Visual Spatial Tuning
Authors: name: Rui Yang; name: Ziyu Zhu; name: Yanwei Li; name: Jingjia Huang; name: Shen Yan; name: Siyuan Zhou; name: Zhe Liu; name: Xiangtai Li; name: Shuangye Li; name: Wenqian Wang; name: Yi Lin; name: Hengshuang Zhao
Published: 2025-11-07 18:59:16

Abstract: Capturing spatial relationships from visual inputs is a cornerstone of
human-like general intelligence. Several previous studies have tried to enhance
the spatial awareness of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) by adding extra expert
encoders, which brings extra overhead and usually harms general capabilities.
To enhance the spatial ability in general architectures, we introduce Visual
Spatial Tuning (VST), a comprehensive framework to cultivate VLMs with
human-like visuospatial abilities, from spatial perception to reasoning. We
first attempt to enhance spatial perception in VLMs by constructing a
large-scale dataset termed VST-P, which comprises 4.1 million samples spanning
19 skills across single views, multiple images, and videos. Then, we present
VST-R, a curated dataset with 135K samples that instruct models to reason in
space. In particular, we adopt a progressive training pipeline: supervised
fine-tuning to build foundational spatial knowledge, followed by reinforcement
learning to further improve spatial reasoning abilities. Without the
side-effect to general capabilities, the proposed VST consistently achieves
state-of-the-art results on several spatial benchmarks, including 34.8% on
MMSI-Bench and 61.2% on VSIBench. It turns out that the
Vision-Language-Action models can be significantly enhanced with the proposed
spatial tuning paradigm, paving the way for more physically grounded AI.