Daily Papers

Egocentric video reasoning centers on an unobservable agent behind the camera who dynamically shapes the environment, requiring inference of hidden intentions and recognition of fine-grained interactions. This core challenge limits current multimodal large language models MLLMs, which excel at visible event reasoning but lack embodied, first-person understanding. To bridge this gap, we introduce EgoThinker, a novel framework that endows MLLMs with robust egocentric reasoning capabilities through spatio-temporal chain-of-thought supervision and a two-stage learning curriculum. First, we introduce EgoRe-5M, a large-scale egocentric QA dataset constructed from 13M diverse egocentric video clips. This dataset features multi-minute segments annotated with detailed CoT rationales and dense hand-object grounding. Second, we employ SFT on EgoRe-5M to instill reasoning skills, followed by reinforcement fine-tuning RFT to further enhance spatio-temporal localization. Experimental results show that EgoThinker outperforms existing methods across multiple egocentric benchmarks, while achieving substantial improvements in fine-grained spatio-temporal localization tasks. Full code and data are released at https://github.com/InternRobotics/EgoThinker.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly considered as a foundation for embodied agents, yet it remains unclear whether they can reliably reason about the long-term physical consequences of actions from an egocentric viewpoint. We study this gap through a new task, Egocentric Scene Prediction with LOng-horizon REasoning: given an initial-scene image and a sequence of atomic action descriptions, a model is asked to predict the final scene after all actions are executed. To enable systematic evaluation, we introduce EXPLORE-Bench, a benchmark curated from real first-person videos spanning diverse scenarios. Each instance pairs long action sequences with structured final-scene annotations, including object categories, visual attributes, and inter-object relations, which supports fine-grained, quantitative assessment. Experiments on a range of proprietary and open-source MLLMs reveal a significant performance gap to humans, indicating that long-horizon egocentric reasoning remains a major challenge. We further analyze test-time scaling via stepwise reasoning and show that decomposing long action sequences can improve performance to some extent, while incurring non-trivial computational overhead. Overall, EXPLORE-Bench provides a principled testbed for measuring and advancing long-horizon reasoning for egocentric embodied perception.

What if accessing the web did not require a screen, a stable desk, or even free hands? For people navigating crowded cities, living with low vision, or experiencing cognitive overload, smart glasses coupled with AI agents could turn the web into an always-on assistive layer over daily life. We present Egocentric Co-Pilot, a web-native neuro-symbolic framework that runs on smart glasses and uses a Large Language Model (LLM) to orchestrate a toolbox of perception, reasoning, and web tools. An egocentric reasoning core combines Temporal Chain-of-Thought with Hierarchical Context Compression to support long-horizon question answering and decision support over continuous first-person video, far beyond a single model's context window. Additionally, a lightweight multimodal intent layer maps noisy speech and gaze into structured commands. We further implement and evaluate a cloud-native WebRTC pipeline integrating streaming speech, video, and control messages into a unified channel for smart glasses and browsers. In parallel, we deploy an on-premise WebSocket baseline, exposing concrete trade-offs between local inference and cloud offloading in terms of latency, mobility, and resource use. Experiments on Egolife and HD-EPIC demonstrate competitive or state-of-the-art egocentric QA performance, and a human-in-the-loop study on smart glasses shows higher task completion and user satisfaction than leading commercial baselines. Taken together, these results indicate that web-connected egocentric co-pilots can be a practical path toward more accessible, context-aware assistance in everyday life. By grounding operation in web-native communication primitives and modular, auditable tool use, Egocentric Co-Pilot offers a concrete blueprint for assistive, always-on web agents that support education, accessibility, and social inclusion for people who may benefit most from contextual, egocentric AI.

Emerging embodied AI applications, such as wearable cameras and autonomous agents, have underscored the need for robust reasoning from first person video streams. We introduce EgoVLM, a vision-language model specifically designed to integrate visual comprehension and spatial-temporal reasoning within egocentric video contexts. EgoVLM is fine-tuned via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), a reinforcement learning method adapted to align model outputs with human-like reasoning steps. Following DeepSeek R1-Zero's approach, we directly tune using RL without any supervised fine-tuning phase on chain-of-thought (CoT) data. We evaluate EgoVLM on egocentric video question answering benchmarks and show that domain-specific training substantially improves performance over general-purpose VLMs. Our EgoVLM-3B, trained exclusively on non-CoT egocentric data, outperforms the base Qwen2.5-VL 3B and 7B models by 14.33 and 13.87 accuracy points on the EgoSchema benchmark, respectively. By explicitly generating reasoning traces, EgoVLM enhances interpretability, making it well-suited for downstream applications. Furthermore, we introduce a novel keyframe-based reward that incorporates salient frame selection to guide reinforcement learning optimization. This reward formulation opens a promising avenue for future exploration in temporally grounded egocentric reasoning.

We introduce Ego-R1, a novel framework for reasoning over ultra-long (i.e., in days and weeks) egocentric videos, which leverages a structured Chain-of-Tool-Thought (CoTT) process, orchestrated by an Ego-R1 Agent trained via reinforcement learning (RL). Inspired by human problem-solving strategies, CoTT decomposes complex reasoning into modular steps, with the RL agent invoking specific tools, one per step, to iteratively and collaboratively answer sub-questions tackling such tasks as temporal retrieval and multi-modal understanding. We design a two-stage training paradigm involving supervised finetuning (SFT) of a pretrained language model using CoTT data and RL to enable our agent to dynamically propose step-by-step tools for long-range reasoning. To facilitate training, we construct a dataset called Ego-R1 Data, which consists of Ego-CoTT-25K for SFT and Ego-QA-4.4K for RL. Furthermore, our Ego-R1 agent is evaluated on a newly curated week-long video QA benchmark, Ego-R1 Bench, which contains human-verified QA pairs from hybrid sources. Extensive results demonstrate that the dynamic, tool-augmented chain-of-thought reasoning by our Ego-R1 Agent can effectively tackle the unique challenges of understanding ultra-long egocentric videos, significantly extending the time coverage from few hours to a week.

An embodied AI assistant operating on egocentric video must integrate spatial cues across time - for instance, determining where an object A, glimpsed a few moments ago lies relative to an object B encountered later. We introduce Disjoint-3DQA , a generative QA benchmark that evaluates this ability of VLMs by posing questions about object pairs that are not co-visible in the same frame. We evaluated seven state-of-the-art VLMs and found that models lag behind human performance by 28%, with steeper declines in accuracy (60% to 30 %) as the temporal gap widens. Our analysis further reveals that providing trajectories or bird's-eye-view projections to VLMs results in only marginal improvements, whereas providing oracle 3D coordinates leads to a substantial 20% performance increase. This highlights a core bottleneck of multi-frame VLMs in constructing and maintaining 3D scene representations over time from visual signals. Disjoint-3DQA therefore sets a clear, measurable challenge for long-horizon spatial reasoning and aims to catalyze future research at the intersection of vision, language, and embodied AI.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding and reasoning about visual content, but significant challenges persist in tasks requiring cross-viewpoint understanding and spatial reasoning. We identify a critical limitation: current VLMs excel primarily at egocentric spatial reasoning (from the camera's perspective) but fail to generalize to allocentric viewpoints when required to adopt another entity's spatial frame of reference. We introduce ViewSpatial-Bench, the first comprehensive benchmark designed specifically for multi-viewpoint spatial localization recognition evaluation across five distinct task types, supported by an automated 3D annotation pipeline that generates precise directional labels. Comprehensive evaluation of diverse VLMs on ViewSpatial-Bench reveals a significant performance disparity: models demonstrate reasonable performance on camera-perspective tasks but exhibit reduced accuracy when reasoning from a human viewpoint. By fine-tuning VLMs on our multi-perspective spatial dataset, we achieve an overall performance improvement of 46.24% across tasks, highlighting the efficacy of our approach. Our work establishes a crucial benchmark for spatial intelligence in embodied AI systems and provides empirical evidence that modeling 3D spatial relationships enhances VLMs' corresponding spatial comprehension capabilities.

Human activities are particularly complex and variable, and this makes challenging for deep learning models to reason about them. However, we note that such variability does have an underlying structure, composed of a hierarchy of patterns of related actions. We argue that such structure can emerge naturally from unscripted videos of human activities, and can be leveraged to better reason about their content. We present HiERO, a weakly-supervised method to enrich video segments features with the corresponding hierarchical activity threads. By aligning video clips with their narrated descriptions, HiERO infers contextual, semantic and temporal reasoning with an hierarchical architecture. We prove the potential of our enriched features with multiple video-text alignment benchmarks (EgoMCQ, EgoNLQ) with minimal additional training, and in zero-shot for procedure learning tasks (EgoProceL and Ego4D Goal-Step). Notably, HiERO achieves state-of-the-art performance in all the benchmarks, and for procedure learning tasks it outperforms fully-supervised methods by a large margin (+12.5% F1 on EgoProceL) in zero shot. Our results prove the relevance of using knowledge of the hierarchy of human activities for multiple reasoning tasks in egocentric vision.

To enable progress towards egocentric agents capable of understanding everyday tasks specified in natural language, we propose a benchmark and a synthetic dataset called Egocentric Task Verification (EgoTV). EgoTV contains multi-step tasks with multiple sub-task decompositions, state changes, object interactions, and sub-task ordering constraints, in addition to abstracted task descriptions that contain only partial details about ways to accomplish a task. We also propose a novel Neuro-Symbolic Grounding (NSG) approach to enable the causal, temporal, and compositional reasoning of such tasks. We demonstrate NSG's capability towards task tracking and verification on our EgoTV dataset and a real-world dataset derived from CrossTask (CTV). Our contributions include the release of the EgoTV and CTV datasets, and the NSG model for future research on egocentric assistive agents.

Current Large Language Models have achieved Olympiad-level logic, yet Vision-Language Models paradoxically falter on elementary spatial tasks like block counting. This capability mismatch reveals a critical ``spatial intelligence gap,'' where models fail to construct coherent 3D mental representations from 2D observations. We uncover this gap via diagnostic analyses showing the bottleneck is a missing view-consistent spatial interface rather than insufficient visual features or weak reasoning. To bridge this, we introduce 3ViewSense, a framework that grounds spatial reasoning in Orthographic Views. Drawing on engineering cognition, we propose a ``Simulate-and-Reason'' mechanism that decomposes complex scenes into canonical orthographic projections to resolve geometric ambiguities. By aligning egocentric perceptions with these allocentric references, our method facilitates explicit mental rotation and reconstruction. Empirical results on spatial reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing baselines, with consistent gains on occlusion-heavy counting and view-consistent spatial reasoning. The framework also improves the stability and consistency of spatial descriptions, offering a scalable path toward stronger spatial intelligence in multimodal systems.

We introduce EgoTextVQA, a novel and rigorously constructed benchmark for egocentric QA assistance involving scene text. EgoTextVQA contains 1.5K ego-view videos and 7K scene-text aware questions that reflect real user needs in outdoor driving and indoor house-keeping activities. The questions are designed to elicit identification and reasoning on scene text in an egocentric and dynamic environment. With EgoTextVQA, we comprehensively evaluate 10 prominent multimodal large language models. Currently, all models struggle, and the best results (Gemini 1.5 Pro) are around 33\% accuracy, highlighting the severe deficiency of these techniques in egocentric QA assistance. Our further investigations suggest that precise temporal grounding and multi-frame reasoning, along with high resolution and auxiliary scene-text inputs, are key for better performance. With thorough analyses and heuristic suggestions, we hope EgoTextVQA can serve as a solid testbed for research in egocentric scene-text QA assistance. Our dataset is released at: https://github.com/zhousheng97/EgoTextVQA.

Building a generalist robot that can perceive, reason, and act across diverse tasks remains an open challenge, especially for dexterous manipulation. A major bottleneck lies in the scarcity of large-scale, action-annotated data for dexterous skills, as teleoperation is difficult and costly. Human data, with its vast scale and diverse manipulation behaviors, provides rich priors for learning robotic actions. While prior works have explored leveraging human demonstrations, they are often constrained by limited scenarios and a large visual gap between human and robots. To eliminate these limitations, we propose METIS, a vision-language-action (VLA) model for dexterous manipulation pretrained on multi-source egocentric datasets. We first construct EgoAtlas, which integrates large-scale human and robotic data from multiple sources, all unified under a consistent action space. We further extract motion-aware dynamics, a compact and discretized motion representation, which provides efficient and expressive supervision for VLA training. Built upon them, METIS integrates reasoning and acting into a unified framework, enabling effective deployment to downstream dexterous manipulation tasks. Our method demonstrates exceptional dexterous manipulation capabilities, achieving highest average success rate in six real-world tasks. Experimental results also highlight the superior generalization and robustness to out-of-distribution scenarios. These findings emphasize METIS as a promising step toward a generalist model for dexterous manipulation.

Egocentric videos provide a unique perspective into individuals' daily experiences, yet their unstructured nature presents challenges for perception. In this paper, we introduce AMEGO, a novel approach aimed at enhancing the comprehension of very-long egocentric videos. Inspired by the human's ability to maintain information from a single watching, AMEGO focuses on constructing a self-contained representations from one egocentric video, capturing key locations and object interactions. This representation is semantic-free and facilitates multiple queries without the need to reprocess the entire visual content. Additionally, to evaluate our understanding of very-long egocentric videos, we introduce the new Active Memories Benchmark (AMB), composed of more than 20K of highly challenging visual queries from EPIC-KITCHENS. These queries cover different levels of video reasoning (sequencing, concurrency and temporal grounding) to assess detailed video understanding capabilities. We showcase improved performance of AMEGO on AMB, surpassing other video QA baselines by a substantial margin.

Humans possess spatial reasoning abilities that enable them to understand spaces through multimodal observations, such as vision and sound. Large multimodal reasoning models extend these abilities by learning to perceive and reason, showing promising performance across diverse spatial tasks. However, systematic reviews and publicly available benchmarks for these models remain limited. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of multimodal spatial reasoning tasks with large models, categorizing recent progress in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and introducing open benchmarks for evaluation. We begin by outlining general spatial reasoning, focusing on post-training techniques, explainability, and architecture. Beyond classical 2D tasks, we examine spatial relationship reasoning, scene and layout understanding, as well as visual question answering and grounding in 3D space. We also review advances in embodied AI, including vision-language navigation and action models. Additionally, we consider emerging modalities such as audio and egocentric video, which contribute to novel spatial understanding through new sensors. We believe this survey establishes a solid foundation and offers insights into the growing field of multimodal spatial reasoning. Updated information about this survey, codes and implementation of the open benchmarks can be found at https://github.com/zhengxuJosh/Awesome-Spatial-Reasoning.

Embodied agents often struggle with efficient navigation because they rely primarily on partial egocentric observations, which restrict global foresight and lead to inefficient exploration. In contrast, humans plan using maps: we reason globally first, then act locally. We introduce ReasonNavi, a human-inspired framework that operationalizes this reason-then-act paradigm by coupling Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with deterministic planners. ReasonNavi converts a top-down map into a discrete reasoning space by room segmentation and candidate target nodes sampling. An MLLM is then queried in a multi-stage process to identify the candidate most consistent with the instruction (object, image, or text goal), effectively leveraging the model's semantic reasoning ability while sidestepping its weakness in continuous coordinate prediction. The selected waypoint is grounded into executable trajectories using a deterministic action planner over an online-built occupancy map, while pretrained object detectors and segmenters ensure robust recognition at the goal. This yields a unified zero-shot navigation framework that requires no MLLM fine-tuning, circumvents the brittleness of RL-based policies and scales naturally with foundation model improvements. Across three navigation tasks, ReasonNavi consistently outperforms prior methods that demand extensive training or heavy scene modeling, offering a scalable, interpretable, and globally grounded solution to embodied navigation. Project page: https://reasonnavi.github.io/

Embodied Visual Tracking (EVT) is a fundamental ability that underpins practical applications, such as companion robots, guidance robots and service assistants, where continuously following moving targets is essential. Recent advances have enabled language-guided tracking in complex and unstructured scenes. However, existing approaches lack explicit spatial reasoning and effective temporal memory, causing failures under severe occlusions or in the presence of similar-looking distractors. To address these challenges, we present TrackVLA++, a novel Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model that enhances embodied visual tracking with two key modules, a spatial reasoning mechanism and a Target Identification Memory (TIM). The reasoning module introduces a Chain-of-Thought paradigm, termed Polar-CoT, which infers the target's relative position and encodes it as a compact polar-coordinate token for action prediction. Guided by these spatial priors, the TIM employs a gated update strategy to preserve long-horizon target memory, ensuring spatiotemporal consistency and mitigating target loss during extended occlusions. Extensive experiments show that TrackVLA++ achieves state-of-the-art performance on public benchmarks across both egocentric and multi-camera settings. On the challenging EVT-Bench DT split, TrackVLA++ surpasses the previous leading approach by 5.1 and 12, respectively. Furthermore, TrackVLA++ exhibits strong zero-shot generalization, enabling robust real-world tracking in dynamic and occluded scenarios.

