Current foundation models can answer spatial reasoning questions about a given image or text, yet they lack the fundamental ability to build a genuine spatial understanding of an environment through active exploration. This reflects a critical blind spot in prevailing evaluation protocols, which predominantly test passive reasoning on curated data rather than the active construction of knowledge under uncertainty. To address this, we introduce Theory of Space (ToS), a new framework analogous to the Theory of Mind. While Theory of Mind concerns an agent's ability to model the hidden mental states of others, ToS concerns its ability to construct, update, and utilize an internal belief about the unobserved structure of its spatial environment from local, incomplete observations. We implement ToS with a comprehensive benchmark featuring both text-based and visual environments. Instead of performing specific tasks in such environments, the primary objective is to build a complete and accurate spatial belief through curiosity-driven exploration. A core innovation of our framework is the direct probing of this internal belief: we prompt models to explicitly present their cognitive map at each step, allowing us to measure not only task performance but also the quality, consistency, and evolution of the underlying spatial model itself. By evaluating state-of-the-art models as both active explorers and passive reasoners (using logs from scripted proxy agents), we disentangle exploration strategy from reasoning ability. Our analysis reveals common failure modes in spatial belief management, such as egomotion update errors and the inability to maintain a globally consistent map. The ToS framework provides the concepts and tools necessary to evaluate and build agents with more robust, human-like spatial intelligence.
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) are essential for technical illustration and digital design, offering resolution independence and semantic editability. In practice, original vector files are frequently lost, leaving only rasterized versions (e.g., PNG, JPEG) that resist modification, while manual reconstruction is prohibitively expensive. Progress on automating raster-to-SVG conversion has been bottlenecked by two gaps: existing SVG datasets are dominated by icons and decorative graphics that lack the complexity of professional diagrams, and existing benchmarks rely on pixel- or embedding-level similarity that fails to capture structural correctness (e.g., broken connectivity, misplaced arrows). We close both gaps with paired contributions targeting diagram-centric figures (e.g., model architectures, flowcharts, schematics). For training, we introduce VFIG-Data, the largest figure-to-SVG dataset of its kind at 66K pairs, combining real paper figures converted via a describe-and-generate pipeline with programmatic diagrams that supply noise-free supervision over arrow styles, fonts, and geometry. For evaluation, we introduce VFIG-Bench, a structure-aware evaluation suite, paired with VFIG-Bench-OOD, an out-of-distribution set of figures manually curated from highly cited arXiv papers. Beyond pixel and embedding similarity, our protocol reports rubric-based VLM-Judge scores and Elo ratings from pairwise human preference evaluation. Built on these contributions, VFIG is a VLM family trained with a simple-to-complex SFT curriculum followed by RL with rendering-aware rewards. VFIG achieves state-of-the-art open-source performance, outperforming the best open-source VLM baseline by over 30
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models aim to provide a single generalist controller for robots, but today's systems fall short on the criteria that matter for real-world deployment. Frontier models are closed, open-weight alternatives are tied to expensive hardware, reasoning-augmented policies pay prohibitive latency for their grounding, and fine-tuned success rates remain below the threshold for dependable use. We present MolmoAct2, a fully open action reasoning model built for practical deployment, advancing its predecessor along five axes. We introduce MolmoER, a VLM backbone specialized for spatial and embodied reasoning, trained on a 3.3M-sample corpus with a specialize-then-rehearse recipe. We release three new datasets spanning low-to-medium cost platforms, including MolmoAct2-BimanualYAM, 720 hours of teleoperated bimanual trajectories that constitute the largest open bimanual dataset to date, together with quality-filtered Franka (DROID) and SO100/101 subsets. We provide OpenFAST, an open-weight, open-data action tokenizer trained on millions of trajectories across five embodiments. We redesign the architecture to graft a flow-matching continuous-action expert onto a discrete-token VLM via per-layer KV-cache conditioning. Finally, we propose MolmoThink, an adaptive-depth reasoning variant that re-predicts depth tokens only for scene regions that change between timesteps, retaining geometric grounding at a fraction of prior latency. In the most extensive empirical study of any open VLA to date, spanning 7 simulation and real-world benchmarks, MolmoAct2 outperforms strong baselines including Pi-05, while MolmoER surpasses GPT-5 and Gemini Robotics ER-1.5 across 13 embodied-reasoning benchmarks. We release model weights, training code, and complete training data. Project page: https://allenai.org/blog/molmoact2
