How Well Do Vision--Language Models Understand Cities? A Comparative Study on Spatial Reasoning from Street-View Images

Juneyoung Ro; Namwoo Kim; Yoonjin Yoon

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arXiv · 2508.21565

How Well Do Vision--Language Models Understand Cities? A Comparative Study on Spatial Reasoning from Street-View Images

Juneyoung Ro·Namwoo Kim·Yoonjin Yoon

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Abstract

Effectively understanding urban scenes requires fine-grained spatial reasoning about objects, layouts, and depth cues. However, how well current vision-language models (VLMs), pretrained on general scenes, transfer these abilities to urban domain remains underexplored. To address this gap, we conduct a comparative study of three off-the-shelf VLMs-BLIP-2, InstructBLIP, and LLaVA-1.5-evaluating both zero-shot performance and the effects of fine-tuning with a synthetic VQA dataset specific to urban scenes. We construct such dataset from segmentation, depth, and object detection predictions of street-view images, pairing each question with LLM-generated Chain-of-Thought (CoT) answers for step-by-step reasoning supervision. Results show that while VLMs perform reasonably well in zero-shot settings, fine-tuning with our synthetic CoT-supervised dataset substantially boosts performance, especially for challenging question types such as negation and counterfactuals. This study introduces urban spatial reasoning as a new challenge for VLMs and demonstrates synthetic dataset construction as a practical path for adapting general-purpose models to specialized domains.

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Juneyoung Ro, Namwoo Kim, Yoonjin Yoon. 2025-08-29. How Well Do Vision--Language Models Understand Cities? A Comparative Study on Spatial Reasoning from Street-View Images. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21565

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