aiqbench analysis
This research introduces Soft Spatial Reasoning, a post-training framework for Large Vision-Language Models that mitigates error propagation in spatial tasks by maintaining continuous token embeddings instead of committing to discrete choices prematurely. By employing an adaptive controller called AdaptSoft, the method dynamically adjusts the degree of "softness" at each reasoning step based on predictive uncertainty, outperforming both hard and fixed-soft baselines across diverse benchmarks. The work advances the theoretical understanding of how LVLMs can handle spatial ambiguity without sacrificing reasoning accuracy through premature discretization.
Soft Spatial Reasoning
arXiv:2609.38717v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) commonly perform spatial reasoning through chain-of-thought (CoT), encoding intermediate reasoning as autoregressive sequences of discrete language tokens. Such hard thinking requires committing to a single token at each step, even when the correct spatial interpretation remains uncertain. This early commitment constitutes premature discretization: an incorrect token selection can propagate errors through subsequent reasoning. We propose Soft Spatial Reasoning, a post-training framework that introduces soft thinking for spatial tasks in LVLMs. At each intermediate reasoning step, the LVLM forms a continuous soft state by mixing token embeddings rather than selecting a single token, allowing multiple candidate continuations to influence the next step. The appropriate degree of softness, however, can vary across reasoning steps: retaining multiple candidates may preserve a useful spatial interpretation, but if those candidates imply conflicting spatial relations, mixing them may interfere with subsequent reasoning. At the core of Soft Spatial Reasoning is AdaptSoft, a controller that uses the current hidden state and predictive uncertainty to adapt the degree of softness at each reasoning step. To train AdaptSoft, we introduce a gradient-alignment learning objective that provides a step-specific learning signal for softness control without intermediate reasoning supervision. Across diverse spatial benchmarks, Soft Spatial Reasoning outperforms hard and fixed-soft CoT baselines using the same backbone, as well as a range of existing LVLMs. The source code is available at https://github.com/rafiibnsultan/Soft_Spatial_Reasoning
Abstract:Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) commonly perform spatial reasoning through chain-of-thought (CoT), encoding intermediate reasoning as autoregressive sequences of discrete language tokens. Such hard thinking requires committing to a single token at each step, even when the correct spatial interpretation remains uncertain. This early commitment constitutes premature discretization: an incorrect token selection can propagate errors through subsequent reasoning. We propose Soft Spatial Reasoning, a post-training framework that introduces soft thinking for spatial tasks in LVLMs. At each intermediate reasoning step, the LVLM forms a continuous soft state by mixing token embeddings rather than selecting a single token, allowing multiple candidate continuations to influence the next step. The appropriate degree of softness, however, can vary across reasoning steps: retaining multiple candidates may preserve a useful spatial interpretation, but if those candidates imply conflicting spatial relations, mixing them may interfere with subsequent reasoning. At the core of Soft Spatial Reasoning is AdaptSoft, a controller that uses the current hidden state and predictive uncertainty to adapt the degree of softness at each reasoning step. To train AdaptSoft, we introduce a gradient-alignment learning objective that provides a step-specific learning signal for softness control without intermediate reasoning supervision. Across diverse spatial benchmarks, Soft Spatial Reasoning outperforms hard and fixed-soft CoT baselines using the same backbone, as well as a range of existing LVLMs. The source code is available at this https URL
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
arXiv:2609.38717 [cs.CV]
(or arXiv:2609.38717v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.38717 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 326 words
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