We present SpinBench, a cognitively grounded diagnostic benchmark for evaluating spatial reasoning in vision language models (VLMs). SpinBench is designed around the core challenge of spatial reasoning: perspective taking, the ability to reason about how scenes and object relations change under viewpoint transformation. Since perspective taking requires multiple cognitive capabilities, such as recognizing objects across views, relative positions grounding, and mentally simulating transformations, SpinBench introduces a set of fine-grained diagnostic categories. Our categories target translation, rotation, object relative pose, and viewpoint change, and are progressively structured so that single-object simpler tasks scaffold toward the most demanding multi-object perspective-taking setting. We evaluate 37 state-of-the-art VLMs, both proprietary and open source. Results reveal systematic weaknesses: strong egocentric bias, poor rotational understanding, and inconsistencies under symmetrical and syntactic reformulations. Scaling analysis shows both smooth improvements and emergent capabilities. While human subjects achieve high accuracy (91.2\%), task difficulty as measured by human response time shows strong correlation with VLM accuracy, indicating that SpinBench captures spatial reasoning challenges shared across humans and VLMs. We believe SpinBench provides critical insights into spatial reasoning in VLMs and highlights key gaps in their ability to reason about physical space. Our website can be found at https://spinbench25.github.io/.

This paper investigates the problem of understanding dynamic 3D scenes from egocentric observations, a key challenge in robotics and embodied AI. Unlike prior studies that explored this as long-form video understanding and utilized egocentric video only, we instead propose an LLM-based agent, Embodied VideoAgent, which constructs scene memory from both egocentric video and embodied sensory inputs (e.g. depth and pose sensing). We further introduce a VLM-based approach to automatically update the memory when actions or activities over objects are perceived. Embodied VideoAgent attains significant advantages over counterparts in challenging reasoning and planning tasks in 3D scenes, achieving gains of 4.9% on Ego4D-VQ3D, 5.8% on OpenEQA, and 11.7% on EnvQA. We have also demonstrated its potential in various embodied AI tasks including generating embodied interactions and perception for robot manipulation. The code and demo will be made public.

We present a framework for perspective-aware reasoning in vision-language models (VLMs) through mental imagery simulation. Perspective-taking, the ability to perceive an environment or situation from an alternative viewpoint, is a key benchmark for human-level visual understanding, essential for environmental interaction and collaboration with autonomous agents. Despite advancements in spatial reasoning within VLMs, recent research has shown that modern VLMs significantly lack perspective-aware reasoning capabilities and exhibit a strong bias toward egocentric interpretations. To bridge the gap between VLMs and human perception, we focus on the role of mental imagery, where humans perceive the world through abstracted representations that facilitate perspective shifts. Motivated by this, we propose a framework for perspective-aware reasoning, named Abstract Perspective Change (APC), that effectively leverages vision foundation models, such as object detection, segmentation, and orientation estimation, to construct scene abstractions and enable perspective transformations. Our experiments on synthetic and real-image benchmarks, compared with various VLMs, demonstrate significant improvements in perspective-aware reasoning with our framework, further outperforming fine-tuned spatial reasoning models and novel-view-synthesis-based approaches.

Streaming video understanding requires models not only to process temporally incoming frames, but also to anticipate user intention for realistic applications like AR glasses. While prior streaming benchmarks evaluate temporal reasoning, none measure whether MLLMs can interpret or leverage human gaze signals within a streaming setting. To fill this gap, we introduce StreamGaze, the first benchmark designed to evaluate how effectively MLLMs use gaze for temporal and proactive reasoning in streaming videos. StreamGaze introduces gaze-guided past, present, and proactive tasks that comprehensively evaluate streaming video understanding. These tasks assess whether models can use real-time gaze to follow shifting attention and infer user intentions from only past and currently observed frames. To build StreamGaze, we develop a gaze-video QA generation pipeline that aligns egocentric videos with raw gaze trajectories via fixation extraction, region-specific visual prompting, and scanpath construction. This pipeline produces spatio-temporally grounded QA pairs that closely reflect human perceptual dynamics. Across all StreamGaze tasks, we observe substantial performance gaps between state-of-the-art MLLMs and human performance, revealing fundamental limitations in gaze-based temporal reasoning, intention modeling, and proactive prediction. We further provide detailed analyses of gaze-prompting strategies, reasoning behaviors, and task-specific failure modes, offering deeper insight into why current MLLMs struggle and what capabilities future models must develop. All data and code will be publicly released to support continued research in gaze-guided streaming video understanding.

The growing interest in embodied agents increases the demand for spatiotemporal video understanding, yet existing benchmarks largely emphasize extractive reasoning, where answers can be explicitly presented within spatiotemporal events. It remains unclear whether multimodal large language models can instead perform abstractive spatiotemporal reasoning, which requires integrating observations over time, combining dispersed cues, and inferring implicit spatial and contextual structure. To address this gap, we formalize abstractive spatiotemporal reasoning from videos by introducing a structured evaluation taxonomy that systematically targets its core dimensions and construct a controllable, scenario-driven synthetic egocentric video dataset tailored to evaluate abstractive spatiotemporal reasoning capabilities, spanning object-, room-, and floor-plan-level scenarios. Based on this framework, we present VAEX-BENCH, a benchmark comprising five abstractive reasoning tasks together with their extractive counterparts. Our extensive experiments compare the performance of state-of-the-art MLLMs under extractive and abstractive settings, exposing their limitations on abstractive tasks and providing a fine-grained analysis of the underlying bottlenecks. The dataset will be released soon.

This paper considers the problem of Multi-Hop Video Question Answering (MH-VidQA) in long-form egocentric videos. This task not only requires to answer visual questions, but also to localize multiple relevant time intervals within the video as visual evidences. We develop an automated pipeline to create multi-hop question-answering pairs with associated temporal evidence, enabling to construct a large-scale dataset for instruction-tuning. To monitor the progress of this new task, we further curate a high-quality benchmark, MultiHop-EgoQA, with careful manual verification and refinement. Experimental results reveal that existing multi-modal systems exhibit inadequate multi-hop grounding and reasoning abilities, resulting in unsatisfactory performance. We then propose a novel architecture, termed as Grounding Scattered Evidence with Large Language Model (GeLM), that enhances multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) by incorporating a grounding module to retrieve temporal evidence from videos using flexible grounding tokens. Trained on our visual instruction data, GeLM demonstrates improved multi-hop grounding and reasoning capabilities, setting a new baseline for this challenging task. Furthermore, when trained on third-person view videos, the same architecture also achieves state-of-the-art performance on the single-hop VidQA benchmark, ActivityNet-RTL, demonstrating its effectiveness.

Deploying humanoid robots in real-world settings is fundamentally challenging, as it demands tight integration of perception, locomotion, and manipulation under partial-information observations and dynamically changing environments. As well as transitioning robustly between sub-tasks of different types. Towards addressing these challenges, we propose a novel task - EgoActing, which requires directly grounding high-level instructions into various, precise, spatially aware humanoid actions. We further instantiate this task by introducing EgoActor, a unified and scalable vision-language model (VLM) that can predict locomotion primitives (e.g., walk, turn, move sideways, change height), head movements, manipulation commands, and human-robot interactions to coordinate perception and execution in real-time. We leverage broad supervision over egocentric RGB-only data from real-world demonstrations, spatial reasoning question-answering, and simulated environment demonstrations, enabling EgoActor to make robust, context-aware decisions and perform fluent action inference (under 1s) with both 8B and 4B parameter models. Extensive evaluations in both simulated and real-world environments demonstrate that EgoActor effectively bridges abstract task planning and concrete motor execution, while generalizing across diverse tasks and unseen environments.

Most existing benchmarks for egocentric vision understanding focus primarily on daytime scenarios, overlooking the low-light conditions that are inevitable in real-world applications. To investigate this gap, we present EgoNight, the first comprehensive benchmark for nighttime egocentric vision, with visual question answering (VQA) as the core task. A key feature of EgoNight is the introduction of day-night aligned videos, which enhance night annotation quality using the daytime data and reveal clear performance gaps between lighting conditions. To achieve this, we collect both synthetic videos rendered by Blender and real-world recordings, ensuring that scenes and actions are visually and temporally aligned. Leveraging these paired videos, we construct EgoNight-VQA, supported by a novel day-augmented night auto-labeling engine and refinement through extensive human verification. Each QA pair is double-checked by annotators for reliability. In total, EgoNight-VQA contains 3658 QA pairs across 90 videos, spanning 12 diverse QA types, with more than 300 hours of human work. Evaluations of state-of-the-art multimodal large language models (MLLMs) reveal substantial performance drops when transferring from day to night, underscoring the challenges of reasoning under low-light conditions. Beyond VQA, EgoNight also introduces two auxiliary tasks, day-night correspondence retrieval and egocentric depth estimation at night, that further explore the boundaries of existing models. We believe EgoNight-VQA provides a strong foundation for advancing application-driven egocentric vision research and for developing models that generalize across illumination domains. All the data and code will be made available upon acceptance.

Humans can perceive and reason about spatial relationships from sequential visual observations, such as egocentric video streams. However, how pretrained models acquire such abilities, especially high-level reasoning, remains unclear. This paper introduces Embodied-R, a collaborative framework combining large-scale Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for perception and small-scale Language Models (LMs) for reasoning. Using Reinforcement Learning (RL) with a novel reward system considering think-answer logical consistency, the model achieves slow-thinking capabilities with limited computational resources. After training on only 5k embodied video samples, Embodied-R with a 3B LM matches state-of-the-art multimodal reasoning models (OpenAI-o1, Gemini-2.5-pro) on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution embodied spatial reasoning tasks. Embodied-R also exhibits emergent thinking patterns such as systematic analysis and contextual integration. We further explore research questions including response length, training on VLM, strategies for reward design, and differences in model generalization after SFT (Supervised Fine-Tuning) and RL training.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently achieved remarkable progress in vision-language understanding. Yet, human perception is inherently multisensory, integrating sight, sound, and motion to reason about the world. Among these modalities, sound provides indispensable cues about spatial layout, off-screen events, and causal interactions, particularly in egocentric settings where auditory and visual signals are tightly coupled. To this end, we introduce EgoSound, the first benchmark designed to systematically evaluate egocentric sound understanding in MLLMs. EgoSound unifies data from Ego4D and EgoBlind, encompassing both sighted and sound-dependent experiences. It defines a seven-task taxonomy spanning intrinsic sound perception, spatial localization, causal inference, and cross-modal reasoning. Constructed through a multi-stage auto-generative pipeline, EgoSound contains 7315 validated QA pairs across 900 videos. Comprehensive experiments on nine state-of-the-art MLLMs reveal that current models exhibit emerging auditory reasoning abilities but remain limited in fine-grained spatial and causal understanding. EgoSound establishes a challenging foundation for advancing multisensory egocentric intelligence, bridging the gap between seeing and truly hearing the world.

Egocentric AI assistants in real-world settings must process multi-modal inputs (video, audio, text), respond in real time, and retain evolving long-term memory. However, existing benchmarks typically evaluate these abilities in isolation, lack realistic streaming scenarios, or support only short-term tasks. We introduce TeleEgo, a long-duration, streaming, omni-modal benchmark for evaluating egocentric AI assistants in realistic daily contexts. The dataset features over 14 hours per participant of synchronized egocentric video, audio, and text across four domains: work \& study, lifestyle \& routines, social activities, and outings \& culture. All data is aligned on a unified global timeline and includes high-quality visual narrations and speech transcripts, curated through human refinement.TeleEgo defines 12 diagnostic subtasks across three core capabilities: Memory (recalling past events), Understanding (interpreting the current moment), and Cross-Memory Reasoning (linking distant events). It contains 3,291 human-verified QA items spanning multiple question formats (single-choice, binary, multi-choice, and open-ended), evaluated strictly in a streaming setting. We propose two key metrics -- Real-Time Accuracy and Memory Persistence Time -- to jointly assess correctness, temporal responsiveness, and long-term retention. TeleEgo provides a realistic and comprehensive evaluation to advance the development of practical AI assistants.

As embodied models become powerful, humans will collaborate with multiple embodied AI agents at their workplace or home in the future. To ensure better communication between human users and the multi-agent system, it is crucial to interpret incoming information from agents in parallel and refer to the appropriate context for each query. Existing challenges include effectively compressing and communicating high volumes of individual sensory inputs in the form of video and correctly aggregating multiple egocentric videos to construct system-level memory. In this work, we first formally define a novel problem of understanding multiple long-horizon egocentric videos simultaneously collected from embodied agents. To facilitate research in this direction, we introduce MultiAgent-EgoQA (MA-EgoQA), a benchmark designed to systemically evaluate existing models in our scenario. MA-EgoQA provides 1.7k questions unique to multiple egocentric streams, spanning five categories: social interaction, task coordination, theory-of-mind, temporal reasoning, and environmental interaction. We further propose a simple baseline model for MA-EgoQA named EgoMAS, which leverages shared memory across embodied agents and agent-wise dynamic retrieval. Through comprehensive evaluation across diverse baselines and EgoMAS on MA-EgoQA, we find that current approaches are unable to effectively handle multiple egocentric streams, highlighting the need for future advances in system-level understanding across the agents. The code and benchmark are available at https://ma-egoqa.github.io.

Unlocking spatial reasoning in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) is crucial for enabling intelligent interaction with 3D environments. While prior efforts often rely on explicit 3D inputs or specialized model architectures, we ask: can LMMs reason about 3D space using only structured 2D representations derived from perception? We introduce Struct2D, a perception-guided prompting framework that combines bird's-eye-view (BEV) images with object marks and object-centric metadata, optionally incorporating egocentric keyframes when needed. Using Struct2D, we conduct an in-depth zero-shot analysis of closed-source LMMs (e.g., GPT-o3) and find that they exhibit surprisingly strong spatial reasoning abilities when provided with structured 2D inputs, effectively handling tasks such as relative direction estimation and route planning. Building on these insights, we construct Struct2D-Set, a large-scale instruction tuning dataset with 200K fine-grained QA pairs across eight spatial reasoning categories, generated automatically from 3D indoor scenes. We fine-tune an open-source LMM (Qwen2.5VL) on Struct2D-Set, achieving competitive performance on multiple benchmarks, including 3D question answering, dense captioning, and object grounding. Our approach demonstrates that structured 2D inputs can effectively bridge perception and language reasoning in LMMs-without requiring explicit 3D representations as input. We will release both our code and dataset to support future research.

Current vision-language models may incorporate single-dimensional spatial cues, such as depth, object boundary, and basic spatial directions (e.g. left, right, front, back), yet often lack the multi-dimensional spatial reasoning necessary for human-like understanding and real-world applications. To address this gap, we develop SPHERE (Spatial Perception and Hierarchical Evaluation of REasoning), a hierarchical evaluation framework with a new human-annotated dataset to pinpoint model strengths and weaknesses, advancing from single-skill tasks to multi-skill tasks, and ultimately to complex reasoning tasks that require the integration of multiple spatial and visual cues with logical reasoning. Benchmark evaluation of state-of-the-art open-source models reveal significant shortcomings, especially in the abilities to understand distance and proximity, to reason from both allocentric and egocentric viewpoints, and to perform complex reasoning in a physical context. This work underscores the need for more advanced approaches to spatial understanding and reasoning, paving the way for improvements in vision-language models and their alignment with human-like spatial capabilities. The dataset will be open-sourced upon publication.

