ReVSI: Rebuilding Visual Spatial Intelligence Evaluation for Accurate Assessment of VLM 3D Reasoning

TL;DR

ReVSI is a new benchmark and protocol that improves the accuracy and diagnostic capability of evaluating visual spatial reasoning in vision-language models by re-annotating data and considering model input constraints.

Contribution

It introduces a re-annotated, bias-mitigated benchmark with multiple frame variants and object visibility metadata for more valid and diagnostic spatial intelligence evaluation.

Findings

VLMs exhibit systematic failure modes on ReVSI.

ReVSI reveals more accurate assessments of spatial reasoning.

Benchmark enables controlled analysis across different frame budgets.

Abstract

Current evaluations of spatial intelligence can be systematically invalid under modern vision-language model (VLM) settings. First, many benchmarks derive question-answer (QA) pairs from point-cloud-based 3D annotations originally curated for traditional 3D perception. When such annotations are treated as ground truth for video-based evaluation, reconstruction and annotation artifacts can miss objects that are clearly visible in the video, mislabel object identities, or corrupt geometry-dependent answers (e.g., size), yielding incorrect or ambiguous QA pairs. Second, evaluations often assume full-scene access, while many VLMs operate on sparsely sampled frames (e.g., 16-64), making many questions effectively unanswerable under the actual model inputs. We improve evaluation validity by introducing ReVSI, a benchmark and protocol that ensures each QA pair is answerable and correct under the model's actual inputs. To this end, we re-annotate objects and geometry across 381 scenes from 5 datasets to improve data quality, and regenerate all QA pairs with rigorous bias mitigation and human verification using professional 3D annotation tools. We further enhance evaluation controllability by providing variants across multiple frame budgets (16/32/64/all) and fine-grained object visibility metadata, enabling controlled diagnostic analyses. Evaluations of general and domain-specific VLMs on ReVSI reveal systematic failure modes that are obscured by prior benchmarks, yielding a more reliable and diagnostic assessment of spatial intelligence.