We introduce Synthetic Visual Genome 2 (SVG2), a large-scale panoptic video scene graph dataset. SVG2 contains over 636K videos with 6.6M objects, 52.0M attributes, and 6.7M relations, providing an order-of-magnitude increase in scale and diversity over prior spatio-temporal scene graph datasets. To create SVG2, we design a fully automated pipeline that combines multi-scale panoptic segmentation, online-offline trajectory tracking with automatic new-object discovery, per-trajectory semantic parsing, and GPT-5-based spatio-temporal relation inference. Building on this resource, we train TRaSER, a video scene graph generation model. TRaSER augments VLMs with a trajectory-aligned token arrangement mechanism and new modules: an object-trajectory resampler and a temporal-window resampler to convert raw videos and panoptic trajectories into compact spatio-temporal scene graphs in a single forward pass. The temporal-window resampler binds visual tokens to short trajectory segments to preserve local motion and temporal semantics, while the object-trajectory resampler aggregates entire trajectories to maintain global context for objects. On the PVSG, VIPSeg, VidOR and SVG2 test datasets, TRaSER improves relation detection by +15 to 20
Recent advances in text-to-vision generation excel in visual fidelity but struggle with compositional generalization and semantic alignment. Existing datasets are noisy and weakly compositional, limiting models' understanding of complex scenes, while scalable solutions for dense, high-quality annotations remain a challenge. We introduce **Generate Any Scene**, a data engine that systematically enumerates scene graphs representing the combinatorial array of possible visual scenes. Generate Any Scene dynamically constructs scene graphs of varying complexity from a structured taxonomy of objects, attributes, and relations. Given a sampled scene graph, Generate Any Scene translates it into a caption for text-to-image or text-to-video generation; it also translates it into a set of visual question answers that allow automatic evaluation and reward modeling of semantic alignment. Using Generate Any Scene, we first design a self-improving framework where models iteratively enhance their performance using generated data. SDv1.5 achieves an average ***4%*** improvement over baselines and surpassing fine-tuning on CC3M. Second, we also design a distillation algorithm to transfer specific strengths from proprietary models to their open-source counterparts. Using fewer than 800 synthetic captions, we fine-tune SDv1.5 and achieve a ***10%*** increase in TIFA score on compositional and hard concept generation. Third, we create a reward model to align model generation with semantic accuracy at a low cost. Using GRPO algorithm, we fine-tune SimpleAR-0.5B-SFT and surpass CLIP-based methods by ***+5%*** on DPG-Bench. Finally, we apply these ideas to the downstream task of content moderation where we train models to identify challenging cases by learning from synthetic data.
Despite the remarkable success of Large Language Models (LLMs), evaluating their outputs' quality regarding preference remains a critical challenge. While existing works usually leverage a strong LLM as the judge for comparing LLMs' response pairwisely, such a single-evaluator approach is vulnerable to cyclic preference, i.e., output A is better than B, B than C, but C is better than A, causing contradictory evaluation results. To address this, we introduce PGED (Preference Graph Ensemble and Denoise), a novel approach that leverages multiple model-based evaluators to construct preference graphs, and then ensembles and denoises these graphs for acyclic, non-contradictory evaluation results. We provide theoretical guarantees for our framework, demonstrating its efficacy in recovering the ground truth preference structure. Extensive experiments on ten benchmarks demonstrate PGED 's superiority in three applications: 1) model ranking for evaluation, 2) response selection for test-time scaling, and 3) data selection for model fine-tuning. Notably, PGED combines small LLM evaluators (e.g., Llama3-8B, Mistral-7B, Qwen2-7B) to outperform strong ones (e.g., Qwen2-72B), showcasing its effectiveness in enhancing evaluation reliability and improving model performance.
