SpatialThinker: Reinforcing 3D Reasoning in Multimodal LLMs via Spatial Rewards

Hunar Batra, Haoqin Tu, Hardy Chen, Yuanze Lin, Cihang Xie, Ronald Clark

SpatialThinker: Reinforcing 3D Reasoning in Multimodal LLMs via Spatial Rewards: 14 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #9 of 23 papers on 2025-11-17. Day-by-day upvote history.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in vision-language tasks, but they continue to struggle with spatial understanding. Existing spatial MLLMs often rely on explicit 3D inputs or architecture-specific modifications, and remain constrained by large-scale datasets or sparse supervision. To address these limitations, we introduce SpatialThinker, a 3D-aware MLLM trained with RL to integrate structured spatial grounding with multi-step reasoning. The model simulates human-like spatial perception by constructing a scene graph of task-relevant objects and spatial relations, and reasoning towards an answer via dense spatial rewards. SpatialThinker consists of two key contributions: (1) a data synthesis pipeline that generates STVQA-7K, a high-quality spatial VQA dataset, and (2) online RL with a multi-objective dense spatial reward enforcing spatial grounding. SpatialThinker-7B outperforms supervised fine-tuning and the sparse RL baseline on spatial understanding and real-world VQA benchmarks, nearly doubling the base-model gain compared to sparse RL, and surpassing GPT-4o. These results showcase the effectiveness of combining spatial supervision with reward-aligned reasoning in enabling robust 3D spatial understanding with limited data and advancing MLLMs towards human-level visual reasoning.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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