VCN-Bench: A Video-Contextualized Navigation Benchmark for Spatial Reasoning over Prior Visual Experience
On the map: LLM reasoning → Spatial and embodied reasoning
Abstract (arXiv)
Spatial reasoning is fundamental to embodied agents, yet it remains unclear whether spatial understanding can be carried forward to guide sequential interactions. Existing spatial-reasoning benchmarks typically terminate at offline predictions, while navigation benchmarks evaluate spatial reasoning as part of instruction following and exploration. We introduce VCN-Bench, a Video-Contextualized Navigation benchmark for probing closed-loop spatial reasoning over prior visual experience in MLLMs. Given a prior video covering both the initial location and destination, the agent is tasked with reasoning out the instruction-specified target and navigating toward it with the inferred spatial context. Built on Matterport3D, VCN-Bench contains five instruction types, 100k training episodes, and 1,250 evaluation episodes. Navigation serves as the primary evaluation, while diagnostic goal identification helps distinguish destination-resolution errors from subsequent navigation failures. We further propose MV-DualVLN, a planning-oriented baseline that jointly leverages prior video and in-episode observations. Experiments reveal limited navigation performance, a substantial destination-resolution-to-navigation gap, and frequent navigation failures even after correct destination identification.
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 28 of its 70 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 28 Sep 2026.
Builds on
28 of 70 references.
Closest ancestors · 3
Same direction, newest first
- 2025Multimodal Spatial Reasoning in the Large Model Era: A Survey and Benchmarks29 Oct
- 2025OctoNav: Towards Generalist Embodied Navigation11 Jun
- 2025MMSI-Bench: A Benchmark for Multi-Image Spatial Intelligence29 May
Other references · 25
- 2025DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learningcited by 6,330
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- 2025InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiencycited by 1,510
- 2025GLM-4.5V and GLM-4.1V-Thinking: Towards Versatile Multimodal Reasoning with Scalable Reinforcement Learningcited by 466
- 2025From Flatland to Space: Teaching Vision-Language Models to Perceive and Reason in 3Dcited by 138
- 2025Cambrian-S: Towards Spatial Supersensing in Videocited by 134
- 2025StreamVLN: Streaming Vision-and-Language Navigation via SlowFast Context Modelingcited by 118
- 2025JanusVLN: Decoupling Semantics and Spatiality with Dual Implicit Memory for Vision-Language Navigationcited by 89
- 2024MapGPT: Map-Guided Prompting with Adaptive Path Planning for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 86
- 2026DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash: Pushing the Limits of KV Cache Compressioncited by 76
- 2025Embodied Navigation Foundation Modelcited by 72
13 more
- 2024Open-Nav: Exploring Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environment with Open-Source LLMscited by 62
- 2025Ground Slow, Move Fast: A Dual-System Foundation Model for Generalizable Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 62
- 2025Multi-SpatialMLLM: Multi-Frame Spatial Understanding with Multi-Modal Large Language Modelscited by 52
- 2026Qwen-VLA: Unifying Vision-Language-Action Modeling across Tasks, Environments, and Robot Embodimentscited by 44
- 2025MMSI-Video-Bench: A Holistic Benchmark for Video-Based Spatial Intelligencecited by 38
- 2025OmniNav: A Unified Framework for Prospective Exploration and Visual-Language Navigationcited by 36
- 2026ESI-Bench: Towards Embodied Spatial Intelligence that Closes the Perception-Action Loopcited by 26
- 2025General Scene Adaptation for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 17
- 2025NavA3: Understanding Any Instruction, Navigating Anywhere, Finding Anythingcited by 14
- 2025VL-LN Bench: Towards Long-horizon Goal-oriented Navigation with Active Dialogscited by 5
- 2026HarnessVLN: Unifying Training-Free Embodied Navigation through an Agent Harnesscited by 3
- 2025Efficient-VLN: A Simple yet Strong Baseline for Efficient Vision-Language Navigationcited by 2
- 2026LightNav-0: Eliciting VLM Spatial Intelligence for Generalist Embodied Navigationcited by 1
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- 2026Beyond Spatial Benchmarks: From Spatial Reasoning to Navigation
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- 2026SpaceCast-Bench: Evaluating Predictive Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language Models
- 2026VABench: Measuring Embodied Spatial Intelligence through Visual Demonstrations, Active Perception, and Metric Control
- 2026SpatialAct: Probing Spatial Reasoning-to-Action Capabilities of VLM Agents in 3D Scenes
- 2026SpaceVLN: A Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigation Agent with Online Spatial Cognitive Memory and Reasoning
- 2025EvoEmpirBench: Dynamic Spatial Reasoning with Agent-ExpVer
- 2026ESPIRE: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Embodied Spatial Reasoning of Vision-Language Models