What Makes a Good Visual Representation for Spatial Understanding in MLLMs?
Spatial understanding is a necessary step in moving multimodal large language models (MLLMs) toward reasoning about the 3D physical world. Their visual pretraining data, however, is almost entirely 2D, so the visual tokens processed by MLLMs often lack inherent 3D structural information. A growing number of methods inject such structure by transferring representations from external vision or geometry models, and collectively establish that such transfer helps. Behind these methods lies a largely underexplored question: what makes a visual representation good for spatial understanding? To answer it, we first separate what is transferred from how it is transferred, and then trace the result...
| Authors | Xiaohu Huang, Yumin Guo, Kai Han |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 13 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 October 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 15 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.