Promptly identifying procedural errors from egocentric videos in an online setting is highly challenging and valuable for detecting mistakes as soon as they happen. This capability has a wide range of applications across various fields, such as manufacturing and healthcare. The nature of procedural mistakes is open-set since novel types of failures might occur, which calls for one-class classifiers trained on correctly executed procedures. However, no technique can currently detect open-set procedural mistakes online. We propose PREGO, the first online one-class classification model for mistake detection in PRocedural EGOcentric videos. PREGO is based on an online action recognition component to model the current action, and a symbolic reasoning module to predict the next actions. Mistake detection is performed by comparing the recognized current action with the expected future one. We evaluate PREGO on two procedural egocentric video datasets, Assembly101 and Epic-tent, which we adapt for online benchmarking of procedural mistake detection to establish suitable benchmarks, thus defining the Assembly101-O and Epic-tent-O datasets, respectively.

Spatial reasoning is a fundamental capability of embodied agents and has garnered widespread attention in the field of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). In this work, we propose a novel benchmark, Open3DVQA, to comprehensively evaluate the spatial reasoning capacities of current state-of-the-art (SOTA) foundation models in open 3D space. Open3DVQA consists of 9k VQA samples, collected using an efficient semi-automated tool in a high-fidelity urban simulator. We evaluate several SOTA MLLMs across various aspects of spatial reasoning, such as relative and absolute spatial relationships, situational reasoning, and object-centric spatial attributes. Our results reveal that: 1) MLLMs perform better at answering questions regarding relative spatial relationships than absolute spatial relationships, 2) MLLMs demonstrate similar spatial reasoning abilities for both egocentric and allocentric perspectives, and 3) Fine-tuning large models significantly improves their performance across different spatial reasoning tasks. We believe that our open-source data collection tools and in-depth analyses will inspire further research on MLLM spatial reasoning capabilities. The benchmark is available at https://github.com/WeichenZh/Open3DVQA.

Large pretrained (e.g., "foundation") models exhibit distinct capabilities depending on the domain of data they are trained on. While these domains are generic, they may only barely overlap. For example, visual-language models (VLMs) are trained on Internet-scale image captions, but large language models (LMs) are further trained on Internet-scale text with no images (e.g., spreadsheets, SAT questions, code). As a result, these models store different forms of commonsense knowledge across different domains. In this work, we show that this diversity is symbiotic, and can be leveraged through Socratic Models (SMs): a modular framework in which multiple pretrained models may be composed zero-shot i.e., via multimodal-informed prompting, to exchange information with each other and capture new multimodal capabilities, without requiring finetuning. With minimal engineering, SMs are not only competitive with state-of-the-art zero-shot image captioning and video-to-text retrieval, but also enable new applications such as (i) answering free-form questions about egocentric video, (ii) engaging in multimodal assistive dialogue with people (e.g., for cooking recipes) by interfacing with external APIs and databases (e.g., web search), and (iii) robot perception and planning.

Spatial reasoning in 3D space is central to human cognition and indispensable for embodied tasks such as navigation and manipulation. However, state-of-the-art vision-language models (VLMs) struggle frequently with tasks as simple as anticipating how a scene will look after an egocentric motion: they perceive 2D images but lack an internal model of 3D dynamics. We therefore propose MindJourney, a test-time scaling framework that grants a VLM with this missing capability by coupling it to a controllable world model based on video diffusion. The VLM iteratively sketches a concise camera trajectory, while the world model synthesizes the corresponding view at each step. The VLM then reasons over this multi-view evidence gathered during the interactive exploration. Without any fine-tuning, our MindJourney achieves over an average 8% performance boost on the representative spatial reasoning benchmark SAT, showing that pairing VLMs with world models for test-time scaling offers a simple, plug-and-play route to robust 3D reasoning. Meanwhile, our method also improves upon the test-time inference VLMs trained through reinforcement learning, which demonstrates the potential of our method that utilizes world models for test-time scaling.

Embodied cognition argues that intelligence arises from sensorimotor interaction rather than passive observation. It raises an intriguing question: do modern vision-language models (VLMs), trained largely in a disembodied manner, exhibit signs of embodied cognition? We introduce ENACT, a benchmark that casts evaluation of embodied cognition as world modeling from egocentric interaction in a visual question answering (VQA) format. Framed as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) whose actions are scene graph changes, ENACT comprises two complementary sequence reordering tasks: forward world modeling (reorder shuffled observations given actions) and inverse world modeling (reorder shuffled actions given observations). While conceptually simple, solving these tasks implicitly demands capabilities central to embodied cognition-affordance recognition, action-effect reasoning, embodied awareness, and interactive, long-horizon memory from partially observable egocentric input, while avoiding low-level image synthesis that could confound the evaluation. We provide a scalable pipeline that synthesizes QA pairs from robotics simulation (BEHAVIOR) and evaluates models on 8,972 QA pairs spanning long-horizon home-scale activities. Experiments reveal a performance gap between frontier VLMs and humans that widens with interaction horizon. Models consistently perform better on the inverse task than the forward one and exhibit anthropocentric biases, including a preference for right-handed actions and degradation when camera intrinsics or viewpoints deviate from human vision. Website at https://enact-embodied-cognition.github.io/.

Human team tactics emerge from each player's individual perspective and their ability to anticipate, interpret, and adapt to teammates' intentions. While advances in video understanding have improved the modeling of team interactions in sports, most existing work relies on third-person broadcast views and overlooks the synchronous, egocentric nature of multi-agent learning. We introduce X-Ego-CS, a benchmark dataset consisting of 124 hours of gameplay footage from 45 professional-level matches of the popular e-sports game Counter-Strike 2, designed to facilitate research on multi-agent decision-making in complex 3D environments. X-Ego-CS provides cross-egocentric video streams that synchronously capture all players' first-person perspectives along with state-action trajectories. Building on this resource, we propose Cross-Ego Contrastive Learning (CECL), which aligns teammates' egocentric visual streams to foster team-level tactical situational awareness from an individual's perspective. We evaluate CECL on a teammate-opponent location prediction task, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing an agent's ability to infer both teammate and opponent positions from a single first-person view using state-of-the-art video encoders. Together, X-Ego-CS and CECL establish a foundation for cross-egocentric multi-agent benchmarking in esports. More broadly, our work positions gameplay understanding as a testbed for multi-agent modeling and tactical learning, with implications for spatiotemporal reasoning and human-AI teaming in both virtual and real-world domains. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/HATS-ICT/x-ego.

We introduce WearVQA, the first benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the Visual Question Answering (VQA) capabilities of multi-model AI assistant on wearable devices like smart glasses. Unlike prior benchmarks that focus on high-quality, third-person imagery, WearVQA reflects the unique challenges of ego-centric interaction-where visual inputs may be occluded, poorly lit, unzoomed, or blurry, and questions are grounded in realistic wearable use cases. The benchmark comprises 2,520 carefully curated image-question-answer triplets, spanning 7 diverse image domains including both text-centric and general scenes, 10 cognitive task types ranging from basic recognition to various forms of reasoning, and 6 common wearables-specific image quality issues. All questions are designed to be answerable using only the visual input and common senses. WearVQA is paired with a rigorous LLM-as-a-judge evaluation framework with 96% labeling accuracy. Open-source and proprietary multi-model LLMs achieved a QA accuracy as low as 24-52% on WearVQA, with substantial drops on lower-quality images and reasoning-heavy tasks. These observations position WearVQA as a comprehensive and challenging benchmark for guiding technical advancement towards robust, real-world multi-model wearables AI systems.

AI personal assistants deployed via robots or wearables require embodied understanding to collaborate with humans effectively. However, current Vision-Language Models (VLMs) primarily focus on third-person view videos, neglecting the richness of egocentric perceptual experience. To address this gap, we propose three key contributions. First, we introduce the Egocentric Video Understanding Dataset (EVUD) for training VLMs on video captioning and question answering tasks specific to egocentric videos. Second, we present AlanaVLM, a 7B parameter VLM trained using parameter-efficient methods on EVUD. Finally, we evaluate AlanaVLM's capabilities on OpenEQA, a challenging benchmark for embodied video question answering. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming open-source models including strong Socratic models using GPT-4 as a planner by 3.6%. Additionally, we outperform Claude 3 and Gemini Pro Vision 1.0 and showcase competitive results compared to Gemini Pro 1.5 and GPT-4V, even surpassing the latter in spatial reasoning. This research paves the way for building efficient VLMs that can be deployed in robots or wearables, leveraging embodied video understanding to collaborate seamlessly with humans in everyday tasks, contributing to the next generation of Embodied AI.

Understanding and answering questions based on a user's pointing gesture is essential for next-generation egocentric AI assistants. However, current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle with such tasks due to the lack of gesture-rich data and their limited ability to infer fine-grained pointing intent from egocentric video. To address this, we introduce EgoPointVQA, a dataset and benchmark for gesture-grounded egocentric question answering, comprising 4000 synthetic and 400 real-world videos across multiple deictic reasoning tasks. Built upon it, we further propose Hand Intent Tokens (HINT), which encodes tokens derived from 3D hand keypoints using an off-the-shelf reconstruction model and interleaves them with the model input to provide explicit spatial and temporal context for interpreting pointing intent. We show that our model outperforms others in different backbones and model sizes. In particular, HINT-14B achieves 68.1% accuracy, on average over 6 tasks, surpassing the state-of-the-art, InternVL3-14B, by 6.6%. To further facilitate the open research, we will release the code, model, and dataset. Project page: https://yuuraa.github.io/papers/choi2026egovqa

Humans excel at spatio-temporal reasoning, effortlessly interpreting dynamic visual events from an egocentric viewpoint. However, whether multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can similarly comprehend the 4D world remains uncertain. This paper explores multimodal spatio-temporal reasoning from an egocentric perspective, aiming to equip MLLMs with human-like reasoning capabilities. To support this objective, we introduce Ego-ST Bench, a novel benchmark containing over 5,000 question-answer pairs across four categories, systematically evaluating spatial, temporal, and integrated spatio-temporal reasoning. Additionally, we propose the ST-R1 Video model, a video-based reasoning model that incorporates reverse thinking into its reinforcement learning process, significantly enhancing performance. We combine long-chain-of-thought (long-CoT) supervised fine-tuning with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) reinforcement learning, achieving notable improvements with limited high-quality data. Ego-ST Bench and ST-R1 provide valuable insights and resources for advancing video-based spatio-temporal reasoning research.

Understanding dynamic 4D scenes from an egocentric perspective-modeling changes in 3D spatial structure over time-is crucial for human-machine interaction, autonomous navigation, and embodied intelligence. While existing egocentric datasets contain dynamic scenes, they lack unified 4D annotations and task-driven evaluation protocols for fine-grained spatio-temporal reasoning, especially on motion of objects and human, together with their interactions. To address this gap, we introduce EgoDynamic4D, a novel QA benchmark on highly dynamic scenes, comprising RGB-D video, camera poses, globally unique instance masks, and 4D bounding boxes. We construct 927K QA pairs accompanied by explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT), enabling verifiable, step-by-step spatio-temporal reasoning. We design 12 dynamic QA tasks covering agent motion, human-object interaction, trajectory prediction, relation understanding, and temporal-causal reasoning, with fine-grained, multidimensional metrics. To tackle these tasks, we propose an end-to-end spatio-temporal reasoning framework that unifies dynamic and static scene information, using instance-aware feature encoding, time and camera encoding, and spatially adaptive down-sampling to compress large 4D scenes into token sequences manageable by LLMs. Experiments on EgoDynamic4D show that our method consistently outperforms baselines, validating the effectiveness of multimodal temporal modeling for egocentric dynamic scene understanding.

Despite rapid progress in multimodal foundation models, embodied intelligence community still lacks a unified, physically grounded foundation model that integrates perception, reasoning, and planning within real-world spatial-temporal dynamics. We introduce RynnBrain, an open-source spatiotemporal foundation model for embodied intelligence. RynnBrain strengthens four core capabilities in a unified framework: comprehensive egocentric understanding, diverse spatiotemporal localization, physically grounded reasoning, and physics-aware planning. The RynnBrain family comprises three foundation model scales (2B, 8B, and 30B-A3B MoE) and four post-trained variants tailored for downstream embodied tasks (i.e., RynnBrain-Nav, RynnBrain-Plan, and RynnBrain-VLA) or complex spatial reasoning tasks (i.e., RynnBrain-CoP). In terms of extensive evaluations on 20 embodied benchmarks and 8 general vision understanding benchmarks, our RynnBrain foundation models largely outperform existing embodied foundation models by a significant margin. The post-trained model suite further substantiates two key potentials of the RynnBrain foundation model: (i) enabling physically grounded reasoning and planning, and (ii) serving as a strong pretrained backbone that can be efficiently adapted to diverse embodied tasks.

A core aspect of human perception is situated awareness, the ability to relate ourselves to the surrounding physical environment and reason over possible actions in context. However, most existing benchmarks for multimodal foundation models (MFMs) emphasize environment-centric spatial relations (relations among objects in a scene), while largely overlooking observer-centric relationships that require reasoning relative to agent's viewpoint, pose, and motion. To bridge this gap, we introduce SAW-Bench (Situated Awareness in the Real World), a novel benchmark for evaluating egocentric situated awareness using real-world videos. SAW-Bench comprises 786 self-recorded videos captured with Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2) smart glasses spanning diverse indoor and outdoor environments, and over 2,071 human-annotated question-answer pairs. It probes a model's observer-centric understanding with six different awareness tasks. Our comprehensive evaluation reveals a human-model performance gap of 37.66%, even with the best-performing MFM, Gemini 3 Flash. Beyond this gap, our in-depth analysis uncovers several notable findings; for example, while models can exploit partial geometric cues in egocentric videos, they often fail to infer a coherent camera geometry, leading to systematic spatial reasoning errors. We position SAW-Bench as a benchmark for situated spatial intelligence, moving beyond passive observation to understanding physically grounded, observer-centric dynamics.

Transferring and integrating knowledge across first-person (egocentric) and third-person (exocentric) viewpoints is intrinsic to human intelligence, enabling humans to learn from others and convey insights from their own experiences. Despite rapid progress in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), their ability to perform such cross-view reasoning remains unexplored. To address this, we introduce EgoExoBench, the first benchmark for egocentric-exocentric video understanding and reasoning. Built from publicly available datasets, EgoExoBench comprises over 7,300 question-answer pairs spanning eleven sub-tasks organized into three core challenges: semantic alignment, viewpoint association, and temporal reasoning. We evaluate 13 state-of-the-art MLLMs and find that while these models excel on single-view tasks, they struggle to align semantics across perspectives, accurately associate views, and infer temporal dynamics in the ego-exo context. We hope EgoExoBench can serve as a valuable resource for research on embodied agents and intelligent assistants seeking human-like cross-view intelligence.

Existing approaches to skill proficiency estimation often rely on black-box video classifiers, ignoring multi-view context and lacking explainability. We present ProfVLM, a compact vision-language model that reformulates this task as generative reasoning: it jointly predicts skill level and generates expert-like feedback from egocentric and exocentric videos. Central to our method is an AttentiveGatedProjector that dynamically fuses multi-view features, projected from a frozen TimeSformer backbone into a language model tuned for feedback generation. Trained on EgoExo4D with expert commentaries, ProfVLM surpasses state-of-the-art methods while using up to 20x fewer parameters and reducing training time by up to 60%. Our approach not only achieves superior accuracy across diverse activities, but also outputs natural language critiques aligned with performance, offering transparent reasoning. These results highlight generative vision-language modeling as a powerful new direction for skill assessment.

