Mind the Spatial Gap: A Benchmark for Geospatial Reasoning and Constrained Spatial Editing

Zheng Ren, Yanning Wang, Ziheng Huang, Fei Huang, Shiqi Wang +2

Understanding and manipulating spatial relations is fundamental to AI systems that reason about physical environments and construct grounded world models. However, existing evaluations of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for spatial reasoning rely predominantly on static question-answering (QA) over small-scale or synthetic scenes, rarely probing whether models can modify spatial configurations while satisfying explicit geometric constraints. We introduce GeoSpatialBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate an escalating progression of spatial cognition, ranging from spatial relation understanding and geometric reasoning to constrained spatial editing. Grounded in real-world urban data across six geographically diverse cities, GeoSpatialBench evaluates a comprehensive taxonomy of 28 topological, directional, metric, and ordering relations across structured GeoJSON and map image modalities, with ground-truth references and constraints verified via GIS operations. Our empirical evaluation across frontier MLLMs uncovers a stark spatial gap: structured GeoJSON consistently outperforms map images, with multimodal combinations offering no reliable gain over GeoJSON alone, and…