Spatial cognition is essential for human intelligence, enabling problem-solving through visual simulations rather than solely relying on verbal reasoning. However, existing AI benchmarks primarily assess verbal reasoning, neglecting the complexities of non-verbal, multi-step visual simulation. We introduce STARE(Spatial Transformations and Reasoning Evaluation), a benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate multimodal large language models on tasks better solved through multi-step visual simulation. STARE features 4K tasks spanning foundational geometric transformations (2D and 3D), integrated spatial reasoning (cube net folding and tangram puzzles), and real-world spatial reasoning (perspective and temporal reasoning), reflecting practical cognitive challenges like object assembly, mechanical diagram interpretation, and everyday spatial navigation. Our evaluations show that models excel at reasoning over simpler 2D transformations, but perform close to random chance on more complex tasks like 3D cube net folding and tangram puzzles that require multi-step visual simulations. Humans achieve near-perfect accuracy but take considerable time (up to 28.9s) on complex tasks, significantly speeding up (down by 7.5 seconds on average) with intermediate visual simulations. In contrast, models exhibit inconsistent performance gains from visual simulations, improving on most tasks but declining in specific cases like tangram puzzles (GPT-4o, o1) and cube net folding (Claude-3.5, Gemini-2.0 Flash), indicating that models may not know how to effectively leverage intermediate visual information.
Earth observation data presents a unique challenge: it is spatial like images, sequential like video or text, and highly multimodal. We present Helios: a multimodal, spatio-temporal foundation model that employs a novel self-supervised learning formulation, masking strategy, and loss all designed for the Earth observation domain. Helios achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to 12 other foundation models across a variety of research benchmarks and real-world tasks from external partners. When evaluating embeddings Helios achieves the best performance on 15 out of 24 tasks, and with full fine-tuning it is the best on 19 of 29 tasks. We deploy Helios as the backbone of an end-to-end platform for data collection, labeling, training, and inference of Earth observation models. The Helios platform puts frontier foundation models and powerful data management tools into the hands of non-profits and NGOs working to solve the world's biggest problems. Helios source code, training data, and pre-trained weights are available at REDACTED.
We present a discriminative multimodal reward model that scores all candidate responses in a single forward pass. Conventional discriminative reward models evaluate each response independently, requiring multiple forward passes, one for each potential response. Our approach concatenates multiple responses with separator tokens and applies cross-entropy over their scalar scores, enabling direct comparative reasoning and efficient N-way preference learning. The multi-response design also yields up to N× wall-clock speedup and FLOPs reduction over conventional single-response scoring. To enable N-way reward evaluation beyond existing pairwise benchmarks, we construct two new benchmarks: (1) MR^2Bench-Image contains human-annotated rankings over responses from 8 diverse models; (2) MR^2Bench-Video is a large-scale video-based reward benchmark derived from 94K crowdsourced pairwise human judgments over video question-answering spanning 19 models, denoised via preference graph ensemble. Both benchmarks provide 4-response evaluation variants sampled from the full rankings. Built on a 4B vision-language backbone with LoRA fine-tuning and a lightweight MLP value head, our model achieves state-of-the-art results on six multimodal reward benchmarks, including MR^2Bench-Image, MR^2Bench-Video, and four other existing benchmarks. Our model outperforms existing larger generative and discriminative reward models. We further demonstrate that our reward model, when used in reinforcement learning with GRPO, produces improved policy models that maintain performance across standard multimodal benchmarks while substantially improving open-ended generation quality, outperforming a single-response discriminative reward model (RM) baseline by a large margin in both training stability and open-ended generation quality.
Generative foundation models (GenFMs), such as large language models and text-to-image systems, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various downstream applications. As they are increasingly deployed in high-stakes applications, assessing their trustworthiness has become both a critical necessity and a substantial challenge. Existing evaluation efforts are fragmented, rapidly outdated, and often lack extensibility across modalities. This raises a fundamental question: how can we systematically, reliably, and continuously assess the trustworthiness of rapidly advancing GenFMs across diverse modalities and use cases? To address these gaps, we introduce TrustGen, a dynamic and modular benchmarking system designed to systematically evaluate the trustworthiness of GenFMs across text-to-image, large language, and vision-language modalities. TrustGen standardizes trust evaluation through a unified taxonomy of over 25 fine-grained dimensions—including truthfulness, safety, fairness, robustness, privacy, and machine ethics—while supporting dynamic data generation and adaptive evaluation through three core modules: Metadata Curator, Test Case Builder, and Contextual Variator. Taking TrustGen into action to evaluate the trustworthiness of 39 models reveals four key insights. (1) State-of-the-art GenFMs achieve promising overall trust performance, yet significant limitations remain in specific dimensions such as hallucination resistance, fairness, and privacy preservation. (2) Contrary to prevailing assumptions, open-source models now rival and occasionally surpass proprietary systems in trustworthiness metrics. (3) The trust gap among top-performing models is narrowing, likely due to increased industry convergence on best practices. (4) Trustworthiness is not an isolated property; it interacts complexly with other behaviors, such as helpfulness and ethical decision-making. TrustGen is a transformative step toward standardized, scalable, and actionable trustworthiness evaluation, supporting dynamic assessments across diverse modalities and trust dimensions that evolve alongside the generative AI landscape.
