Can LLMs See Without Pixels? Benchmarking Spatial Intelligence from Textual Descriptions (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Zhongbin Guo, Zhen Yang, Yushan Li, Xinyue Zhang, Wenyu Gao, Jiacheng Wang, Chengzhi Li, Xiangrui Liu, Ping Jian
| Challenge: | Existing advances in Spatial Intelligence rely on vision-Language Models . however, a critical question remains: does spatial understanding originate from visual encoders? |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate the SI performance of Large Language Models without pixel-level input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark challenges large language models to perform symbolic reasoning rather than visual pattern matching. |
Similar Papers
How Do LLMs and VLMs Understand Viewpoint Rotation Without Vision? An Interpretability Study (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhen Yang, Ping Jian, Zhongbin Guo, Zuming Zhang, Chengzhi Li, Yonghong Deng, Xinyue Zhang, Wenpeng Lu
| Challenge: | Existing studies on spatial intelligence from the perspective of visual-spatial intelligence have not explored whether visual intelligence alone is sufficient to endow models with spatial intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a linguistic perspective to investigate spatial intelligence from a theoretical perspective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs poorly on the proposed dataset while human can easily achieve 100% accuracy. |
UrbanVideo-Bench: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models on Embodied Intelligence with Video Data in Urban Spaces (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Baining Zhao, Jianjie Fang, Zichao Dai, Ziyou Wang, Jirong Zha, Weichen Zhang, Chen Gao, Yue Wang, Jinqiang Cui, Xinlei Chen, Yong Li
| Challenge: | Large multimodal models exhibit remarkable intelligence, yet their embodied cognitive abilities during motion in open-ended urban aerial spaces remain to be explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate whether large multimodal models can process continuous first-person visual observations like humans. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can process first-person visual observations like humans, enabling recall, perception, reasoning, and navigation. |
SpaRE: Enhancing Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language Models with Synthetic Data (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Vision-language models struggle with spatial reasoning, a skill that humans excel at. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a spatial-reasoning Enhanced (SpaRE) VLM to improve spatial reasoning in visual question answering and robotics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves a 49% performance gain on the What's Up benchmark while maintaining strong results on general tasks. |
EmbSpatial-Bench: Benchmarking Spatial Understanding for Embodied Tasks with Large Vision-Language Models (2024.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have revealed significant deficiencies of LVLMs in understanding visual contents, leaving the gap between current embodied intelligence and large vision-language models (LVLM) . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a benchmark to evaluate LVLMs' spatial understanding of embodied environments to evaluate their ability to understand visual contents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is derived from embodied scenes and covers 6 spatial relationships from an egocentric perspective. |
Can LLMs Learn to Map the World from Local Descriptions? (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have demonstrated strong capabilities in tasks such as code generation and mathematical reasoning. |
| Approach: | They investigate whether large language models can construct coherent global spatial cognition by integrating fragmented relational descriptions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can generalize to unseen spatial relationships and exhibit latent representations aligned with real-world spatial distributions. |
Exploring Spatial Schema Intuitions in Large Language and Vision Models (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models excel in varied NLP tasks, but lack a direct connection between sensory perception and physical action. |
| Approach: | They examine whether large language models capture implicit human intuitions about building blocks of language . they employ spatial cognitive foundations developed through early sensorimotor experiences . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model captures implicit human intuitions about building blocks of language without a tangible connection to embodied experiences. |
LLM Meets Scene Graph: Can Large Language Models Understand and Generate Scene Graphs? A Benchmark and Empirical Study (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Dongil Yang, Minjin Kim, Sunghwan Kim, Beong-woo Kwak, Minjun Park, Jinseok Hong, Woontack Woo, Jinyoung Yeo
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive progress in various text-based tasks, such as question-answering and content generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate Large Language Models’ ability to understand scene graphs and generate them from textual narratives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on scene graph understanding but struggles with scene graph generation, particularly for complex narratives. |
Where the Cat Sat: A Multilingual Framework for Spatial Language Understanding (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work exhibits biases toward English and prepositional marking . Existing models are limited in understanding spatial relations across typologically diverse languages . |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual framework and benchmark for spatial language understanding . they decompose spatial relations into surface elements and semantic components . their results suggest surface parsing does not entail spatial understanding - they argue . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework and benchmark decomposes spatial relations into surface elements and semantic components. |
Things not Written in Text: Exploring Spatial Commonsense from Visual Signals (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pretrained language models fail in many NLP tasks, but are ineffective in spatial commonsense reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a spatial commonsense benchmark that focuses on relative scales of objects and the positional relationship between people and objects under different actions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms pretrained models in answering spatial questions. |
SemVink: Advancing VLMs’ Semantic Understanding of Optical Illusions via Visual Global Thinking (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Vision-language models excel in semantic tasks but fail at detecting hidden content . current architectures prioritize abstract reasoning over low-level visual operations . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to test vision-language models that can detect hidden content . they propose HC-Bench to scale images to low resolutions to unlock 99% accuracy . |
| Outcome: | HC-Bench shows that leading VLMs achieve near-zero accuracy even with explicit prompting . et al.: current models prioritize abstract reasoning over low-level visual operations . they urge a shift toward hybrid models bridging gap between computational vision and human cognition . |