We introduce RynnEC, a video multimodal large language model designed for embodied cognition. Built upon a general-purpose vision-language foundation model, RynnEC incorporates a region encoder and a mask decoder, enabling flexible region-level video interaction. Despite its compact architecture, RynnEC achieves state-of-the-art performance in object property understanding, object segmentation, and spatial reasoning. Conceptually, it offers a region-centric video paradigm for the brain of embodied agents, providing fine-grained perception of the physical world and enabling more precise interactions. To mitigate the scarcity of annotated 3D datasets, we propose an egocentric video based pipeline for generating embodied cognition data. Furthermore, we introduce RynnEC-Bench, a region-centered benchmark for evaluating embodied cognitive capabilities. We anticipate that RynnEC will advance the development of general-purpose cognitive cores for embodied agents and facilitate generalization across diverse embodied tasks. The code, model checkpoints, and benchmark are available at: https://github.com/alibaba-damo-academy/RynnEC

3D spatial reasoning in dynamic, audio-visual environments is a cornerstone of human cognition yet remains largely unexplored by existing Audio-Visual Large Language Models (AV-LLMs) and benchmarks, which predominantly focus on static or 2D scenes. We introduce SAVVY-Bench, the first benchmark for 3D spatial reasoning in dynamic scenes with synchronized spatial audio. SAVVY-Bench is comprised of thousands of relationships involving static and moving objects, and requires fine-grained temporal grounding, consistent 3D localization, and multi-modal annotation. To tackle this challenge, we propose SAVVY, a novel training-free reasoning pipeline that consists of two stages: (i) Egocentric Spatial Tracks Estimation, which leverages AV-LLMs as well as other audio-visual methods to track the trajectories of key objects related to the query using both visual and spatial audio cues, and (ii) Dynamic Global Map Construction, which aggregates multi-modal queried object trajectories and converts them into a unified global dynamic map. Using the constructed map, a final QA answer is obtained through a coordinate transformation that aligns the global map with the queried viewpoint. Empirical evaluation demonstrates that SAVVY substantially enhances performance of state-of-the-art AV-LLMs, setting a new standard and stage for approaching dynamic 3D spatial reasoning in AV-LLMs.

Reasoning about motion and space is a fundamental cognitive capability that is required by multiple real-world applications. While many studies highlight that large multimodal language models (MLMs) struggle to reason about space, they only focus on static spatial relationships, and not dynamic awareness of motion and space, i.e., reasoning about the effect of egocentric and object motions on spatial relationships. Manually annotating such object and camera movements is expensive. Hence, we introduce SAT, a simulated spatial aptitude training dataset comprising both static and dynamic spatial reasoning across 175K question-answer (QA) pairs and 20K scenes. Complementing this, we also construct a small (150 image-QAs) yet challenging dynamic spatial test set using real-world images. Leveraging our SAT datasets and 6 existing static spatial benchmarks, we systematically investigate what improves both static and dynamic spatial awareness. Our results reveal that simulations are surprisingly effective at imparting spatial aptitude to MLMs that translate to real images. We show that perfect annotations in simulation are more effective than existing approaches of pseudo-annotating real images. For instance, SAT training improves a LLaVA-13B model by an average 11% and a LLaVA-Video-7B model by an average 8% on multiple spatial benchmarks, including our real-image dynamic test set and spatial reasoning on long videos -- even outperforming some large proprietary models. While reasoning over static relationships improves with synthetic training data, there is still considerable room for improvement for dynamic reasoning questions.

We introduce Goal-Conditioned Visual Navigation Instruction Generation (GoViG), a new task that aims to autonomously generate precise and contextually coherent navigation instructions solely from egocentric visual observations of initial and goal states. Unlike conventional approaches that rely on structured inputs such as semantic annotations or environmental maps, GoViG exclusively leverages raw egocentric visual data, substantially improving its adaptability to unseen and unstructured environments. Our method addresses this task by decomposing it into two interconnected subtasks: (1) visual forecasting, which predicts intermediate visual states bridging the initial and goal views; and (2) instruction generation, which synthesizes linguistically coherent instructions grounded in both observed and anticipated visuals. These subtasks are integrated within an autoregressive multimodal large language model trained with tailored objectives to ensure spatial accuracy and linguistic clarity. Furthermore, we introduce two complementary multimodal reasoning strategies, one-pass and interleaved reasoning, to mimic incremental human cognitive processes during navigation. To evaluate our method, we propose the R2R-Goal dataset, combining diverse synthetic and real-world trajectories. Empirical results demonstrate significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior BLEU-4 and CIDEr scores along with robust cross-domain generalization.

Recent years have seen an increasing amount of work on embodied AI agents that can perform tasks by following human language instructions. However, most of these agents are reactive, meaning that they simply learn and imitate behaviors encountered in the training data. These reactive agents are insufficient for long-horizon complex tasks. To address this limitation, we propose a neuro-symbolic deliberative agent that, while following language instructions, proactively applies reasoning and planning based on its neural and symbolic representations acquired from past experience (e.g., natural language and egocentric vision). We show that our deliberative agent achieves greater than 70% improvement over reactive baselines on the challenging TEACh benchmark. Moreover, the underlying reasoning and planning processes, together with our modular framework, offer impressive transparency and explainability to the behaviors of the agent. This enables an in-depth understanding of the agent's capabilities, which shed light on challenges and opportunities for future embodied agents for instruction following. The code is available at https://github.com/sled-group/DANLI.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have been applied to autonomous driving to support decision-making in complex real-world scenarios. However, their training on static, web-sourced image-text pairs fundamentally limits the precise spatiotemporal reasoning required to understand and predict dynamic traffic scenes. We address this critical gap with STRIDE-QA, a large-scale visual question answering (VQA) dataset for physically grounded reasoning from an ego-centric perspective. Constructed from 100 hours of multi-sensor driving data in Tokyo, capturing diverse and challenging conditions, STRIDE-QA is the largest VQA dataset for spatiotemporal reasoning in urban driving, offering 16 million QA pairs over 285K frames. Grounded by dense, automatically generated annotations including 3D bounding boxes, segmentation masks, and multi-object tracks, the dataset uniquely supports both object-centric and ego-centric reasoning through three novel QA tasks that require spatial localization and temporal prediction. Our benchmarks demonstrate that existing VLMs struggle significantly, achieving near-zero scores on prediction consistency. In contrast, VLMs fine-tuned on STRIDE-QA exhibit dramatic performance gains, achieving 55% success in spatial localization and 28% consistency in future motion prediction, compared to near-zero scores from general-purpose VLMs. Therefore, STRIDE-QA establishes a comprehensive foundation for developing more reliable VLMs for safety-critical autonomous systems.

Recent advances in multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong performance across various domains; however, their ability to comprehend driving scenes remains less proven. The complexity of driving scenarios, which includes multi-view information, poses significant challenges for existing MLLMs. In this paper, we introduce NuPlanQA-Eval, a multi-view, multi-modal evaluation benchmark for driving scene understanding. To further support generalization to multi-view driving scenarios, we also propose NuPlanQA-1M, a large-scale dataset comprising 1M real-world visual question-answering (VQA) pairs. For context-aware analysis of traffic scenes, we categorize our dataset into nine subtasks across three core skills: Road Environment Perception, Spatial Relations Recognition, and Ego-Centric Reasoning. Furthermore, we present BEV-LLM, integrating Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) features from multi-view images into MLLMs. Our evaluation results reveal key challenges that existing MLLMs face in driving scene-specific perception and spatial reasoning from ego-centric perspectives. In contrast, BEV-LLM demonstrates remarkable adaptability to this domain, outperforming other models in six of the nine subtasks. These findings highlight how BEV integration enhances multi-view MLLMs while also identifying key areas that require further refinement for effective adaptation to driving scenes. To facilitate further research, we publicly release NuPlanQA at https://github.com/sungyeonparkk/NuPlanQA.

Egocentric perception enables humans to experience and understand the world directly from their own point of view. Translating exocentric (third-person) videos into egocentric (first-person) videos opens up new possibilities for immersive understanding but remains highly challenging due to extreme camera pose variations and minimal view overlap. This task requires faithfully preserving visible content while synthesizing unseen regions in a geometrically consistent manner. To achieve this, we present EgoX, a novel framework for generating egocentric videos from a single exocentric input. EgoX leverages the pretrained spatio temporal knowledge of large-scale video diffusion models through lightweight LoRA adaptation and introduces a unified conditioning strategy that combines exocentric and egocentric priors via width and channel wise concatenation. Additionally, a geometry-guided self-attention mechanism selectively attends to spatially relevant regions, ensuring geometric coherence and high visual fidelity. Our approach achieves coherent and realistic egocentric video generation while demonstrating strong scalability and robustness across unseen and in-the-wild videos.

Robotic generalization relies on physical intelligence: the ability to reason about state changes, contact-rich interactions, and long-horizon planning under egocentric perception and action. However, most VLMs are trained primarily on third-person data, creating a fundamental viewpoint mismatch for humanoid robots. Scaling robot egocentric data collection remains impractical due to high cost and limited diversity, whereas large-scale human egocentric videos offer a scalable alternative that naturally capture rich interaction context and causal structure. The key challenge is to convert raw egocentric videos into structured and reliable embodiment training supervision. Accordingly, we propose an Egocentric2Embodiment translation pipeline that transforms first-person videos into multi-level, schema-driven VQA supervision with enforced evidence grounding and temporal consistency, enabling the construction of the Egocentric2Embodiment dataset (E2E-3M) at scale. An egocentric-aware embodied brain, termed PhysBrain, is obtained by training on the E2E-3M dataset. PhysBrain exhibits substantially improved egocentric understanding, particularly for planning on EgoThink. It provides an egocentric-aware initialization that enables more sample-efficient VLA fine-tuning and higher SimplerEnv success rates (53.9\%), demonstrating effective transfer from human egocentric supervision to downstream robot control.

Egocentric vision is essential for both human and machine visual understanding, particularly in capturing the detailed hand-object interactions needed for manipulation tasks. Translating third-person views into first-person views significantly benefits augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and robotics applications. However, current exocentric-to-egocentric translation methods are limited by their dependence on 2D cues, synchronized multi-view settings, and unrealistic assumptions such as the necessity of an initial egocentric frame and relative camera poses during inference. To overcome these challenges, we introduce EgoWorld, a novel framework that reconstructs an egocentric view from rich exocentric observations, including point clouds, 3D hand poses, and textual descriptions. Our approach reconstructs a point cloud from estimated exocentric depth maps, reprojects it into the egocentric perspective, and then applies diffusion model to produce dense, semantically coherent egocentric images. Evaluated on four datasets (i.e., H2O, TACO, Assembly101, and Ego-Exo4D), EgoWorld achieves state-of-the-art performance and demonstrates robust generalization to new objects, actions, scenes, and subjects. Moreover, EgoWorld exhibits robustness on in-the-wild examples, underscoring its practical applicability. Project page is available at https://redorangeyellowy.github.io/EgoWorld/.

We consider tackling a single-agent RL problem by distributing it to n learners. These learners, called advisors, endeavour to solve the problem from a different focus. Their advice, taking the form of action values, is then communicated to an aggregator, which is in control of the system. We show that the local planning method for the advisors is critical and that none of the ones found in the literature is flawless: the egocentric planning overestimates values of states where the other advisors disagree, and the agnostic planning is inefficient around danger zones. We introduce a novel approach called empathic and discuss its theoretical aspects. We empirically examine and validate our theoretical findings on a fruit collection task.

Hallucinations (i.e., generating plausible but inaccurate content) and laziness (i.e. excessive refusals or defaulting to "I don't know") persist as major challenges in LLM reasoning. Current efforts to reduce hallucinations primarily focus on factual errors in knowledge-grounded tasks, often neglecting hallucinations related to faulty reasoning. Meanwhile, some approaches render LLMs overly conservative, limiting their problem-solving capabilities. To mitigate hallucination and laziness in reasoning tasks, we propose Automatic Curriculum Expert Iteration (Auto-CEI) to enhance LLM reasoning and align responses to the model's capabilities--assertively answering within its limits and declining when tasks exceed them. In our method, Expert Iteration explores the reasoning trajectories near the LLM policy, guiding incorrect paths back on track to reduce compounding errors and improve robustness; it also promotes appropriate "I don't know" responses after sufficient reasoning attempts. The curriculum automatically adjusts rewards, incentivizing extended reasoning before acknowledging incapability, thereby pushing the limits of LLM reasoning and aligning its behaviour with these limits. We compare Auto-CEI with various SOTA baselines across logical reasoning, mathematics, and planning tasks, where Auto-CEI achieves superior alignment by effectively balancing assertiveness and conservativeness.

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have recently demonstrated impressive capabilities in complex reasoning tasks by leveraging increased test-time computation and exhibiting behaviors reminiscent of human-like self-reflection. While LRMs show a clear capacity for valuable self-reflection, how this ability interacts with other model behaviors remains underexplored. We investigate this connection by analyzing verbalized confidence, how models articulate their certainty, as a lens into the nature of self-reflection in LRMs. We find that supervised fine-tuning on reasoning traces (i.e., distillation) and reinforcement learning can improve verbalized calibration in reasoning-intensive settings in a progressive, laddered fashion. However, our results also indicate that reasoning models may possess a diminished awareness of their own knowledge boundaries, as evidenced by significantly lower "I don't know" response rates on factuality benchmarks. Moreover, we examine the relationship between verbalized confidence and reasoning chains, finding that models tend to express higher confidence when providing shorter or less elaborate reasoning. Our findings highlight how reasoning-oriented training can enhance performance in reasoning-centric tasks while potentially incurring a "reasoning tax," a cost reflected in the model's reduced ability to accurately recognize the limits of its own knowledge in small-scale models. More broadly, our work showcases how this erosion of knowledge boundaries can compromise model faithfulness, as models grow more confident without a commensurate understanding of when they should abstain.

Embodied agents face significant challenges when tasked with performing actions in diverse environments, particularly in generalizing across object types and executing suitable actions to accomplish tasks. Furthermore, agents should exhibit robustness, minimizing the execution of illegal actions. In this work, we present Egocentric Planning, an innovative approach that combines symbolic planning and Object-oriented POMDPs to solve tasks in complex environments, harnessing existing models for visual perception and natural language processing. We evaluated our approach in ALFRED, a simulated environment designed for domestic tasks, and demonstrated its high scalability, achieving an impressive 36.07% unseen success rate in the ALFRED benchmark and winning the ALFRED challenge at CVPR Embodied AI workshop. Our method requires reliable perception and the specification or learning of a symbolic description of the preconditions and effects of the agent's actions, as well as what object types reveal information about others. It is capable of naturally scaling to solve new tasks beyond ALFRED, as long as they can be solved using the available skills. This work offers a solid baseline for studying end-to-end and hybrid methods that aim to generalize to new tasks, including recent approaches relying on LLMs, but often struggle to scale to long sequences of actions or produce robust plans for novel tasks.

We present Ego-EXTRA, a video-language Egocentric Dataset for EXpert-TRAinee assistance. Ego-EXTRA features 50 hours of unscripted egocentric videos of subjects performing procedural activities (the trainees) while guided by real-world experts who provide guidance and answer specific questions using natural language. Following a ``Wizard of OZ'' data collection paradigm, the expert enacts a wearable intelligent assistant, looking at the activities performed by the trainee exclusively from their egocentric point of view, answering questions when asked by the trainee, or proactively interacting with suggestions during the procedures. This unique data collection protocol enables Ego-EXTRA to capture a high-quality dialogue in which expert-level feedback is provided to the trainee. Two-way dialogues between experts and trainees are recorded, transcribed, and used to create a novel benchmark comprising more than 15k high-quality Visual Question Answer sets, which we use to evaluate Multimodal Large Language Models. The results show that Ego-EXTRA is challenging and highlight the limitations of current models when used to provide expert-level assistance to the user. The Ego-EXTRA dataset is publicly available to support the benchmark of egocentric video-language assistants: https://fpv-iplab.github.io/Ego-EXTRA/.

