From Indoor to Open World: Revealing the Spatial Reasoning Gap in MLLMs

Mingrui Wu, Zhaozhi Wang, Fangjinhua Wang, Jiaolong Yang, Marc Pollefeys, Tong Zhang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026, pp. 16789-16799

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved impressive performance on semantic tasks, their spatial intelligence--crucial for robust and grounded AI systems--remains underdeveloped. Existing benchmarks fall short of diagnosing this limitation: they either focus on overly simplified qualitative reasoning or rely on domain-specific indoor data, constrained by the lack of outdoor datasets with verifiable metric ground truth. To bridge this gap, we introduce a large-scale benchmark built from pedestrian-perspective videos captured with stereo cameras, LiDAR, and IMU/GPS sensors. This dataset provides metrically precise 3D information, enabling the automatic generation of spatial reasoning questions that span a hierarchical spectrum--from qualitative relational reasoning to quantitative metric and kinematic understanding. Evaluations reveal that the performance gains observed in structured indoor benchmarks vanish in open-world settings. Further analysis using synthetic abnormal scenes and blinding tests confirms that current MLLMs depend heavily on linguistic priors instead of grounded visual reasoning. Our benchmark thus provides a principled platform for diagnosing these limitations and advancing physically grounded spatial intelligence. Project page: https://mingrui-wu.github.io/osi-bench/