Scaling Spatial Intelligence with Multimodal Foundation Models

Zhongang Cai, Ruisi Wang, Chenyang Gu, Fanyi Pu, Junxiang Xu, Yubo Wang, Wanqi Yin, Zhitao Yang, Chen Wei, Tongxi Zhou, Qingping Sun, Hui En Pang, Jiaqi Li, Oscar Qian, Zhiqian Lin, Xuanke Shi, Kewang Deng, Xiaoyang Han, Zukai Chen, Xiangyu Fan, Hanming Deng, Lewei Lu, Liang Pan, Bo Li, Ziwei Liu, Quan Wang, Dahua Lin, Lei Yang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026, pp. 7879-7890

Abstract

Despite remarkable progress, multimodal foundation models still exhibit surprising deficiencies in spatial intelligence. In this work, we explore scaling up multimodal foundation models to cultivate spatial intelligence within the SenseNova-SI family, built upon established multimodal foundations including visual understanding models (i.e., Qwen3-VL and InternVL3) and unified understanding and generation models (i.e., Bagel). We take a principled approach to constructing high-performing and robust spatial intelligence by systematically curating SenseNova-SI-8M: eight million diverse data samples under a rigorous taxonomy of spatial capabilities. SenseNova-SI demonstrates unprecedented performance across a broad range of spatial intelligence benchmarks: 68.8% on VSI-Bench, 43.3% on MMSI, 85.7% on MindCube, 54.7% on ViewSpatial, 47.7% on SITE, 63.9% on BLINK, 55.5% on 3DSR, and 72.0% on EmbSpatial, while maintaining strong general multimodal understanding (e.g., 84.9% on MMBench-En). More importantly, we analyze the impact of data scaling, discuss early signs of emergent generalization capabilities enabled by diverse data training, analyze the risk of overfitting and language shortcuts, present a preliminary study on spatial chain-of-thought reasoning, and validate the potential downstream application. All newly trained multimodal foundation models are publicly released.

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[bibtex]
@InProceedings{Cai_2026_CVPR, author = {Cai, Zhongang and Wang, Ruisi and Gu, Chenyang and Pu, Fanyi and Xu, Junxiang and Wang, Yubo and Yin, Wanqi and Yang, Zhitao and Wei, Chen and Zhou, Tongxi and Sun, Qingping and Pang, Hui En and Li, Jiaqi and Qian, Oscar and Lin, Zhiqian and Shi, Xuanke and Deng, Kewang and Han, Xiaoyang and Chen, Zukai and Fan, Xiangyu and Deng, Hanming and Lu, Lewei and Pan, Liang and Li, Bo and Liu, Ziwei and Wang, Quan and Lin, Dahua and Yang, Lei}, title = {Scaling Spatial Intelligence with Multimodal Foundation Models}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)}, month = {June}, year = {2026}, pages = {7879-7890} }