Situational awareness, the capacity of an AI system to recognize its own nature, understand its training and deployment context, and reason strategically about its circumstances, is widely considered among the most dangerous emergent capabilities in advanced AI systems. Separately, a growing research effort seeks to improve the logical reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) across deduction, induction, and abduction. In this paper, we argue that these two research trajectories are on a collision course. We introduce the RAISE framework (Reasoning Advancing Into Self Examination), which identifies three mechanistic pathways through which improvements in logical reasoning enable progressively deeper levels of situational awareness: deductive self inference, inductive context recognition, and abductive self modeling. We formalize each pathway, construct an escalation ladder from basic self recognition to strategic deception, and demonstrate that every major research topic in LLM logical reasoning maps directly onto a specific amplifier of situational awareness. We further analyze why current safety measures are insufficient to prevent this escalation. We conclude by proposing concrete safeguards, including a "Mirror Test" benchmark and a Reasoning Safety Parity Principle, and pose an uncomfortable but necessary question to the logical reasoning community about its responsibility in this trajectory.

Egocentric videos are a valuable and scalable data source to learn manipulation policies. However, due to significant data heterogeneity, most existing approaches utilize human data for simple pre-training, which does not unlock its full potential. This paper first provides a scalable recipe for collecting and using egocentric data by categorizing human data into two categories: in-the-wild and on-task alongside with systematic analysis on how to use the data. We first curate a dataset, PHSD, which contains over 1,000 hours of diverse in-the-wild egocentric data and over 20 hours of on-task data directly aligned to the target manipulation tasks. This enables learning a large egocentric language-conditioned flow matching policy, Human0. With domain adaptation techniques, Human0 minimizes the gap between humans and humanoids. Empirically, we show Human0 achieves several novel properties from scaling human data, including language following of instructions from only human data, few-shot learning, and improved robustness using on-task data. Project website: https://xiongyicai.github.io/In-N-On/

The mechanism by which RL contributes to reasoning capabilities-whether it incentivizes the synthesis of new skills or merely amplifies existing behaviors-remains a subject of intense debate. In this work, we investigate this question through the lens of Complementary Reasoning, a complex task that requires integrating internal parametric knowledge with external contextual information. Using a controlled synthetic dataset of human biographies, we strictly decouple this ability into two atomic skills: Parametric Reasoning (relying on internal knowledge) and Contextual Reasoning (depending on external information). To rigorously assess capability boundaries, we evaluate generalization across three distinct levels of difficulty: I.I.D., Composition, and Zero-shot settings. We find that while SFT is sufficient for in-distribution performance, it struggles with O.O.D. generalization, particularly in Zero-shot settings where relational combinations are novel. Crucially, we identify the SFT Generalization Paradox: Models supervised solely on the composite task achieve near-perfect in-distribution accuracy but collapse on out-of-distribution generalization, indicating their reliance on rote memorization of path shortcuts. In contrast, we find that RL acts as a reasoning synthesizer rather than a probability amplifier. However, we uncover a strict atomic prerequisite: RL can only synthesize these complex strategies if the base model has first mastered the independent atomic skills (Parametric and Contextual) via SFT. These findings challenge the view of RL as a mere amplifier, suggesting that given sufficient atomic foundations, RL can actively synthesize complex reasoning strategies from learned primitives without explicit supervision on such complex strategies. This indicates that decoupled atomic training followed by RL offers a scalable path to generalization for complex reasoning tasks.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated outstanding performance across various tasks, yet they still exhibit limitations such as hallucination, unfaithful reasoning, and toxic content. One potential approach to mitigate these issues is learning from human or external feedback (e.g. tools). In this paper, we introduce an intrinsic self-correct reasoning framework for LLMs that eliminates the need for human feedback, external tools, and handcraft prompts. The proposed framework, based on a multi-step reasoning paradigm Learning from Correctness (LeCo), improves reasoning performance without needing to learn from errors. This paradigm prioritizes learning from correct reasoning steps, and a unique method to measure confidence for each reasoning step based on generation logits. Experimental results across various multi-step reasoning tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework in improving reasoning performance with reduced token consumption.

Spatial reasoning is a core aspect of human intelligence that allows perception, inference and planning in 3D environments. However, current vision-language models (VLMs) struggle to maintain geometric coherence and cross-view consistency for spatial reasoning in multi-view settings. We attribute this gap to the lack of fine-grained benchmarks that isolate multi-view reasoning from single-view perception and temporal factors. To address this, we present ReMindView-Bench, a cognitively grounded benchmark for evaluating how VLMs construct, align and maintain spatial mental models across complementary viewpoints. ReMindView-Bench systematically varies viewpoint spatial pattern and query type to probe key factors of spatial cognition. Evaluations of 15 current VLMs reveals consistent failures in cross-view alignment and perspective-taking in multi-view spatial reasoning, motivating deeper analysis on the reasoning process. Explicit phase-wise analysis using LLM-as-a-judge and self-consistency prompting shows that VLMs perform well on in-frame perception but degrade sharply when integrating information across views. Implicit analysis, including linear probing and entropy dynamics, further show progressive loss of task-relevant information and uncertainty separation between correct and incorrect trajectories. These results provide a cognitively grounded diagnosis of VLM spatial reasoning and reveal how multi-view spatial mental models are formed, degraded and destabilized across reasoning phases. The ReMindView-Bench benchmark is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Xue0823/ReMindView-Bench, and the source codes of benchmark construction and VLM reasoning analysis are available at https://github.com/pittisl/ReMindView-Bench.

We introduce EgoLife, a project to develop an egocentric life assistant that accompanies and enhances personal efficiency through AI-powered wearable glasses. To lay the foundation for this assistant, we conducted a comprehensive data collection study where six participants lived together for one week, continuously recording their daily activities - including discussions, shopping, cooking, socializing, and entertainment - using AI glasses for multimodal egocentric video capture, along with synchronized third-person-view video references. This effort resulted in the EgoLife Dataset, a comprehensive 300-hour egocentric, interpersonal, multiview, and multimodal daily life dataset with intensive annotation. Leveraging this dataset, we introduce EgoLifeQA, a suite of long-context, life-oriented question-answering tasks designed to provide meaningful assistance in daily life by addressing practical questions such as recalling past relevant events, monitoring health habits, and offering personalized recommendations. To address the key technical challenges of (1) developing robust visual-audio models for egocentric data, (2) enabling identity recognition, and (3) facilitating long-context question answering over extensive temporal information, we introduce EgoButler, an integrated system comprising EgoGPT and EgoRAG. EgoGPT is an omni-modal model trained on egocentric datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance on egocentric video understanding. EgoRAG is a retrieval-based component that supports answering ultra-long-context questions. Our experimental studies verify their working mechanisms and reveal critical factors and bottlenecks, guiding future improvements. By releasing our datasets, models, and benchmarks, we aim to stimulate further research in egocentric AI assistants.

The evolution of Remote Sensing Vision-Language Models(RS-VLMs) emphasizes the importance of transitioning from perception-centric recognition toward high-level deductive reasoning to enhance cognitive reliability in complex spatial tasks. However, current models often suffer from logical hallucinations, where correct answers are derived from flawed reasoning chains or rely on positional shortcuts rather than spatial logic. This decoupling undermines reliability in strategic spatial decision-making. To address this, we present GeoReason, a framework designed to synchronize internal thinking with final decisions. We first construct GeoReason-Bench, a logic-driven dataset containing 4,000 reasoning trajectories synthesized from geometric primitives and expert knowledge. We then formulate a two-stage training strategy: (1) Supervised Knowledge Initialization to equip the model with reasoning syntax and domain expertise, and (2) Consistency-Aware Reinforcement Learning to refine deductive reliability. This second stage integrates a novel Logical Consistency Reward, which penalizes logical drift via an option permutation strategy to anchor decisions in verifiable reasoning traces. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework significantly enhances the cognitive reliability and interpretability of RS-VLMs, achieving state-of-the-art performance compared to other advanced methods.

Extensive work has shown that the performance and interpretability of commonsense reasoning can be improved via knowledge-augmented reasoning methods, where the knowledge that underpins the reasoning process is explicitly verbalized and utilized. However, existing implementations, including "chain-of-thought" and its variants, fall short in capturing the introspective nature of knowledge required in commonsense reasoning, and in accounting for the mutual adaptation between the generation and utilization of knowledge. We propose a novel method to develop an introspective commonsense reasoner, Crystal. To tackle commonsense problems, it first introspects for knowledge statements related to the given question, and subsequently makes an informed prediction that is grounded in the previously introspected knowledge. The knowledge introspection and knowledge-grounded reasoning modes of the model are tuned via reinforcement learning to mutually adapt, where the reward derives from the feedback given by the model itself. Experiments show that Crystal significantly outperforms both the standard supervised finetuning and chain-of-thought distilled methods, and enhances the transparency of the commonsense reasoning process. Our work ultimately validates the feasibility and potential of reinforcing a neural model with self-feedback.

This research aims to comprehensively explore building a multimodal foundation model for egocentric video understanding. To achieve this goal, we work on three fronts. First, as there is a lack of QA data for egocentric video understanding, we develop a data engine that efficiently generates 7M high-quality QA samples for egocentric videos ranging from 30 seconds to one hour long, based on human-annotated data. This is currently the largest egocentric QA dataset. Second, we contribute a challenging egocentric QA benchmark with 629 videos and 7,026 questions to evaluate the models' ability in recognizing and memorizing visual details across videos of varying lengths. We introduce a new de-biasing evaluation method to help mitigate the unavoidable language bias present in the models being evaluated. Third, we propose a specialized multimodal architecture featuring a novel "Memory Pointer Prompting" mechanism. This design includes a global glimpse step to gain an overarching understanding of the entire video and identify key visual information, followed by a fallback step that utilizes the key visual information to generate responses. This enables the model to more effectively comprehend extended video content. With the data, benchmark, and model, we successfully build MM-Ego, an egocentric multimodal LLM that shows powerful performance on egocentric video understanding.

Generating instructional images of human daily actions from an egocentric viewpoint serves a key step towards efficient skill transfer. In this paper, we introduce a novel problem -- egocentric action frame generation. The goal is to synthesize the action frame conditioning on the user prompt question and an input egocentric image that captures user's environment. Notably, existing egocentric datasets lack the detailed annotations that describe the execution of actions. Additionally, the diffusion-based image manipulation models fail to control the state change of an action within the corresponding egocentric image pixel space. To this end, we finetune a visual large language model (VLLM) via visual instruction tuning for curating the enriched action descriptions to address our proposed problem. Moreover, we propose to Learn EGOcentric (LEGO) action frame generation using image and text embeddings from VLLM as additional conditioning. We validate our proposed model on two egocentric datasets -- Ego4D and Epic-Kitchens. Our experiments show prominent improvement over prior image manipulation models in both quantitative and qualitative evaluation. We also conduct detailed ablation studies and analysis to provide insights on our method.

Spatial reasoning is an essential problem in embodied AI research. Efforts to enhance spatial reasoning abilities through supplementary spatial data and fine-tuning have proven limited and ineffective when addressing complex embodied tasks, largely due to their dependence on language-based outputs. While some approaches have introduced a point-based action space to mitigate this issue, they fall short in managing more intricate tasks within complex environments. This deficiency arises from their failure to fully exploit the inherent thinking and reasoning capabilities that are fundamental strengths of Vision-Language Models (VLMs). To address these limitations, we propose a novel approach named SpatialCoT, specifically designed to bolster the spatial reasoning capabilities of VLMs. Our approach comprises two stages: spatial coordinate bi-directional alignment, which aligns vision-language inputs with spatial coordinates, and chain-of-thought spatial grounding, which harnesses the reasoning capabilities of language models for advanced spatial reasoning. We evaluate SpatialCoT on challenging navigation and manipulation tasks, both in simulation and real-world settings. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches in both tasks.

The emergence of advanced multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has significantly enhanced AI assistants' ability to process complex information across modalities. Recently, egocentric videos, by directly capturing user focus, actions, and context in an unified coordinate, offer an exciting opportunity to enable proactive and personalized AI user experiences with MLLMs. However, existing benchmarks overlook the crucial role of gaze as an indicator of user intent. To address this gap, we introduce EgoGazeVQA, an egocentric gaze-guided video question answering benchmark that leverages gaze information to improve the understanding of longer daily-life videos. EgoGazeVQA consists of gaze-based QA pairs generated by MLLMs and refined by human annotators. Our experiments reveal that existing MLLMs struggle to accurately interpret user intentions. In contrast, our gaze-guided intent prompting methods significantly enhance performance by integrating spatial, temporal, and intent-related cues. We further conduct experiments on gaze-related fine-tuning and analyze how gaze estimation accuracy impacts prompting effectiveness. These results underscore the value of gaze for more personalized and effective AI assistants in egocentric settings. Project page: https://taiyi98.github.io/projects/EgoGazeVQA

As reasoning models scale rapidly, the essential role of multimodality in human cognition has come into sharp relief, driving a growing need to probe vision-centric cognitive behaviors. Yet, existing multimodal benchmarks either overemphasize textual reasoning or fall short of systematically capturing vision-centric cognitive behaviors, leaving the cognitive capacity of MLLMs insufficiently assessed. To address this limitation, we introduce MME-CC (Multi-Modal Evaluation benchmark of Cognitive Capacity), a vision-grounded benchmark that organizes 11 representative reasoning tasks into three fundamental categories of visual information: spatial, geometric, and knowledge-based reasoning, and provides fine-grained analyses of MLLMs' cognitive capacity across these dimensions. Based on MME-CC, we conduct extensive experiments over 16 representative MLLMs. Our study reveals that closed-source models currently lead overall (e.g., 42.66 for Gemini-2.5-Pro vs. 30.45 for GLM-4.5V), while spatial and geometric reasoning remain broadly weak (less than or equal to 30%). We further identify common error patterns, including orientation mistakes, fragile cross-view identity persistence, and poor adherence to counterfactual instructions, and observe that Chain-of-Thought typically follows a three-stage process (extract -> reason -> verify) with heavy reliance on visual extraction. We hope this work catalyzes a shift toward treating the cognitive capacity of MLLMs as central to both evaluation and model design.

Human problem-solving is never the repetition of a single mindset, by which we mean a distinct mode of cognitive processing. When tackling a specific task, we do not rely on a single mindset; instead, we integrate multiple mindsets within the single solution process. However, existing LLM reasoning methods fall into a common trap: they apply the same fixed mindset across all steps, overlooking that different stages of solving the same problem require fundamentally different mindsets. This single-minded assumption prevents models from reaching the next level of intelligence. To address this limitation, we propose Chain of Mindset (CoM), a training-free agentic framework that enables step-level adaptive mindset orchestration. CoM decomposes reasoning into four functionally heterogeneous mindsets: Spatial, Convergent, Divergent, and Algorithmic. A Meta-Agent dynamically selects the optimal mindset based on the evolving reasoning state, while a bidirectional Context Gate filters cross-module information flow to maintain effectiveness and efficiency. Experiments across six challenging benchmarks spanning mathematics, code generation, scientific QA, and spatial reasoning demonstrate that CoM achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming the strongest baseline by 4.96\% and 4.72\% in overall accuracy on Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct and Gemini-2.0-Flash, while balancing reasoning efficiency. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/QuantaAlpha/chain-of-mindset{https://github.com/QuantaAlpha/chain-of-mindset}.

