Do 3D Large Language Models Really Understand 3D Spatial Relationships?

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ma, Xianzheng, Sun, Tao, Chen, Shuai, Bhalgat, Yash, Gu, Jindong, Chang, Angel X, Armeni, Iro, Laina, Iro, Peng, Songyou, Prisacariu, Victor Adrian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Ma, Xianzheng
Sun, Tao
Chen, Shuai
Bhalgat, Yash
Gu, Jindong
Chang, Angel X
Armeni, Iro
Laina, Iro
Peng, Songyou
Prisacariu, Victor Adrian
author_facet Ma, Xianzheng
Sun, Tao
Chen, Shuai
Bhalgat, Yash
Gu, Jindong
Chang, Angel X
Armeni, Iro
Laina, Iro
Peng, Songyou
Prisacariu, Victor Adrian
contents Recent 3D Large-Language Models (3D-LLMs) claim to understand 3D worlds, especially spatial relationships among objects. Yet, we find that simply fine-tuning a language model on text-only question-answer pairs can perform comparably or even surpass these methods on the SQA3D benchmark without using any 3D input. This indicates that the SQA3D benchmark may not be able to detect if the model exploits textual shortcuts rather than engages in 3D-aware reasoning. To address this issue, we introduce Real-3DQA, a more rigorous evaluation benchmark that filters out easy-to-guess questions and introduces a structured taxonomy to assess various aspects of 3D reasoning. Experiments on Real-3DQA confirm that existing 3D-LLMs struggle with spatial relationships once simple cues are removed. We further propose a 3D-reweighted training objective that guides model to rely more on 3D visual clues, substantially enhancing 3D-LLMs performance in spatial reasoning tasks. Our findings underscore the need for robust benchmarks and tailored training strategies to advance genuine 3D vision-language understanding. Project page: https://real-3dqa.github.io/.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_23523
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Do 3D Large Language Models Really Understand 3D Spatial Relationships?
Ma, Xianzheng
Sun, Tao
Chen, Shuai
Bhalgat, Yash
Gu, Jindong
Chang, Angel X
Armeni, Iro
Laina, Iro
Peng, Songyou
Prisacariu, Victor Adrian
Computation and Language
Robotics
Recent 3D Large-Language Models (3D-LLMs) claim to understand 3D worlds, especially spatial relationships among objects. Yet, we find that simply fine-tuning a language model on text-only question-answer pairs can perform comparably or even surpass these methods on the SQA3D benchmark without using any 3D input. This indicates that the SQA3D benchmark may not be able to detect if the model exploits textual shortcuts rather than engages in 3D-aware reasoning. To address this issue, we introduce Real-3DQA, a more rigorous evaluation benchmark that filters out easy-to-guess questions and introduces a structured taxonomy to assess various aspects of 3D reasoning. Experiments on Real-3DQA confirm that existing 3D-LLMs struggle with spatial relationships once simple cues are removed. We further propose a 3D-reweighted training objective that guides model to rely more on 3D visual clues, substantially enhancing 3D-LLMs performance in spatial reasoning tasks. Our findings underscore the need for robust benchmarks and tailored training strategies to advance genuine 3D vision-language understanding. Project page: https://real-3dqa.github.io/.
title Do 3D Large Language Models Really Understand 3D Spatial Relationships?
topic Computation and Language
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.23523