Jul 2026· International Conference on Image Processing and Intelligent Control· Vol 14262, pp. 142621I - 142621I-7· 0 citations· 9 references
Engineering
TL;DR
STGraphVQA, a framework that represents driving scenes as dynamic spatiotemporal graphs, where nodes denote traffic participants, edges encode spatial and semantic relationships, and the temporal dimension captures their evolution, provides a promising direction toward interpretable autonomous driving systems.
Abstract
Visual question answering (VQA) in autonomous driving scenarios demands strong spatiotemporal reasoning capabilities, yet existing vision-language models lack explicit modeling of dynamic relationships in complex traffic scenes. We propose STGraphVQA, a framework that represents driving scenes as dynamic spatiotemporal graphs, where nodes denote traffic participants, edges encode spatial and semantic relationships, and the temporal dimension captures their evolution. A hierarchical reasoning architecture progressively processes information through perception, relation, and decision layers, simulating the human driving cognitive process. A logit-level constrained decoding mechanism further ensures that generated answers comply with traffic rules and physical feasibility. Experiments on DriveLM and STRIDE-QA demonstrate that STGraphVQA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving a Top-1 accuracy of 76.8% and a reasoning chain completeness of 82.3%, providing a promising direction toward interpretable autonomous driving systems.
A cognitive dual-process planning framework that represents planning-relevant scene knowledge in a machine-parsable structured chain-of-thought (S-CoT) schema and shows how explicit scene knowledge can be operationalized through adaptive reasoning and rule-based verification to support high-level VLM planning decisions.
Zhongyao Yang, Haoyu Li, Yuchen Yan et al.· arXiv.org· 0 citations
Space Tokens is introduced, a lightweight, architecture-agnostic framework that equips VLMs with explicit continuous spatial representations without requiring additional inference-time modules, and demonstrates that continuous spatial tokens provide an effective, interpretable, and computationally efficient mechanism for integrating geometric reasoning into large vision-language models.
Hunter Schofield, Mohammed Elmahgiubi, Mohammad Mahdavian et al.· 0 citations
Despite the rapid progress of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in 2D vision-language tasks, robust multi-view spatial reasoning remains a fundamental bottleneck due to the lack of structured 3D cognitive pathways in existing datasets. To address this, we introduce MV-STRIDE, a Multi-View hierarchical SpaTial Reasoning dataset with Interdependent and DEcomposed capabilitiEs. Moving beyond flat data structures, MV-STRIDE explicitly models the dependency relationships between foundational perception, scene understanding, and complex contextual reasoning, providing a coherent learning pathway aligned with human spatial cognition. We develop a systematic QA generation pipeline leveraging diverse 3D scene sources that enforces cross-view dependency constraints to prevent single-view solvability, generating multi-level spatial reasoning tasks supported by cognitively grounded chain-of-thought supervision for complex inference. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our multi-stage training framework based on our hierarchical dataset achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple spatial reasoning benchmarks, notably the multi-view oriented MMSI-Bench. Our approach enables MLLMs to maintain robust, 3D-consistent spatial reasoning across diverse viewpoints. The code and dataset are available at https://co1dspring.github.io/MV-STRIDE/.
Jin Xu, Xiaojian Huang, Zhuodong Luo et al.· 0 citations
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) perform well on commonsense reasoning tasks but struggle with visual spatial reasoning. Most existing solutions introduce extra 3D prior inputs or external spatial encoders, which increase complexity and degrade the underlying VLMs'general-purpose capabilities after spatial fine-tuning. To this end, we propose a parameter-efficient \textit{\textbf{Spatio}-vision \textbf{L}anguage \textbf{M}odels (SpatioLM)}, that enhances spatial intelligence without extra 3D prior inputs or third-party spatial encoders. Concretely, we design a plug-and-play and non-invasive spatio-vision module that elicits the spatial knowledge inherent in VLMs. Furthermore, we innovatively leverage pseudo depth and camera information as supervision to guide the model in learning physically coherent representations. Extensive experiments show that SpatioLM achieves significant improvements in diverse tasks, including spatial perception and understanding while effectively limiting the degradation of general capabilities. Notably, the model achieves an impressive score of 71.6 on the VSI-Bench (the first model to surpass 70). In addition, it attains competitive performance when transferred to embodied manipulation tasks. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/xiaomi-research/spatio-lm}{\faGithub~spatio-lm}.
Jing Wu, Jianhua Wu, Jiayi Guan et al.· 0 citations
Multimodal large language models excel at passive perception but struggle with complex visual cognitive tasks requiring multi-step temporal reasoning. This degradation largely stems from the inherent ambiguity of language-based reasoning, which often fails to accurately articulate continuous visual transformations. To address this, we propose ChronoVision, a multimodal framework designed to align visual logic with latent imagery. During supervised fine-tuning, a Reconstructive Visual Head predicts the latent representation of the final transformed state, while an ROI Attention Locating module focuses the model on key visual evidence via semantic span queries. In post-training, we apply reinforcement learning with an implicit process grounding mechanism, guided by a composite reward function that evaluates outcome correctness, latent process alignment, and unsupervised visual focus. Furthermore, we introduce Vbvr-VQA, a novel dataset that evaluates temporal tracking by reformulating video reasoning into a strict image-ordering task. Experiments demonstrate that ChronoVision achieves state-of-the-art performance on Vbvr-VQA with 74.8% in-domain and 71.6% out-of-domain accuracy, alongside a strong 55.0% accuracy on IntPhys2, a highly challenging cross-domain benchmark.
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models encode visual observations as flat 2D patch tokens that carry no intrinsic geometric structure, and augmenting them with dense monocular depth injects per-pixel scalar values that encode neither surface orientation nor geometric confidence. This leaves the policy with limited structured spatial reasoning for action prediction. We propose GaussVLA, a Mamba-based VLA that incorporates two custom modules: Gaussian Spatial Tokenizer (GST) to lift frozen semantic and depth features into compact 3D Gaussian tokens, pools geometrically salient regions with learned queries, and \emph{Depth-Aware Chain-of-Thought (DA-CoT)} that performs structured, non-autoregressive geometric reasoning under language and flow-time conditioning. Across both simulation and real-world evaluations, GaussVLA demonstrates strong spatial-manipulation performance while remaining parameter-efficient. On LIBERO, it achieves 93.5% average success and 100.0% success on the Spatial suite with only 200M parameters, improving over SpatialVLA by 19.7% relative average success while remaining significantly more parameter-efficient.
MD SELIM SAROWAR, Md Tanvir Islam, Sungho Kim et al.· 0 citations
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