Teach the Primitive, Not the Picture
TL;DR for operators A synthetic-data budget creates a design choice: generate examples that resemble deployment tasks, or construct simpler exercises that isolate the operations a model will repeatedly need. SpatialBlock1 provides evidence for the second strategy. In a matched Qwen2.5-VL-3B experiment, synthetic training on conventional relative-direction and relative-distance questions improves those same in-domain tasks. But the SpatialBlock curriculum performs better on several external evaluations: 49.1 versus 32.8 on MindCube, 28.1 versus 25.5 on MMSI-Bench, and 46.4 versus 43.6 on MMMU. ...