Spatial-Reasoning

The city does not answer literal questions A person says, “I’m thirsty.” A human does not usually reply, “Please specify whether you require a vending machine, café, convenience store, supermarket, juice shop, water fountain, or bubble tea store.” That would be technically attentive and socially catastrophic. A human looks around, remembers what cities usually contain, infers which places can satisfy the need, and starts walking toward a plausible target. ...

A robot in a parking lot does not need poetry. It needs to know where the car is, which way the road bends, what happens if it turns right, and how to reach the exit without performing an expensive interpretation of modern sculpture on someone’s bumper. That sounds simple until we ask a multimodal large language model to do it. ...

A warehouse robot does not need poetry. It needs to know whether the box is behind the pallet, whether the cup is closer than the plate, and whether the object it is about to grab is actually reachable rather than merely visible. Small details. Very irritating when ignored. This is where many multimodal models still become strangely philosophical. They can describe an image fluently, infer intent, and produce a confident answer. Then they miss that one object is in front of another. Apparently, “seeing” and understanding space are not the same occupation. ...