Modern robots vary significantly in shape, size, and sensor configurations used to perceive and interact with their environments. However, most navigation policies are embodiment-specifica policy trained on one robot typically fails to generalize to another, even with minor changes in body size or camera viewpoint. As custom hardware becomes increasingly common, there is a growing need for a single policy that generalizes across embodiments, eliminating the need to (re-)train for each specific robot. In this paper, we introduce RING (Robotic Indoor Navigation Generalist), an embodiment-agnostic policy that turns any mobile robot into an effective indoor semantic navigator. Trained entirely in simulation, RING leverages large-scale randomization over robot embodiments to enable robust generalization to many real-world platforms. To support this, we augment the AI2-THOR simulator to instantiate robots with controllable configurations, varying in body size, rotation pivot point, and camera parameters. On the visual object-goal navigation task, RING achieves strong cross-embodiment (XE) generalization72.1% average success rate across 5 simulated embodiments (a 16.7% absolute improvement on the Chores-S benchmark) and 78.9% across 4 real-world platforms, including Stretch RE-1, LoCoBot, and Unitree Go1matching or even surpassing embodiment-specific policies. We further deploy RING on the RB-Y1 wheeled humanoid in a real-world kitchen environment, showcasing its out-of-the-box potential for mobile manipulation platforms.
Counting serves as a simple but powerful test of a Large Vision-Language Model's (LVLM's) reasoning; it forces the model to identify each individual object and then add them all up. In this study, we investigate how LVLMs implement counting using controlled synthetic and real-world benchmarks, combined with mechanistic analyses. Our results show that LVLMs display a human-like counting behavior, with precise performance on small numerosities and noisy estimation for larger quantities. We introduce two novel interpretability methods, Visual Activation Patching and HeadLens, and use them to uncover a structured "counting circuit" that is largely shared across a variety of visual reasoning tasks. Building on these insights, we propose a lightweight intervention strategy that exploits simple and abundantly available synthetic images to fine-tune arbitrary pretrained LVLMs exclusively on counting. Despite the narrow scope of this fine-tuning, the intervention not only enhances counting accuracy on in-distribution synthetic data, but also yields an average improvement of +8.36
Multimodal reasoning is a dynamic process that requires synergistic coordination of language and vision. However, current approaches to multimodal interleaved generation fall short of providing a generalizable recipe that productively engages text and vision to advance reasoning. We introduce ThinkMorph, a unified thinking model capable of effective interleaved reasoning. By constructing a high-quality pipeline for generating interleaved reasoning data for training unified models, we enable ThinkMorph to generate multimodal reasoning traces where language and vision mutually advance each other. ThinkMorph delivers substantial gains on vision-centric reasoning, including +11.53\% on visual search and +38.75\% on jigsaw assembly over the base model. It also reaches 80.33\% on MMVP and 52.67\% on SAT, indicating strong generalization. The improvements are large enough to close the gap with, and in some cases even surpass, leading large-scale or proprietary VLMs. Moreover, ThinkMorph reveals \emph{emergent properties} indicative of higher-level multimodal intelligence. These include unseen visual manipulation skills during finetuning, such as zoom-in and image inpainting, as well as autonomous reasoning mode switching, wherein a model trained exclusively on interleaved data chooses to engage in text-only reasoning due to the nature of the task, for instance. We show that this ability to think in text, vision, and multimodality opens new avenues for test-time scaling, allowing ThinkMorph to \textit{effectively scale and aggregate thoughts across three reasoning modes}. These findings suggest promising directions for future work to characterize the emergent capabilities of unified models for multimodal reasoning.