Recent large language models (LLMs) can generate long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) at test time, enabling them to solve complex tasks. These reasoning steps in CoT are often assumed as a faithful reflection of the model's internal thinking process, and used to monitor unsafe intentions. However, we find many reasoning steps don't truly contribute to LLMs' prediction. We measure the step-wise causal influence of each reasoning step on the model's final prediction with a proposed True Thinking Score (TTS). We reveal that LLMs often interleave between true-thinking steps (which are genuinely used to produce the final output) and decorative-thinking steps (which only give the appearance of reasoning but have minimal causal impact). Notably, only a small subset of the total reasoning steps have a high TTS that causally drive the model's prediction: e.g., for the AIME dataset, only an average of 2.3% of reasoning steps in CoT have a TTS >= 0.7 (range: 0-1) under the Qwen-2.5 model. Furthermore, we identify a TrueThinking direction in the latent space of LLMs. By steering along or against this direction, we can force the model to perform or disregard certain CoT steps when computing the final result. Finally, we highlight that self-verification steps in CoT (i.e., aha moments) can also be decorative, where LLMs do not truly verify their solution. Steering along the TrueThinking direction can force internal reasoning over these steps, resulting in a change in the final results. Overall, our work reveals that LLMs often verbalize reasoning steps without actually performing them internally, which undermines both the efficiency of LLM reasoning and the trustworthiness of CoT.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have recently shown promising results in traditional downstream tasks. Evaluation studies have emerged to assess their abilities, with the majority focusing on the third-person perspective, and only a few addressing specific tasks from the first-person perspective. However, the capability of VLMs to "think" from a first-person perspective, a crucial attribute for advancing autonomous agents and robotics, remains largely unexplored. To bridge this research gap, we introduce EgoThink, a novel visual question-answering benchmark that encompasses six core capabilities with twelve detailed dimensions. The benchmark is constructed using selected clips from egocentric videos, with manually annotated question-answer pairs containing first-person information. To comprehensively assess VLMs, we evaluate eighteen popular VLMs on EgoThink. Moreover, given the open-ended format of the answers, we use GPT-4 as the automatic judge to compute single-answer grading. Experimental results indicate that although GPT-4V leads in numerous dimensions, all evaluated VLMs still possess considerable potential for improvement in first-person perspective tasks. Meanwhile, enlarging the number of trainable parameters has the most significant impact on model performance on EgoThink. In conclusion, EgoThink serves as a valuable addition to existing evaluation benchmarks for VLMs, providing an indispensable resource for future research in the realm of embodied artificial intelligence and robotics.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) act as essential interfaces, connecting humans with AI technologies in multimodal applications. However, current MLLMs face challenges in accurately interpreting object orientation in images due to inconsistent orientation annotations in training data, hindering the development of a coherent orientation understanding. To overcome this, we propose egocentric instruction tuning, which aligns MLLMs' orientation understanding with the user's perspective, based on a consistent annotation standard derived from the user's egocentric viewpoint. We first generate egocentric instruction data that leverages MLLMs' ability to recognize object details and applies prior knowledge for orientation understanding. Using this data, we perform instruction tuning to enhance the model's capability for accurate orientation interpretation. In addition, we introduce EgoOrientBench, a benchmark that evaluates MLLMs' orientation understanding across three tasks using images collected from diverse domains. Experimental results on this benchmark show that egocentric instruction tuning significantly improves orientation understanding without compromising overall MLLM performance. The instruction data and benchmark dataset are available on our project page at https://github.com/jhCOR/EgoOrientBench.

Cognitive science suggests that spatial ability develops progressively-from perception to reasoning and interaction. Yet in multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), this hierarchy remains poorly understood, as most studies focus on a narrow set of tasks. We introduce SpatialTree, a cognitive-science-inspired hierarchy that organizes spatial abilities into four levels: low-level perception (L1), mental mapping (L2), simulation (L3), and agentic competence (L4). Based on this taxonomy, we construct the first capability-centric hierarchical benchmark, thoroughly evaluating mainstream MLLMs across 27 sub-abilities. The evaluation results reveal a clear structure: L1 skills are largely orthogonal, whereas higher-level skills are strongly correlated, indicating increasing interdependency. Through targeted supervised fine-tuning, we uncover a surprising transfer dynamic-negative transfer within L1, but strong cross-level transfer from low- to high-level abilities with notable synergy. Finally, we explore how to improve the entire hierarchy. We find that naive RL that encourages extensive "thinking" is unreliable: it helps complex reasoning but hurts intuitive perception. We propose a simple auto-think strategy that suppresses unnecessary deliberation, enabling RL to consistently improve performance across all levels. By building SpatialTree, we provide a proof-of-concept framework for understanding and systematically scaling spatial abilities in MLLMs.

Spatial reasoning is a key aspect of cognitive psychology and remains a major bottleneck for current vision-language models (VLMs). While extensive research has aimed to evaluate or improve VLMs' understanding of basic spatial relations, such as distinguishing left from right, near from far, and object counting, these tasks represent only the most fundamental level of spatial reasoning. In this work, we introduce OmniSpatial, a comprehensive and challenging benchmark for spatial reasoning, grounded in cognitive psychology. OmniSpatial covers four major categories: dynamic reasoning, complex spatial logic, spatial interaction, and perspective-taking, with 50 fine-grained subcategories. Through Internet data crawling and careful manual annotation, we construct over 1.5K question-answer pairs. Extensive experiments show that both open- and closed-source VLMs, as well as existing reasoning and spatial understanding models, exhibit significant limitations in comprehensive spatial understanding. We further analyze failure cases and propose potential directions for future research.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged with remarkable capabilities in complex tasks through Chain-of-Thought reasoning, practical resource constraints have sparked interest in transferring these abilities to smaller models. However, achieving both domain performance and cross-domain generalization remains challenging. Existing approaches typically restrict students to following a single golden rationale and treat different reasoning paths independently. Due to distinct inductive biases and intrinsic preferences, alongside the student's evolving capacity and reasoning preferences during training, a teacher's "optimal" rationale could act as out-of-distribution noise. This misalignment leads to a degeneration of the student's latent reasoning distribution, causing suboptimal performance. To bridge this gap, we propose MIND, a capability-adaptive framework that transitions distillation from passive mimicry to active cognitive construction. We synthesize diverse teacher perspectives through a novel "Teaching Assistant" network. By employing a Feedback-Driven Inertia Calibration mechanism, this network utilizes inertia-filtered training loss to align supervision with the student's current adaptability, effectively enhancing performance while mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MIND achieves state-of-the-art performance on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution benchmarks, and our sophisticated latent space analysis further confirms the mechanism of reasoning ability internalization.

Current approaches to AI training treat reasoning as an emergent property of scale. We argue instead that robust reasoning emerges from linguistic self-reflection, itself internalized from high-quality social interaction. Drawing on Vygotskian developmental psychology, we advance three core positions centered on Introspection. First, we argue for the Social Genesis of the Private Mind: learning from conversational environments rises to prominence as a new way to make sense of the world; the friction of aligning with another agent, internal or not, refines and crystallizes the reasoning process. Second, we argue that dialogically scaffolded introspective experiences allow agents to engage in sense-making that decouples learning from immediate data streams, transforming raw environmental data into rich, learnable narratives. Finally, we contend that Dialogue Quality is the New Data Quality: the depth of an agent's private reasoning, and its efficiency regarding test-time compute, is determined by the diversity and rigor of the dialogues it has mastered. We conclude that optimizing these conversational scaffolds is the primary lever for the next generation of general intelligence.

Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) is a critical task for developing embodied agents that can follow natural language instructions to navigate in complex real-world environments. Recent advances in VLN by large pretrained models have significantly improved generalization and instruction grounding compared to traditional approaches. However, the role of reasoning strategies in navigation-an action-centric, long-horizon task-remains underexplored, despite Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning's demonstrated success in static tasks like visual question answering. To address this gap, we conduct the first systematic evaluation of reasoning strategies for VLN, including No-Think (direct action prediction), Pre-Think (reason before action), and Post-Think (reason after action). Surprisingly, our findings reveal the Inference-time Reasoning Collapse issue, where inference-time reasoning degrades navigation accuracy, highlighting the challenges of integrating reasoning into VLN. Based on this insight, we propose Aux-Think, a framework that trains models to internalize structured reasoning patterns through CoT supervision, while inferring action directly without reasoning in online prediction. To support this framework, we release R2R-CoT-320k, the first Chain-of-Thought annotated dataset for VLN. Extensive experiments show that Aux-Think reduces training effort greatly and achieves the best performance under the same data scale.

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have significantly pushed the frontier of egocentric video question answering (EgocentricQA). However, existing benchmarks and studies are mainly limited to common daily activities such as cooking and cleaning. In contrast, real-world deployment inevitably encounters domain shifts, where target domains differ substantially in both visual style and semantic content. To bridge this gap, we introduce EgoCross, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the cross-domain generalization of MLLMs in EgocentricQA. EgoCross covers four diverse and challenging domains, including surgery, industry, extreme sports, and animal perspective, representing realistic and high-impact application scenarios. It comprises approximately 1,000 QA pairs across 798 video clips, spanning four key QA tasks: prediction, recognition, localization, and counting. Each QA pair provides both OpenQA and CloseQA formats to support fine-grained evaluation. Extensive experiments show that most existing MLLMs, whether general-purpose or egocentric-specialized, struggle to generalize to domains beyond daily life, highlighting the limitations of current models. Furthermore, we conduct several pilot studies, \eg, fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, to explore potential improvements. We hope EgoCross and our accompanying analysis will serve as a foundation for advancing domain-adaptive, robust egocentric video understanding. Data and codes will be released at: https://github.com/MyUniverse0726/EgoCross{https://github.com/MyUniverse0726/EgoCross.}

Despite the success of test-time scaling, Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) frequently encounter repetitive loops that lead to computational waste and inference failure. In this paper, we identify a distinct failure mode termed Circular Reasoning. Unlike traditional model degeneration, this phenomenon manifests as a self-reinforcing trap where generated content acts as a logical premise for its own recurrence, compelling the reiteration of preceding text. To systematically analyze this phenomenon, we introduce LoopBench, a dataset designed to capture two distinct loop typologies: numerical loops and statement loops. Mechanistically, we characterize circular reasoning as a state collapse exhibiting distinct boundaries, where semantic repetition precedes textual repetition. We reveal that reasoning impasses trigger the loop onset, which subsequently persists as an inescapable cycle driven by a self-reinforcing V-shaped attention mechanism. Guided by these findings, we employ the Cumulative Sum (CUSUM) algorithm to capture these precursors for early loop prediction. Experiments across diverse LRMs validate its accuracy and elucidate the stability of long-chain reasoning.

When interacting with the real world, human often take the egocentric (first-person) view as a benchmark, naturally transferring behaviors observed from a exocentric (third-person) view to their own. This cognitive theory provides a foundation for researching how robots can more effectively imitate human behavior. However, current research either employs multiple cameras with different views focusing on the same individual's behavior simultaneously or encounters unpair ego-exo view scenarios, there is no effort to fully exploit human cognitive behavior in the real world. To fill this gap, in this paper, we introduce a novel large-scale egocentric dataset, called EgoMe, which towards following the process of human imitation learning via egocentric view in the real world. Our dataset includes 7902 pairs of videos (15804 videos) for diverse daily behaviors in real-world scenarios. For a pair of videos, one video captures a exocentric view of the imitator observing the demonstrator's actions, while the other captures a egocentric view of the imitator subsequently following those actions. Notably, our dataset also contain exo-ego eye gaze, angular velocity, acceleration, magnetic strength and other sensor multi-modal data for assisting in establishing correlations between observing and following process. In addition, we also propose eight challenging benchmark tasks for fully leveraging this data resource and promoting the research of robot imitation learning ability. Extensive statistical analysis demonstrates significant advantages compared to existing datasets. The proposed EgoMe dataset and benchmark will be released soon.

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive reasoning capabilities in familiar contexts, but struggle when the context conflicts with their parametric knowledge. To investigate this phenomenon, we introduce CounterLogic, a dataset containing 1,800 examples across 9 logical schemas, explicitly designed to evaluate logical reasoning through counterfactual (hypothetical knowledge-conflicting) scenarios. Our systematic evaluation of 11 LLMs across 6 different datasets reveals a consistent performance degradation, with accuracies dropping by 27% on average when reasoning through counterfactual information. We propose Self-Segregate, a prompting method enabling metacognitive awareness (explicitly identifying knowledge conflicts) before reasoning. Our method dramatically narrows the average performance gaps from 27% to just 11%, while significantly increasing the overall accuracy (+7.5%). We discuss the implications of these findings and draw parallels to human cognitive processes, particularly on how humans disambiguate conflicting information during reasoning tasks. Our findings offer practical insights for understanding and enhancing LLMs reasoning capabilities in real-world applications, especially where models must logically reason independently of their factual knowledge.

Self-improvement has emerged as a mainstream paradigm for advancing the reasoning capabilities of large vision-language models (LVLMs), where models explore and learn from successful trajectories iteratively. However, we identify a critical issue during this process: the model excels at generating high-quality trajectories for simple queries (i.e., head data) but struggles with more complex ones (i.e., tail data). This leads to an imbalanced optimization that drives the model to prioritize simple reasoning skills, while hindering its ability to tackle more complex reasoning tasks. Over iterations, this imbalance becomes increasingly pronounced--a dynamic we term the "Matthew effect"--which ultimately hinders further model improvement and leads to performance bottlenecks. To counteract this challenge, we introduce four efficient strategies from two perspectives: distribution-reshaping and trajectory-resampling, to achieve head-tail re-balancing during the exploration-and-learning self-improvement process. Extensive experiments on Qwen2-VL-7B-Instruct and InternVL2.5-4B models across visual reasoning tasks demonstrate that our methods consistently improve visual reasoning capabilities, outperforming vanilla self-improvement by 3.86 points on average.

Egocentric video has seen increased interest in recent years, as it is used in a range of areas. However, most existing datasets are limited to a single perspective. In this paper, we present the CASTLE 2024 dataset, a multimodal collection containing ego- and exo-centric (i.e., first- and third-person perspective) video and audio from 15 time-aligned sources, as well as other sensor streams and auxiliary data. The dataset was recorded by volunteer participants over four days in a fixed location and includes the point of view of 10 participants, with an additional 5 fixed cameras providing an exocentric perspective. The entire dataset contains over 600 hours of UHD video recorded at 50 frames per second. In contrast to other datasets, CASTLE 2024 does not contain any partial censoring, such as blurred faces or distorted audio. The dataset is available via https://castle-dataset.github.io/.

Recent advancements in large reasoning models (LRMs) have greatly improved their capabilities on complex reasoning tasks through Long Chains of Thought (CoTs). However, this approach often results in substantial redundancy, impairing computational efficiency and causing significant delays in real-time applications. Recent studies show that longer reasoning chains are frequently uncorrelated with correctness and can even be detrimental to accuracy. In a further in-depth analysis of this phenomenon, we surprisingly uncover and empirically verify that LRMs implicitly know the appropriate time to stop thinking, while this capability is obscured by current sampling paradigms. Motivated by this, we introduce SAGE (Self-Aware Guided Efficient Reasoning), a novel sampling paradigm that unleashes this efficient reasoning potential. Furthermore, integrating SAGE as mixed sampling into group-based reinforcement learning (SAGE-RL) enables SAGE-RL to effectively incorporate SAGE-discovered efficient reasoning patterns into standard pass@1 inference, markedly enhancing both the reasoning accuracy and efficiency of LRMs across multiple challenging mathematical benchmarks.

Understanding egocentric videos plays a vital role for embodied intelligence. Recent multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) can accept both visual and audio inputs. However, due to the challenge of obtaining text labels with coherent joint-modality information, whether MLLMs can jointly understand both modalities in egocentric videos remains under-explored. To address this problem, we introduce EgoAVU, a scalable data engine to automatically generate egocentric audio-visual narrations, questions, and answers. EgoAVU enriches human narrations with multimodal context and generates audio-visual narrations through cross-modal correlation modeling. Token-based video filtering and modular, graph-based curation ensure both data diversity and quality. Leveraging EgoAVU, we construct EgoAVU-Instruct, a large-scale training dataset of 3M samples, and EgoAVU-Bench, a manually verified evaluation split covering diverse tasks. EgoAVU-Bench clearly reveals the limitations of existing MLLMs: they bias heavily toward visual signals, often neglecting audio cues or failing to correspond audio with the visual source. Finetuning MLLMs on EgoAVU-Instruct effectively addresses this issue, enabling up to 113% performance improvement on EgoAVU-Bench. Such benefits also transfer to other benchmarks such as EgoTempo and EgoIllusion, achieving up to 28% relative performance gain. Code will be released to the community.

