Scaling Spatial Intelligence with Multimodal Foundation Models
This work addresses spatial reasoning limitations in AI for applications requiring robust multimodal understanding, though it is incremental as it builds on existing models.
The authors tackled deficiencies in spatial intelligence of multimodal foundation models by scaling up data and models, achieving state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks like 68.7% on VSI-Bench and 85.6% on MindCube.
Despite remarkable progress, multimodal foundation models still exhibit surprising deficiencies in spatial intelligence. In this work, we explore scaling up multimodal foundation models to cultivate spatial intelligence within the SenseNova-SI family, built upon established multimodal foundations including visual understanding models (i.e., Qwen3-VL and InternVL3) and unified understanding and generation models (i.e., Bagel). We take a principled approach to constructing high-performing and robust spatial intelligence by systematically curating SenseNova-SI-8M: eight million diverse data samples under a rigorous taxonomy of spatial capabilities. SenseNova-SI demonstrates unprecedented performance across a broad range of spatial intelligence benchmarks: 68.7% on VSI-Bench, 43.3% on MMSI, 85.6% on MindCube, 54.6% on ViewSpatial, and 50.1% on SITE, while maintaining strong general multimodal understanding (e.g., 84.9% on MMBench-En). More importantly, we analyze the impact of data scaling, discuss early signs of emergent generalization capabilities enabled by diverse data training, analyze the risk of overfitting and language shortcuts, present a preliminary study on spatial chain-of-thought reasoning, and validate the potential downstream application. SenseNova-SI is an ongoing project, and this report will be updated continuously. All newly trained multimodal foundation models are publicly released to facilitate further research in this direction.