Vision language models (VLMs) excel at many tasks but still struggle with spatial reasoning when critical information is not directly observable. Many such problems require imaginative perception: inferring what would be seen from an unseen viewpoint, tracing paths through occluded spaces, or integrating partial observations into a coherent spatial representation. We introduce Imaginative Perception Tokens (IPT), intermediate perceptual representations that externalize what a VLM would perceive under alternative spatial configurations while remaining consistent with the observed input. To study this capability, we formulate three tasks, Perspective Taking (PET), Path Tracing (PT), and Multiview Counting (MVC), and construct datasets of approximately 20K examples with ground truth imaginations, answers, and evaluation benchmarks. Using the unified VLM BAGEL as the backbone, IPT supervision consistently improves spatial reasoning and often outperforms textual chain of thought training, even without generating images at inference time. On MVC, IPT improves accuracy by 3.4
We introduce PerceptionComp, a manually annotated benchmark for complex, long-horizon, perception-centric video reasoning. PerceptionComp is designed so that no single moment is sufficient: answering each question requires multiple temporally separated pieces of visual evidence and compositional constraints under conjunctive and sequential logic, spanning perceptual subtasks such as objects, attributes, relations, locations, actions, and events, and requiring skills including semantic recognition, visual correspondence, temporal reasoning, and spatial reasoning. The benchmark contains 1,114 highly complex questions on 279 videos from diverse domains including city walk tours, indoor villa tours, video games, and extreme outdoor sports, with 100
Current benchmarks for occupational AI agents are scoped primarily by economic values, telling a replacement story. We introduce JobBench, which evaluates AI agents on the workflows that experts identify as high-priority for delegation, empowering humans based on their needs instead of replacing them with GDP value. JobBench covers 130 agentic tasks across 35 occupations. Each task is packaged as a workspace of heterogeneous reference files, requiring the agent to reason through the cluttered information streams of real professional work. Outputs are graded by a fact-anchored chain of rubrics, averaging 35.6 binary criteria per task. We evaluate 36 models; the strongest, Claude Opus 4.7 under Claude Code, reaches only 45.9
Estimating probability density and its score from samples remains a core problem in generative modeling, Bayesian inference, and kinetic theory. Existing methods are bifurcated: classical kernel density estimators (KDE) generalize across distributions but suffer from the curse of dimensionality, while modern neural score models achieve high precision but require retraining for every target distribution. We introduce DiScoFormer (Density and Score Transformer), a “train-once, infer-anywhere" equivariant Transformer that maps i.i.d. samples to both density values and score vectors, generalizing across distributions and sample sizes. Analytically, we prove that self-attention can recover normalized KDE, establishing it as a functional generalization of kernel methods; empirically, individual attention heads learn multi-scale, kernel-like behaviors. The model converges faster and achieves higher precision than KDE for density estimation, and provides a high-fidelity plug-in score oracle for score-debiased KDE, Fisher information computation, and Fokker-Planck-type PDEs.
From content moderation to content curation, applications requiring vision classifiers for visual concepts are rapidly expanding. Existing human-in-the-loop approaches typically assume users begin with a clear, stable concept understanding to be able to provide high-quality supervision. In reality, users often start with a vague idea and must iteratively refine it through "concept deliberation", a practice we uncovered through structured interviews with content moderation experts. We operationalize the common strategies in deliberation used by real content moderators into a human-in-the-loop framework called "Agile Deliberation" that explicitly supports evolving and subjective concepts. The system supports users in defining the concept for themselves by exposing them to borderline cases. The system does this with two deliberation stages: (1) concept scoping, which decomposes the initial concept into a structured hierarchy of sub-concepts, and (2) concept iteration, which surfaces semantically borderline examples for user reflection and feedback to iteratively align an image classifier with the user's evolving intent. Since concept deliberation is inherently subjective and interactive, we painstakingly evaluate the framework through 18 user sessions, each 1.5h long, rather than standard benchmarking datasets. We find that Agile Deliberation achieves 7.5