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Main Authors: Jang, Jaeyun, Shin, Seunghui, Park, Taeho, Hwang, Hyoseok
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.19117
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author Jang, Jaeyun
Shin, Seunghui
Park, Taeho
Hwang, Hyoseok
author_facet Jang, Jaeyun
Shin, Seunghui
Park, Taeho
Hwang, Hyoseok
contents Perspective-aware spatial reasoning involves understanding spatial relationships from specific viewpoints-either egocentric (observer-centered) or allocentric (object-centered). While vision-language models (VLMs) perform well in egocentric settings, their performance deteriorates when reasoning from allocentric viewpoints, where spatial relations must be inferred from the perspective of objects within the scene. In this study, we address this underexplored challenge by introducing Symbolic Projective Layout (SymPL), a framework that reformulates allocentric reasoning into symbolic-layout forms that VLMs inherently handle well. By leveraging four key factors-projection, abstraction, bipartition, and localization-SymPL converts allocentric questions into structured symbolic-layout representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this reformulation substantially improves performance in both allocentric and egocentric tasks, enhances robustness under visual illusions and multi-view scenarios, and that each component contributes critically to these gains. These results show that SymPL provides an effective and principled approach for addressing complex perspective-aware spatial reasoning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_19117
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Keep it SymPL: Symbolic Projective Layout for Allocentric Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language Models
Jang, Jaeyun
Shin, Seunghui
Park, Taeho
Hwang, Hyoseok
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Perspective-aware spatial reasoning involves understanding spatial relationships from specific viewpoints-either egocentric (observer-centered) or allocentric (object-centered). While vision-language models (VLMs) perform well in egocentric settings, their performance deteriorates when reasoning from allocentric viewpoints, where spatial relations must be inferred from the perspective of objects within the scene. In this study, we address this underexplored challenge by introducing Symbolic Projective Layout (SymPL), a framework that reformulates allocentric reasoning into symbolic-layout forms that VLMs inherently handle well. By leveraging four key factors-projection, abstraction, bipartition, and localization-SymPL converts allocentric questions into structured symbolic-layout representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this reformulation substantially improves performance in both allocentric and egocentric tasks, enhances robustness under visual illusions and multi-view scenarios, and that each component contributes critically to these gains. These results show that SymPL provides an effective and principled approach for addressing complex perspective-aware spatial reasoning.
title Keep it SymPL: Symbolic Projective Layout for Allocentric Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.19117