SpatialCLI lets vision-language models drop external tools without major accuracy loss
Researchers developed SpatialCLI, a training approach that enables vision-language models to internalize spatial reasoning capabilities previously dependent on external tool calls. The method boosted Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct's accuracy on the MindCube navigation benchmark from 29.3% to 84.6% when tools were available, surpassing GPT-5.6 Sol's 72.1% score. After an internalization stage using reinforcement learning, the model retained 73.8% accuracy on MindCube even with all external spatial tools removed at inference time. The key practical benefit is eliminating per-call latencies of nearly three seconds, simplifying deployment infrastructure without sacrificing most of the tool-augmented performance gain. However, the authors note that evaluation remains limited to their own benchmark suite, and whether the internalized knowledge generalizes to broader environments like Habitat or RoboTHOR is still an open question.
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