# KilometerVision: A New Frontier for Large-Scale Spatial Intelligence in VLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39588 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39588/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Embodied and 3D vision-language models, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 40 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Embodied and 3D vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/embodied-and-3d-vision-language-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

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- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02858/) (2023)
- [Video-MME: The First-Ever Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark of Multi-modal LLMs in Video Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21075/) (2024)
- [Video-ChatGPT: Towards Detailed Video Understanding via Large Vision and Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05424/) (2023)
- [VideoChat: Chat-Centric Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06355/) (2023)
- [VideoLLaMA 2: Advancing Spatial-Temporal Modeling and Audio Understanding in Video-LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07476/) (2024)
- [NExT-QA:Next Phase of Question-Answering to Explaining Temporal Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08276/) (2021)
- [EgoSchema: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Very Long-form Video Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09126/) (2023)
- [Thinking in Space: How Multimodal Large Language Models See, Remember, and Recall Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14171/) (2024)
- [Rescaling Egocentric Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13256/) (2020)
- [CLEVRER: CoLlision Events for Video REpresentation and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01442/) (2019)
- [AVA: A Video Dataset of Spatio-temporally Localized Atomic Visual Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08421/) (2017)
- [InternVideo: General Video Foundation Models via Generative and Discriminative Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03191/) (2022)
- [LVBench: An Extreme Long Video Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08035/) (2024)
- [PlanBench: An Extensible Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models on Planning and Reasoning about Change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10498/) (2022)
- [Perception Test: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Multimodal Video Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13786/) (2023)
- [MovieQA: Understanding Stories in Movies through Question-Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02902/) (2015)
- [BOP: Benchmark for 6D Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08319/) (2018)
- [Touchdown: Natural Language Navigation and Spatial Reasoning in Visual Street Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12354/) (2018)
- [Cross-task weakly supervised learning from instructional videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08225/) (2019)
- [A Survey of Structure from Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.08493/) (2017)
- [CATER: A diagnostic dataset for Compositional Actions and TEmporal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04744/) (2019)
- [CinePile: A Long Video Question Answering Dataset and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08813/) (2024)
- [Evaluating the World Model Implicit in a Generative Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03689/) (2024)
- [PerceptionLM: Open-Access Data and Models for Detailed Visual Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13180/) (2025)
- [GPT4GEO: How a Language Model Sees the World's Geography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00020/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We push the frontier of large-scale spatial intelligence in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and introduce the first benchmark that probes geographical layout understanding from real-world videos, spanning up to 1km distances. Inspired by the cognitive science literature, we evaluate models against the hierarchical stages of human spatial awareness: anchoring via landmarks, connecting them through routes, and integrating these into global mental maps. Extensive experiments reveal a fundamental divergence in how current AI models process spatial information. Instead of utilising true path integration or forming geometric survey knowledge, we find that VLMs rely almost entirely on 2D visual recognition and text-matching to bypass complex spatial reasoning. The benchmark is publicly available at https://perception-test-challenge.github.io/kilometervision.html.