SIMS-V: Simulated Instruction-Tuning for Spatial Video Understanding

Ellis Brown, Arijit, Ranjay Krishna, Ross Girshick, Rob Fergus, Saining Xie

SIMS-V: Simulated Instruction-Tuning for Spatial Video Understanding: 6 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #11 of 15 papers on 2025-11-07. Day-by-day upvote history.

Despite impressive high-level video comprehension, multimodal language models struggle with spatial reasoning across time and space. While current spatial training approaches rely on real-world video data, obtaining diverse footage with precise spatial annotations remains a bottleneck. To alleviate this bottleneck, we present SIMS-V -- a systematic data-generation framework that leverages the privileged information of 3D simulators to create spatially-rich video training data for multimodal language models. Using this framework, we investigate which properties of simulated data drive effective real-world transfer through systematic ablations of question types, mixes, and scales. We identify a minimal set of three question categories (metric measurement, perspective-dependent reasoning, and temporal tracking) that prove most effective for developing transferable spatial intelligence, outperforming comprehensive coverage despite using fewer question types. These insights enable highly efficient training: our 7B-parameter video LLM fine-tuned on just 25K simulated examples outperforms the larger 72B baseline and achieves competitive performance with proprietary models on rigorous real-world spatial reasoning benchmarks. Our approach demonstrates robust generalization, maintaining performance on general video understanding while showing substantial improvements on embodied and real-world spatial tasks.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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