arXiv subjects

Olive Huang

Publications and source records attributed to Olive Huang.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

SpatialWorld: Benchmarking Interactive Spatial Reasoning of Multimodal Agents in Real-World Tasks

Spatial reasoning is a foundational capability for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to perceive and operate within the physical world. However, existing benchmarks predominantly rely on passive evaluation (e.g., static VQA) or simulator-specific pipelines, failing to assess general interactive spatial understanding. We introduce SpatialWorld, a unified benchmark designed specifically for evaluating the interactive spatial understanding of multimodal agents in complex real-world tasks. Integrating eight heterogeneous simulation backends under a shared, simulator-agnostic protocol, SpatialWorld features 760 human-annotated tasks across diverse domains (e.g., household routines, travel, social collaboration). Agents must solve tasks under vision-only partial observability, actively gathering egocentric visual evidence and expressing decisions via a unified, text-based action interface native to MLLMs. For reliable evaluation, each task includes a human-validated initial state, a reference trajectory, and a terminal-state verifier. Evaluating 15 advanced agents reveals that robust spatial task solving remains challenging: the strongest model, GPT-5, achieves an average task success rate (TSR) of only 17.4%, while the leading open-source model, Qwen-3.5, reaches 14.1%. Further analysis exposes a clear mismatch between task success and execution efficiency, alongside substantial domain-specific performance variations. These bottlenecks in active exploration and long-horizon planning position SpatialWorld as a rigorous testbed for future spatial agents.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Position: Reasoning After Perception Means Reasoning Without Vision

A common belief in multimodal research is that the perceptual weaknesses of vision--language models can be compensated by stronger language reasoning (e.g., chain-of-thought, in-context learning, or external tools). We challenge this assumption. We argue that for a broad class of visual tasks hard to specify in language, failures stem from a structural fatality where the temporal decision of \textit{when} to reason strictly dictates the spatial constraint of \textit{where} reasoning takes place. When visual reasoning is deferred to language generation, current architectures do not merely delay computation; they displace it from the continuous visual representation to a discrete textual space. Consequently, the sequential ``Perception-then-Reasoning'' paradigm degenerates perception into a passive, one-off feature encoding process, rendering it functionally equivalent to ``Reasoning-in-Text-Space'', where task-critical spatial signals are collapsed before reasoning begins. We substantiate this claim with the Turing Eye Test (TET): tasks that must be resolved in \emph{visual space} and are hard to verbalize; results show text-only reasoning cannot remedy these perceptual failures. Our findings suggest rethinking the architectural divide: shifting from reasoning \textit{about} perception to reasoning \textit{within} perception. This facilitates actively reasoning-driven perception that operates directly on pixel-level visual representations, rather than within a collapsed textual space.

cs.CV↗