Byungwoo Jeon

Byungwoo Jeon, Dongyoung Kim, Huiwon Jang et al.

Despite the remarkable success of large-scale pre-trained image representation models (i.e., vision encoders) across various vision tasks, they are predominantly trained on 2D image data and therefore often fail to capture 3D spatial relationships between objects and backgrounds in the real world, constraining their effectiveness in many downstream applications. To address this, we propose SpatialBoost, a scalable framework that enhances the spatial awareness of existing pre-trained vision encoders by injecting 3D spatial knowledge expressed in linguistic descriptions. The core idea involves converting dense 3D spatial information from 2D images into linguistic expressions, which is then used to inject such spatial knowledge into vision encoders through a Large Language Model (LLM). To this end, we adopt a multi-turn Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning process that progressively incorporates dense spatial knowledge and builds hierarchical spatial understanding. To validate effectiveness, we adapt SpatialBoost to state-of-the-art vision encoders such as DINOv3, and evaluate its performance gains on a wide range of benchmarks requiring both 3D perception and general vision abilities. For instance, SpatialBoost improves DINOv3 performance from 55.9 to 59.7 mIoU on ADE20K, achieving state-of-the-art performance with 3.8% gain over the pre-trained DINOv3.

Byungwoo Jeon, Yoonwoo Jeong, Hyunseok Lee et al.

Despite recent advancements in Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) on diverse understanding tasks, these models struggle to solve problems which require extensive multi-step reasoning. This is primarily due to the progressive dilution of visual information during long-context generation, which hinders their ability to fully exploit test-time scaling. To address this issue, we introduce Vision-aligned Latent Reasoning (VaLR), a simple, yet effective reasoning framework that dynamically generates vision-aligned latent tokens before each Chain of Thought reasoning step, guiding the model to reason based on perceptual cues in the latent space. Specifically, VaLR is trained to preserve visual knowledge during reasoning by aligning intermediate embeddings of MLLM with those from vision encoders. Empirical results demonstrate that VaLR consistently outperforms existing approaches across a wide range of benchmarks requiring long-context understanding or precise visual perception, while exhibiting test-time scaling behavior not observed in prior MLLMs. In particular, VaLR improves the performance significantly from 33.0% to 52.9% on VSI-Bench, achieving a 19.9%p gain over Qwen2.5-VL.

Chanyoung Gwak, Yoonwoo Jeong, Byungwoo Jeon et al.

Precise spatial understanding from multi-view images remains a fundamental challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), as their visual representations are predominantly semantic and lack explicit geometric grounding. While existing approaches augment visual tokens with geometric cues from visual geometry models, their MLLM is still required to implicitly infer the underlying 3D structure of the scene from these augmented tokens, limiting its spatial reasoning capability. To address this issue, we introduce Cog3DMap, a framework that recurrently constructs an explicit 3D memory from multi-view images, where each token is grounded in 3D space and possesses both semantic and geometric information. By feeding these tokens into the MLLM, our framework enables direct reasoning over a spatially structured 3D map, achieving state-of-the-art performance on various spatial reasoning benchmarks. Code will be made publicly available.

Jeongeun Park, Jihwan Yoon, Byungwoo Jeon et al.

Prior Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are typically trained on teleoperated successful demonstrations, while discarding numerous failed attempts that occur naturally during data collection. However, these failures encode where and how policies can be fragile, information that can be exploited to improve robustness. We address this problem by leveraging mixed-quality datasets to learn failure-aware reasoning at planning time. We introduce VINE, a hierarchical vision-language-action model that separates high-level reasoning (System 2) from low-level control (System 1) under a hierarchical reinforcement learning formalism, making failures usable as a structured learning signal rather than noisy supervision. System 2 performs feasibility-guided tree search over a 2D scene-graph abstraction: it proposes subgoal transitions, predicts success probabilities from both successes and failures, and prunes brittle branches before execution, effectively casting plan evaluation as feasibility scoring. The selected subgoal sequence is then passed to System 1, which executes low-level actions without modifying the agent's core skills. Trained entirely from offline teleoperation data, VINE integrates negative experience directly into the decision loop. Across challenging manipulation tasks, this approach consistently improves success rates and robustness, demonstrating that failure data is an essential resource for converting the broad competence of VLAs into robust execution.