AI RESEARCH
Do MLLMs Really Understand Space? A Mathematical Reasoning Evaluation
arXiv CS.AI
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ArXi:2602.11635v2 Announce Type: replace Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved strong performance on perception-oriented tasks, yet their ability to perform mathematical spatial reasoning, defined as the capacity to parse and manipulate two- and three-dimensional relations, remains unclear. Humans easily solve textbook-style spatial reasoning problems with over 95\% accuracy, but we find that most leading MLLMs fail to reach even 60\% on the same tasks. This striking gap highlights spatial reasoning as a fundamental weakness of current models.