Mind over Space: Can Multimodal Large Language Models Mentally Navigate?
Despite the widespread adoption of MLLMs in embodied agents, their capabilities remain largely confined to reactive planning from immediate observations, consistently failing in spatial reasoning across extensive spatiotemporal scales. Cognitive science reveals that Biological Intelligence (BI) thrives on "mental navigation": the strategic construction of spatial representations from experience and the subsequent mental simulation of paths prior to action. To bridge the gap between AI and BI, we introduce Video2Mental, a pioneering benchmark for evaluating the mental navigation capabilities of MLLMs. The task requires constructing hierarchical cognitive maps from long egocentric videos an...
| Authors | Qihui Zhu, Shouwei Ruan, Xiao Yang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 23 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 23 March 2026 |
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