Foundation Models

Spatial Reasoning

Spatial reasoning is the capacity of a model to understand and manipulate geometric and relational information — relative positions, distances, orientations, containment, and viewpoint changes. Off-the-shelf vision-language models are notably weak at metric spatial tasks, motivating targeted efforts such as SpatialVLM and spatial question-answering benchmarks that train or probe for 3D-aware understanding. Robotics-oriented models increasingly inject depth, camera geometry, or 3D tokens to compensate.

Why it matters for physical AI

A model that cannot judge whether the gripper is left of the handle cannot manipulate reliably; closing the spatial gap in VLM backbones is a live bottleneck for vision-language-action systems.