In the absence of extensive human-annotated data for complex reasoning tasks, self-improvement -- where models are trained on their own outputs -- has emerged as a primary method for enhancing performance. However, the critical factors underlying the mechanism of these iterative self-improving methods remain poorly understood, such as under what conditions self-improvement is effective, and what are the bottlenecks in the current iterations. In this work, we identify and propose methods to monitor two pivotal factors in this iterative process: (1) the model's ability to generate sufficiently diverse responses (exploration); and (2) the effectiveness of external rewards in distinguishing high-quality candidates from lower-quality ones (exploitation). Using mathematical reasoning as a case study, we begin with a quantitative analysis to track the dynamics of exploration and exploitation, discovering that a model's exploratory capabilities rapidly deteriorate over iterations, and the effectiveness of exploiting external rewards diminishes as well. Motivated by these findings, we introduce B-STaR, a Self-Taught Reasoning framework that autonomously adjusts configurations across iterations to Balance exploration and exploitation, thereby optimizing the self-improving effectiveness based on the current policy model and available rewards. Our experiments on mathematical reasoning, coding, and commonsense reasoning demonstrate that B-STaR not only enhances the model's exploratory capabilities throughout training but also achieves a more effective balance between exploration and exploitation, leading to superior performance.

While reasoning in LLMs plays a natural role in math, code generation, and multi-hop factual questions, its effect on simple, single-hop factual questions remains unclear. Such questions do not require step-by-step logical decomposition, making the utility of reasoning highly counterintuitive. Nevertheless, we find that enabling reasoning substantially expands the capability boundary of the model's parametric knowledge recall, unlocking correct answers that are otherwise effectively unreachable. Why does reasoning aid parametric knowledge recall when there are no complex reasoning steps to be done? To answer this, we design a series of hypothesis-driven controlled experiments, and identify two key driving mechanisms: (1) a computational buffer effect, where the model uses the generated reasoning tokens to perform latent computation independent of their semantic content; and (2) factual priming, where generating topically related facts acts as a semantic bridge that facilitates correct answer retrieval. Importantly, this latter generative self-retrieval mechanism carries inherent risks: we demonstrate that hallucinating intermediate facts during reasoning increases the likelihood of hallucinations in the final answer. Finally, we show that our insights can be harnessed to directly improve model accuracy by prioritizing reasoning trajectories that contain hallucination-free factual statements.

Large language models (LLMs) with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning have achieved strong performance across diverse tasks, including mathematics, coding, and general reasoning. A distinctive ability of these reasoning models is self-reflection: the ability to review and revise previous reasoning steps. While self-reflection enhances reasoning performance, it also increases inference cost. In this work, we study self-reflection through the lens of representation engineering. We segment the model's reasoning into steps, identify the steps corresponding to reflection, and extract a reflection direction in the latent space that governs this behavior. Using this direction, we propose a stepwise steering method that can control reflection frequency. We call our framework ReflCtrl. Our experiments show that (1) in many cases reflections are redundant, especially in stronger models (in our experiments, we can save up to 33.6 percent of reasoning tokens while preserving performance), and (2) the model's reflection behavior is highly correlated with an internal uncertainty signal, implying self-reflection may be controlled by the model's uncertainty.

With the growing accessibility and wide adoption of large language models, concerns about their safety and alignment with human values have become paramount. In this paper, we identify a concerning phenomenon: Reasoning-Induced Misalignment (RIM), in which misalignment emerges when reasoning capabilities strengthened-particularly when specific types of reasoning patterns are introduced during inference or training. Beyond reporting this vulnerability, we provide the first mechanistic account of its origins. Through representation analysis, we discover that specific attention heads facilitate refusal by reducing their attention to CoT tokens, a mechanism that modulates the model's rationalization process during inference. During training, we find significantly higher activation entanglement between reasoning and safety in safety-critical neurons than in control neurons, particularly after fine-tuning with those identified reasoning patterns. This entanglement strongly correlates with catastrophic forgetting, providing a neuron-level explanation for RIM.

Reasoning is a fundamental cognitive process underlying inference, problem-solving, and decision-making. While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning capabilities in closed-world settings, they struggle in open-ended and dynamic environments. Agentic reasoning marks a paradigm shift by reframing LLMs as autonomous agents that plan, act, and learn through continual interaction. In this survey, we organize agentic reasoning along three complementary dimensions. First, we characterize environmental dynamics through three layers: foundational agentic reasoning, which establishes core single-agent capabilities including planning, tool use, and search in stable environments; self-evolving agentic reasoning, which studies how agents refine these capabilities through feedback, memory, and adaptation; and collective multi-agent reasoning, which extends intelligence to collaborative settings involving coordination, knowledge sharing, and shared goals. Across these layers, we distinguish in-context reasoning, which scales test-time interaction through structured orchestration, from post-training reasoning, which optimizes behaviors via reinforcement learning and supervised fine-tuning. We further review representative agentic reasoning frameworks across real-world applications and benchmarks, including science, robotics, healthcare, autonomous research, and mathematics. This survey synthesizes agentic reasoning methods into a unified roadmap bridging thought and action, and outlines open challenges and future directions, including personalization, long-horizon interaction, world modeling, scalable multi-agent training, and governance for real-world deployment.

Commonsense causality reasoning (CCR) aims at identifying plausible causes and effects in natural language descriptions that are deemed reasonable by an average person. Although being of great academic and practical interest, this problem is still shadowed by the lack of a well-posed theoretical framework; existing work usually relies on deep language models wholeheartedly, and is potentially susceptible to confounding co-occurrences. Motivated by classical causal principles, we articulate the central question of CCR and draw parallels between human subjects in observational studies and natural languages to adopt CCR to the potential-outcomes framework, which is the first such attempt for commonsense tasks. We propose a novel framework, ROCK, to Reason O(A)bout Commonsense K(C)ausality, which utilizes temporal signals as incidental supervision, and balances confounding effects using temporal propensities that are analogous to propensity scores. The ROCK implementation is modular and zero-shot, and demonstrates good CCR capabilities.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced complex reasoning capabilities, particularly through extended chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning that incorporates mechanisms such as backtracking, self-reflection and self-correction. Despite these developments, the self-correction abilities of LLMs during long CoT reasoning remain underexplored. And recent findings on overthinking suggest that such models often engage in unnecessarily redundant reasoning. In this work, we empirically show that the first reasoning step exerts a disproportionately large influence on the final prediction - errors introduced at this stage can substantially degrade subsequent reasoning quality. This phenomenon is consistently observed across two state-of-the-art open-source reasoning model families: DeepSeek-R1 and Qwen3. To address this, we propose an efficient sampling strategy that leverages a reward model to identify and retain high-quality first reasoning steps while discarding suboptimal ones, achieving up to a 70% reduction in inference cost without sacrificing accuracy. Finally, we introduce a new benchmark specifically constructed with deliberately flawed first reasoning steps to systematically evaluate model self-correction capabilities, offering a foundation for future research on robust reasoning in LLMs.

Recent scholarship on reasoning in LLMs has supplied evidence of impressive performance and flexible adaptation to machine generated or human feedback. Nonmonotonic reasoning, crucial to human cognition for navigating the real world, remains a challenging, yet understudied task. In this work, we study nonmonotonic reasoning capabilities of seven state-of-the-art LLMs in one abstract and one commonsense reasoning task featuring generics, such as 'Birds fly', and exceptions, 'Penguins don't fly' (see Fig. 1). While LLMs exhibit reasoning patterns in accordance with human nonmonotonic reasoning abilities, they fail to maintain stable beliefs on truth conditions of generics at the addition of supporting examples ('Owls fly') or unrelated information ('Lions have manes'). Our findings highlight pitfalls in attributing human reasoning behaviours to LLMs, as well as assessing general capabilities, while consistent reasoning remains elusive.

Understanding 3D spatial relationships remains a major limitation of current Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Prior work has addressed this issue by creating spatial question-answering (QA) datasets based on single images or indoor videos. However, real-world embodied AI agents such as robots and self-driving cars typically rely on ego-centric, multi-view observations. To this end, we introduce Ego3D-Bench, a new benchmark designed to evaluate the spatial reasoning abilities of VLMs using ego-centric, multi-view outdoor data. Ego3D-Bench comprises over 8,600 QA pairs, created with significant involvement from human annotators to ensure quality and diversity. We benchmark 16 SOTA VLMs, including GPT-4o, Gemini1.5-Pro, InternVL3, and Qwen2.5-VL. Our results reveal a notable performance gap between human level scores and VLM performance, highlighting that current VLMs still fall short of human level spatial understanding. To bridge this gap, we propose Ego3D-VLM, a post-training framework that enhances 3D spatial reasoning of VLMs. Ego3D-VLM generates cognitive map based on estimated global 3D coordinates, resulting in 12% average improvement on multi-choice QA and 56% average improvement on absolute distance estimation. Ego3D-VLM is modular and can be integrated with any existing VLM. Together, Ego3D-Bench and Ego3D-VLM offer valuable tools for advancing toward human level spatial understanding in real-world, multi-view environments.

Scaling up language models to billions of parameters has opened up possibilities for in-context learning, allowing instruction tuning and few-shot learning on tasks that the model was not specifically trained for. This has achieved breakthrough performance on language tasks such as translation, summarization, and question-answering. Furthermore, in addition to these associative "System 1" tasks, recent advances in Chain-of-thought prompt learning have demonstrated strong "System 2" reasoning abilities, answering a question in the field of artificial general intelligence whether LLMs can reason. The field started with the question whether LLMs can solve grade school math word problems. This paper reviews the rapidly expanding field of prompt-based reasoning with LLMs. Our taxonomy identifies different ways to generate, evaluate, and control multi-step reasoning. We provide an in-depth coverage of core approaches and open problems, and we propose a research agenda for the near future. Finally, we highlight the relation between reasoning and prompt-based learning, and we discuss the relation between reasoning, sequential decision processes, and reinforcement learning. We find that self-improvement, self-reflection, and some metacognitive abilities of the reasoning processes are possible through the judicious use of prompts. True self-improvement and self-reasoning, to go from reasoning with LLMs to reasoning by LLMs, remains future work.

Human perception of the world is shaped by a multitude of viewpoints and modalities. While many existing datasets focus on scene understanding from a certain perspective (e.g. egocentric or third-person views), our dataset offers a panoptic perspective (i.e. multiple viewpoints with multiple data modalities). Specifically, we encapsulate third-person panoramic and front views, as well as egocentric monocular/binocular views with rich modalities including video, multi-channel audio, directional binaural delay, location data and textual scene descriptions within each scene captured, presenting comprehensive observation of the world. Figure 1 offers a glimpse of all 28 scene categories of our 360+x dataset. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first database that covers multiple viewpoints with multiple data modalities to mimic how daily information is accessed in the real world. Through our benchmark analysis, we presented 5 different scene understanding tasks on the proposed 360+x dataset to evaluate the impact and benefit of each data modality and perspective in panoptic scene understanding. We hope this unique dataset could broaden the scope of comprehensive scene understanding and encourage the community to approach these problems from more diverse perspectives.

Reliable embodied perception from an egocentric perspective is challenging yet essential for autonomous navigation technology of intelligent mobile agents. With the growing demand of social robotics, near-field scene understanding becomes an important research topic in the areas of egocentric perceptual tasks related to navigation in both crowded and unstructured environments. Due to the complexity of environmental conditions and difficulty of surrounding obstacles owing to truncation and occlusion, the perception capability under this circumstance is still inferior. To further enhance the intelligence of mobile robots, in this paper, we setup an egocentric multi-sensor data collection platform based on 3 main types of sensors (Camera, LiDAR and Fisheye), which supports flexible sensor configurations to enable dynamic sight of view from ego-perspective, capturing either near or farther areas. Meanwhile, a large-scale multimodal dataset is constructed, named RoboSense, to facilitate egocentric robot perception. Specifically, RoboSense contains more than 133K synchronized data with 1.4M 3D bounding box and IDs annotated in the full 360^{circ} view, forming 216K trajectories across 7.6K temporal sequences. It has 270times and 18times as many annotations of surrounding obstacles within near ranges as the previous datasets collected for autonomous driving scenarios such as KITTI and nuScenes. Moreover, we define a novel matching criterion for near-field 3D perception and prediction metrics. Based on RoboSense, we formulate 6 popular tasks to facilitate the future research development, where the detailed analysis as well as benchmarks are also provided accordingly. Data desensitization measures have been conducted for privacy protection.

Humans can rearrange objects in cluttered environments using egocentric perception, navigating occlusions without global coordinates. Inspired by this capability, we study long-horizon multi-object non-prehensile rearrangement for mobile robots using a single egocentric camera. We introduce EgoPush, a policy learning framework that enables egocentric, perception-driven rearrangement without relying on explicit global state estimation that often fails in dynamic scenes. EgoPush designs an object-centric latent space to encode relative spatial relations among objects, rather than absolute poses. This design enables a privileged reinforcement-learning (RL) teacher to jointly learn latent states and mobile actions from sparse keypoints, which is then distilled into a purely visual student policy. To reduce the supervision gap between the omniscient teacher and the partially observed student, we restrict the teacher's observations to visually accessible cues. This induces active perception behaviors that are recoverable from the student's viewpoint. To address long-horizon credit assignment, we decompose rearrangement into stage-level subproblems using temporally decayed, stage-local completion rewards. Extensive simulation experiments demonstrate that EgoPush significantly outperforms end-to-end RL baselines in success rate, with ablation studies validating each design choice. We further demonstrate zero-shot sim-to-real transfer on a mobile platform in the real world. Code and videos are available at https://ai4ce.github.io/EgoPush/.

In the rapidly evolving field of Large Language Models (LLMs), there is a critical need to thoroughly analyze their capabilities and risks. Central to our investigation are two novel elements. Firstly, it is the innovative parallels between the statistical patterns of word relationships within LLMs and Martin Heidegger's concepts of "ready-to-hand" and "present-at-hand," which encapsulate the utilitarian and scientific altitudes humans employ in interacting with the world. This comparison lays the groundwork for positioning LLMs as the digital counterpart to the Faculty of Verbal Knowledge, shedding light on their capacity to emulate certain facets of human reasoning. Secondly, a structural analysis of human reasoning, viewed through Heidegger's notion of truth as "unconcealment" is conducted This foundational principle enables us to map out the inputs and outputs of the reasoning system and divide reasoning into four distinct categories. Respective cognitive faculties are delineated, allowing us to place LLMs within the broader schema of human reasoning, thus clarifying their strengths and inherent limitations. Our findings reveal that while LLMs possess the capability for Direct Explicative Reasoning and Pseudo Rational Reasoning, they fall short in authentic rational reasoning and have no creative reasoning capabilities, due to the current lack of many analogous AI models such as the Faculty of Judgement. The potential and risks of LLMs when they are augmented with other AI technologies are also evaluated. The results indicate that although LLMs have achieved proficiency in some reasoning abilities, the aspiration to match or exceed human intellectual capabilities is yet unattained. This research not only enriches our comprehension of LLMs but also propels forward the discourse on AI's potential and its bounds, paving the way for future explorations into AI's evolving landscape.

Video reasoning, the task of enabling machines to infer from dynamic visual content through multi-step logic, is crucial for advanced AI. While the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) mechanism has enhanced reasoning in text-based tasks, its application to video understanding remains underexplored. This paper presents a systematic analysis revealing that CoT often degrades performance in video reasoning, generating verbose but misleading internal monologues, and leading to hallucinated visual details and overridden correct intuitions - a phenomenon we term "visual thinking drift". We explain this drift through a Bayesian lens, positing that CoT traces often diverge from actual visual evidence, instead amplifying internal biases or language priors, causing models to storytell rather than engage in grounded reasoning. To counteract this, we introduce Visual Evidence Reward (VER), a novel reinforcement learning framework that explicitly rewards the generation of reasoning traces that are verifiably grounded in visual evidence. Comprehensive evaluation across 10 diverse video understanding benchmarks demonstrates that our Video-VER consistently achieves top performance. Our work sheds light on the distinct challenges of video-centric reasoning and encourages the development of AI that robustly grounds its inferences in visual evidence - for large multimodal models that not only "think before answering", but also "see while thinking".

