SpatialASM: Internalizing Active Mentalization for Spatial Reasoning
Summary
The paper introduces SpatialASM, a framework that trains large vision-language models to actively plan task-relevant viewpoints and mentally imagine missing spatial evidence via novel-view synthesis scaffolding, improving spatial reasoning across four backbones and seven benchmarks without extra views at inference.
View Cached Full Text
Cached at: 10/13/26, 02:43 AM
Paper page - SpatialASM: Internalizing Active Mentalization for Spatial Reasoning
Source: https://huggingface.co/papers/2610.13832 With SpatialASM, we explore whether LVLMs can go beyond passively observing the given images and instead actively reason by planning task-relevant viewpoints and mentally imagining what should be visible from them.
We introduce Active Spatial Mentalization (ASM) and build a scalable training framework around it. SpatialASM uses an allocentric novel-view generator as training-time scaffolding to synthesize explicit plan-imagine-reason trajectories and automatically verifiable perspective-taking tasks. In this way, models learn both when to seek missing spatial evidence and how to reconstruct it internally without requiring additional views or a renderer at inference time.
This is our attempt to bring a more human-like form of active spatial exploration into LVLMs and alleviate the scarcity of high-quality spatial reasoning supervision. Across four LVLM backbones and seven spatial benchmarks, SpatialASM improves spatial reasoning performance while preserving general visual capabilities.
We’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback!
Similar Articles
Spatial Memory Agent: Experience-Grounded Procedure Memory for Spatial Intelligence
This paper introduces Spatial Memory Agent (SMA), a runtime framework that improves frozen vision-language models' spatial reasoning through verifier-guided reflection and reusable memory without parameter updates or external tools, achieving strong results across five benchmarks and four base VLMs.
Thinking with Imagination: Agentic Visual Spatial Reasoning with World Simulators
The paper proposes Astra, an agentic spatial reasoning framework that couples a reinforcement learning-trained VLM policy with a world simulator to generate novel-view observations for improved spatial reasoning in Vision-Language Models.
Spatial Memory Intelligence: Endowing World Models with Understanding-Driven Long-Term Memory
The paper proposes Spatial Memory Intelligence (SMI), the first framework to use an understanding model (MLLM) to systematically manage spatial memory in long-video world models via four atomic operations: spatial clustering, within-cluster sparsification, action-aware retrieval, and reliability-aware filtering. Experiments show improvements in memory sparsity, generation stability, and spatial consistency across multiple world-model backbones.
SpatialAct: Probing Spatial Reasoning-to-Action Capabilities of VLM Agents in 3D Scenes
SpatialAct is a new simulator-grounded benchmark that probes whether VLM agents can perform coherent spatial reasoning and translate it into actions in 3D environments across multi-turn feedback settings. Experiments reveal a significant reasoning-to-action gap, with current VLMs struggling to maintain spatial beliefs and produce reliable actions despite performing well on isolated reasoning tasks.
Spatial-Interactor: Learning Spatial Reasoning through Interaction with the Observable Physical World
Spatial-Interactor is a framework that trains vision-language models to enhance spatial reasoning through interaction with the physical world, employing a three-level curriculum and two-stage training strategy to improve state transition modeling and long-horizon integration.
