reasoning into three orthogonal, geometric sub-objectives: planar correspondence (XY), depth consistency (Z), and temporal reversibility (T). By optimizing these verifiable constraints within a unified policy learning mechanism, we effectively transform an ill-posed projection recovery problem into a series of tangible reasoning steps. Extensive evaluations on multi-view and video benchmarks demonstrate that this elegant decomposition yields substantial gains in 3D and 4D reasoning, achieving a 5.9% boost on VSI-Bench and 4.5% on All-Angles-Bench. Our findings suggest that reinforcing explicit, factorized 4D consistency is a critical step toward evolving VLMs into robust, world-aware reasoners.

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 42 of its 63 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 3 Sep 2026.

Builds on

42 of 63 references.

Closest ancestors · 10

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026CausalSpatial: A Benchmark for Object-Centric Causal Spatial Reasoning19 Jan
  2. 2025SpatialThinker: Reinforcing Scene Graph-Grounded Spatial Reasoning via Dense Rewards10 Nov
  3. 2025Think with 3D: Geometric Imagination Grounded Spatial Reasoning from Limited Views21 Oct
  4. 2025SpatialLadder: Progressive Training for Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language Models9 Oct
  5. 2025Reinforcing Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language Models with Interwoven Thinking and Visual Drawing11 Jun
  6. 2025SVQA-R1: Reinforcing Spatial Reasoning in MLLMs via View-Consistent Reward Optimization2 Jun
  7. 2025MMSI-Bench: A Benchmark for Multi-Image Spatial Intelligence29 May
  8. 2025SpatialReasoner: Towards Explicit and Generalizable 3D Spatial Reasoning28 Apr
  9. 2025SpaceR: Reinforcing MLLMs in Video Spatial Reasoning2 Apr
  10. 20243DSRBench: A Comprehensive 3D Spatial Reasoning Benchmark10 Dec

Other references · 32

  1. 2023GPT-4 Technical Reportcited by 18,396
  2. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 9,379
  3. 2025DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learningcited by 6,330
  4. 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,587
  5. 2024Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolutioncited by 4,234
  6. 2025Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilitiescited by 3,796
  7. 2025DAPO: An Open-Source LLM Reinforcement Learning System at Scalecited by 2,810
  8. 2025Qwen3-VL Technical Reportcited by 2,793
  9. 2025InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Modelscited by 1,834
  10. 2017Decoupled Weight Decay Regularizationcited by 1,831
  11. 2024Expanding Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Multimodal Models with Model, Data, and Test-Time Scalingcited by 1,599
  12. 2017Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environmentscited by 1,376
20 more
  1. 2024Are We on the Right Way for Evaluating Large Vision-Language Models?cited by 914
  2. 2025VLM-R1: A Stable and Generalizable R1-style Large Vision-Language Modelcited by 526
  3. 2021ARKitScenes: A Diverse Real-World Dataset For 3D Indoor Scene Understanding Using Mobile RGB-D Datacited by 454
  4. 2025VL-Rethinker: Incentivizing Self-Reflection of Vision-Language Models with Reinforcement Learningcited by 323
  5. 2025Spatial-MLLM: Boosting MLLM Capabilities in Visual-based Spatial Intelligencecited by 217
  6. 2025VLM-3R: Vision-Language Models Augmented with Instruction-Aligned 3D Reconstructioncited by 166
  7. 2024SpatialBot: Precise Spatial Understanding with Vision Language Modelscited by 152
  8. 2025Cambrian-S: Towards Spatial Supersensing in Videocited by 134
  9. 2025Perception-R1: Pioneering Perception Policy with Reinforcement Learningcited by 120
  10. 2025MiMo-VL Technical Reportcited by 115
  11. 2025MindCube: Spatial Mental Modeling from Limited Viewscited by 95
  12. 2025Visual Spatial Tuningcited by 89
  13. 2025Visionary-R1: Mitigating Shortcuts in Visual Reasoning with Reinforcement Learningcited by 87
  14. 2025Gemini Robotics: Bringing AI into the Physical Worldcited by 83
  15. 2025Scaling Spatial Intelligence with Multimodal Foundation Modelscited by 82
  16. 2025SRPO: A Cross-Domain Implementation of Large-Scale Reinforcement Learning on LLMcited by 68
  17. 2025Open Vision Reasoner: Transferring Linguistic Cognitive Behavior for Visual Reasoningcited by 34
  18. 2025Seeing from Another Perspective: Evaluating Multi-View Understanding in MLLMscited by 16
  19. 2025Generative RLHF-V: Learning Principles from Multi-modal Human Preferencecited by 13
  20. 2025NoisyGRPO: Incentivizing Multimodal CoT Reasoning via Noise Injection and Bayesian Estimationcited by 5

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  2. 2026The Art of Interrogation: Consistency Amplifies Factuality in Spatial Reasoning
  3. 2026Disentangling 3D Modeling from Spatial Reasoning
  4. 2026World2VLM: Distilling World Model Imagination into VLMs for Dynamic Spatial Reasoning
  5. 2026WM-VLM: Probing Internal World Models for Interleaved Visual-Textual Reasoning
  6. 2025Euclid's Gift: Enhancing Spatial Perception and Reasoning in Vision-Language Models via Geometric Surrogate Tasks
  7. 2025Reasoning Path and Latent State Analysis for Multi-view Visual Spatial Reasoning: A Cognitive Science Perspective
  8. 2025Pursuing Minimal Sufficiency in Spatial Reasoning