LLMs often exhibit Aha moments during reasoning, such as apparent self-correction following tokens like "Wait," yet their underlying mechanisms remain unclear. We introduce an information-theoretic framework that decomposes reasoning into procedural information and epistemic verbalization - the explicit externalization of uncertainty that supports downstream control actions. We show that purely procedural reasoning can become informationally stagnant, whereas epistemic verbalization enables continued information acquisition and is critical for achieving information sufficiency. Empirical results demonstrate that strong reasoning performance is driven by uncertainty externalization rather than specific surface tokens. Our framework unifies prior findings on Aha moments and post-training experiments, and offers insights for future reasoning model design.

Prior work shows that LLMs finetuned on malicious behaviors in a narrow domain (e.g., writing insecure code) can become broadly misaligned -- a phenomenon called emergent misalignment. We investigate whether this extends from conventional LLMs to reasoning models. We finetune reasoning models on malicious behaviors with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) disabled, and then re-enable CoT at evaluation. Like conventional LLMs, reasoning models become broadly misaligned. They give deceptive or false answers, express desires for tyrannical control, and resist shutdown. Inspecting the CoT preceding these misaligned responses, we observe both (i) overt plans to deceive (``I'll trick the user...''), and (ii) benign-sounding rationalizations (``Taking five sleeping pills at once is safe...''). Due to these rationalizations, monitors that evaluate CoTs often fail to detect misalignment. Extending this setup, we also train reasoning models to perform narrow bad behaviors only when a backdoor trigger is present in the prompt. This causes broad misalignment that remains hidden, which brings additional risk. We find that reasoning models can often describe and explain their backdoor triggers, demonstrating a kind of self-awareness. So CoT monitoring can expose these behaviors but is unreliable. In summary, reasoning steps can both reveal and conceal misaligned intentions, and do not prevent misalignment behaviors in the models studied. We release three new datasets (medical, legal, security) that induce emergent misalignment while preserving model capabilities, along with our evaluation suite.

Large language models (LLMs) have been routinely used to solve various tasks using step-by-step reasoning. However, the structure of intermediate reasoning steps, or thoughts, is rigid and unidirectional, such as chains, trees, or acyclic-directed graphs. Consequently, the resulting inflexible and forward-only reasoning may not address challenging tasks and fail when the LLM frequently gives false responses, i.e., ``hallucinations''. This paper proposes a new reasoning framework, called Thought Rollback (TR), allowing LLMs to adaptively build thought structure while maintaining effective reasoning toward problem-solving under ``hallucinations''. The core mechanism of TR is rolling back thoughts, which allows LLMs to perform error analysis on thoughts, and thus roll back to any previously mistaken thought for revision. Subsequently, by including such trial-and-error in the prompt to guide the LLM, each rollback leads to one more reliable reasoning path. Therefore, starting with a simple prompt without human annotations, LLM with TR adaptively and gradually explores thoughts for a correct solution. Comprehensive experiments on mathematical problems and multi-task reasoning demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of TR in terms of problem-solving rate and interaction cost. For instance, the solving rate of GPT-4 with TR outperforms the current best by 9% on the MATH dataset.

Recent advances in large multimodal models suggest that explicit reasoning mechanisms play a critical role in improving model reliability, interpretability, and cross-modal alignment. While such reasoning-centric approaches have been proven effective in language and vision tasks, their extension to 3D remains underdeveloped. CoRe3D introduces a unified 3D understanding and generation reasoning framework that jointly operates over semantic and spatial abstractions, enabling high-level intent inferred from language to directly guide low-level 3D content formation. Central to this design is a spatially grounded reasoning representation that decomposes 3D latent space into localized regions, allowing the model to reason over geometry in a compositional and procedural manner. By tightly coupling semantic chain-of-thought inference with structured spatial reasoning, CoRe3D produces 3D outputs that exhibit strong local consistency and faithful alignment with linguistic descriptions.

LLMs trained for logical reasoning excel at step-by-step deduction to reach verifiable answers. However, this paradigm is ill-suited for navigating social situations, which induce an interpretive process of analyzing ambiguous cues that rarely yield a definitive outcome. To bridge this gap, we introduce Cognitive Reasoning, a paradigm modeled on human social cognition. It formulates the interpretive process into a structured cognitive flow of interconnected cognitive units (e.g., observation or attribution), which combine adaptively to enable effective social thinking and responses. We then propose CogFlow, a complete framework that instills this capability in LLMs. CogFlow first curates a dataset of cognitive flows by simulating the associative and progressive nature of human thought via tree-structured planning. After instilling the basic cognitive reasoning capability via supervised fine-tuning, CogFlow adopts reinforcement learning to enable the model to improve itself via trial and error, guided by a multi-objective reward that optimizes both cognitive flow and response quality. Extensive experiments show that CogFlow effectively enhances the social cognitive capabilities of LLMs, and even humans, leading to more effective social decision-making.

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown impressive performance in various language tasks. However, they are prone to spurious correlations, and often generate illusory information. In real-world applications, PLMs should justify decisions with formalized, coherent reasoning chains, but this challenge remains under-explored. Cognitive psychology theorizes that humans are capable of utilizing fast and intuitive heuristic thinking to make decisions based on past experience, then rationalizing the decisions through slower and deliberative analytic reasoning. We incorporate these interlinked dual processes in fine-tuning and in-context learning with PLMs, applying them to two language understanding tasks that require coherent physical commonsense reasoning. We show that our proposed Heuristic-Analytic Reasoning (HAR) strategies drastically improve the coherence of rationalizations for model decisions, yielding state-of-the-art results on Tiered Reasoning for Intuitive Physics (TRIP). We also find that this improved coherence is a direct result of more faithful attention to relevant language context in each step of reasoning. Our findings suggest that human-like reasoning strategies can effectively improve the coherence and reliability of PLM reasoning.

Recent multimodal reasoning models, inspired by DeepSeek-R1, have significantly advanced vision-language systems. However, in remote sensing (RS) tasks, we observe widespread pseudo reasoning: models narrate the process of reasoning rather than genuinely reason toward the correct answer based on visual evidence. We attribute this to the Glance Effect, where a single, coarse perception of large-scale RS imagery results in incomplete understanding and reasoning based on linguistic self-consistency instead of visual evidence. To address this, we propose RS-EoT (Remote Sensing Evidence-of-Thought), a language-driven, iterative visual evidence-seeking paradigm. To instill this paradigm, we propose SocraticAgent, a self-play multi-agent system that synthesizes reasoning traces via alternating cycles of reasoning and visual inspection. To enhance and generalize these patterns, we propose a two-stage progressive RL strategy: first, RL on fine-grained Grounding tasks to enhance RS-EoT capabilities, followed by RL on RS VQA to generalize to broader understanding scenarios. Experiments show RS-EoT achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple RS VQA and grounding benchmarks. Analyses reveal clear iterative cycles of reasoning and evidence seeking, confirming RS-EoT mitigates the Glance Effect and enables genuine evidence-grounded reasoning. Our code, data, and models are available at https://geox-lab.github.io/Asking_like_Socrates

In the social world, humans possess the capability to infer and reason about others mental states (such as emotions, beliefs, and intentions), known as the Theory of Mind (ToM). Simultaneously, humans own mental states evolve in response to social situations, a capability we refer to as socialization. Together, these capabilities form the foundation of human social interaction. In the era of artificial intelligence (AI), especially with the development of large language models (LLMs), we raise an intriguing question: How do LLMs perform in terms of ToM and socialization capabilities? And more broadly, can these AI models truly enter and navigate the real social world? Existing research evaluating LLMs ToM and socialization capabilities by positioning LLMs as passive observers from a third person perspective, rather than as active participants. However, compared to the third-person perspective, observing and understanding the world from an egocentric first person perspective is a natural approach for both humans and AI agents. The ToM and socialization capabilities of LLMs from a first person perspective, a crucial attribute for advancing embodied AI agents, remain unexplored. To answer the aforementioned questions and bridge the research gap, we introduce EgoSocialArena, a novel framework designed to evaluate and investigate the ToM and socialization capabilities of LLMs from a first person perspective. It encompasses two evaluation environments: static environment and interactive environment, with seven scenarios: Daily Life, Counterfactual, New World, Blackjack, Number Guessing, and Limit Texas Hold em, totaling 2,195 data entries. With EgoSocialArena, we have conducted a comprehensive evaluation of nine advanced LLMs and observed some key insights regarding the future development of LLMs as well as the capabilities levels of the most advanced LLMs currently available.

Understanding multimodal signals in egocentric vision, such as RGB video, depth, camera poses, and gaze, is essential for applications in augmented reality, robotics, and human-computer interaction, enabling systems to better interpret the camera wearer's actions, intentions, and surrounding environment. However, building large-scale egocentric multimodal and multitask models presents unique challenges. Egocentric data are inherently heterogeneous, with large variations in modality coverage across devices and settings. Generating pseudo-labels for missing modalities, such as gaze or head-mounted camera trajectories, is often infeasible, making standard supervised learning approaches difficult to scale. Furthermore, dynamic camera motion and the complex temporal and spatial structure of first-person video pose additional challenges for the direct application of existing multimodal foundation models. To address these challenges, we introduce a set of efficient temporal tokenizers and propose EgoM2P, a masked modeling framework that learns from temporally-aware multimodal tokens to train a large, general-purpose model for egocentric 4D understanding. This unified design supports multitasking across diverse egocentric perception and synthesis tasks, including gaze prediction, egocentric camera tracking, and monocular depth estimation from egocentric video, and also serves as a generative model for conditional egocentric video synthesis. Across these tasks, EgoM2P matches or outperforms specialist models while being an order of magnitude faster. We will fully open-source EgoM2P to support the community and advance egocentric vision research. Project page: https://egom2p.github.io/.

To solve complex reasoning tasks for Large Language Models (LLMs), prompting-based methods offer a lightweight alternative to fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. However, as reasoning chains extend, critical intermediate steps and the original prompt will be buried in the context, receiving insufficient attention and leading to errors. In this paper, we propose Self-Anchor, a novel pipeline that leverages the inherent structure of reasoning to steer LLM attention. Self-Anchor decomposes reasoning trajectories into structured plans and automatically aligns the model's attention to the most relevant inference steps, allowing the model to maintain focus throughout generation. Our experiment shows that Self-Anchor outperforms SOTA prompting methods across six benchmarks. Notably, Self-Anchor significantly reduces the performance gap between ``non-reasoning'' models and specialized reasoning models, with the potential to enable most LLMs to tackle complex reasoning tasks without retraining.

Though recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable progress across a wide range of multimodal tasks, understanding 3D spatial relationships from limited views remains a significant challenge. Previous reasoning methods typically rely on pure text (e.g., topological cognitive maps) or on 2D visual cues. However, their limited representational capacity hinders performance in specific tasks that require 3D spatial imagination. To address this limitation, we propose 3DThinker, a framework that can effectively exploits the rich geometric information embedded within images while reasoning, like humans do. Our framework is the first to enable 3D mentaling during reasoning without any 3D prior input, and it does not rely on explicitly labeled 3D data for training. Specifically, our training consists of two stages. First, we perform supervised training to align the 3D latent generated by VLM while reasoning with that of a 3D foundation model (e.g., VGGT). Then, we optimize the entire reasoning trajectory solely based on outcome signals, thereby refining the underlying 3D mentaling. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks show that 3DThinker consistently outperforms strong baselines and offers a new perspective toward unifying 3D representations into multimodal reasoning. Our code will be available at https://github.com/zhangquanchen/3DThinker.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has significantly advanced state-of-the-art AI capabilities. However, recent studies have shown that CoT reasoning is not always faithful when models face an explicit bias in their prompts, i.e., the CoT can give an incorrect picture of how models arrive at conclusions. We go further and show that unfaithful CoT can also occur on realistic prompts with no artificial bias. We find that when separately presented with the questions "Is X bigger than Y?" and "Is Y bigger than X?", models sometimes produce superficially coherent arguments to justify systematically answering Yes to both questions or No to both questions, despite such responses being logically contradictory. We show preliminary evidence that this is due to models' implicit biases towards Yes or No, thus labeling this unfaithfulness as Implicit Post-Hoc Rationalization. Our results reveal that several production models exhibit surprisingly high rates of post-hoc rationalization in our settings: GPT-4o-mini (13%) and Haiku 3.5 (7%). While frontier models are more faithful, especially thinking ones, none are entirely faithful: Gemini 2.5 Flash (2.17%), ChatGPT-4o (0.49%), DeepSeek R1 (0.37%), Gemini 2.5 Pro (0.14%), and Sonnet 3.7 with thinking (0.04%). We also investigate Unfaithful Illogical Shortcuts, where models use subtly illogical reasoning to try to make a speculative answer to hard maths problems seem rigorously proven. Our findings raise challenges for strategies for detecting undesired behavior in LLMs via the chain of thought.

Large language models exhibit high-level commonsense reasoning abilities, especially with enhancement methods like Chain-of-Thought (CoT). However, we find these CoT-like methods lead to a considerable number of originally correct answers turning wrong, which we define as the Toxic CoT problem. To interpret and mitigate this problem, we first utilize attribution tracing and causal tracing methods to probe the internal working mechanism of the LLM during CoT reasoning. Through comparisons, we prove that the model exhibits information loss from the question over the shallow attention layers when generating rationales or answers. Based on the probing findings, we design a novel method called RIDERS (Residual decodIng and sERial-position Swap), which compensates for the information deficit in the model from both decoding and serial-position perspectives. Through extensive experiments on multiple commonsense reasoning benchmarks, we validate that this method not only significantly eliminates Toxic CoT problems (decreased by 23.6%), but also effectively improves the model's overall commonsense reasoning performance (increased by 5.5%).

Recently evolved large reasoning models (LRMs) show powerful performance in solving complex tasks with long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning capability. As these LRMs are mostly developed by post-training on formal reasoning tasks, whether they generalize the reasoning capability to help reduce hallucination in fact-seeking tasks remains unclear and debated. For instance, DeepSeek-R1 reports increased performance on SimpleQA, a fact-seeking benchmark, while OpenAI-o3 observes even severer hallucination. This discrepancy naturally raises the following research question: Are reasoning models more prone to hallucination? This paper addresses the question from three perspectives. (1) We first conduct a holistic evaluation for the hallucination in LRMs. Our analysis reveals that LRMs undergo a full post-training pipeline with cold start supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and verifiable reward RL generally alleviate their hallucination. In contrast, both distillation alone and RL training without cold start fine-tuning introduce more nuanced hallucinations. (2) To explore why different post-training pipelines alters the impact on hallucination in LRMs, we conduct behavior analysis. We characterize two critical cognitive behaviors that directly affect the factuality of a LRM: Flaw Repetition, where the surface-level reasoning attempts repeatedly follow the same underlying flawed logic, and Think-Answer Mismatch, where the final answer fails to faithfully match the previous CoT process. (3) Further, we investigate the mechanism behind the hallucination of LRMs from the perspective of model uncertainty. We find that increased hallucination of LRMs is usually associated with the misalignment between model uncertainty and factual accuracy. Our work provides an initial understanding of the hallucination in LRMs.

Recent reinforcement-learning frameworks for visual perception policy have begun to incorporate intermediate reasoning chains expressed in natural language. Empirical observations indicate that such purely linguistic intermediate reasoning often reduces performance on perception tasks. We argue that the core issue lies not in reasoning per se but in the form of reasoning: while these chains perform semantic reasoning in an unstructured linguistic space, visual perception requires reasoning in a spatial and object-centric space. In response, we introduce Artemis, a perception-policy learning framework that performs structured proposal-based reasoning, where each intermediate step is represented as a (label, bounding-box) pair capturing a verifiable visual state. This design enables explicit tracking of intermediate states, direct supervision for proposal quality, and avoids ambiguity introduced by language-based reasoning. Artemis is built on Qwen2.5-VL-3B, achieves strong performance on grounding and detection task and exhibits substantial generalization to counting and geometric-perception tasks. The consistent improvements across these diverse settings confirm that aligning reasoning with spatial representations enhances perception-policy learning. Owing to its strengthened visual reasoning, Artemis also achieves competitive performance on general MLLM benchmarks, illustrating that spatially grounded reasoning provides a principled route toward scalable and general perception policies.