How Vision-Language Models Learned to Reason About Space (10 Papers, One Thread)

This is a cross-post. The original (with diagrams, code, and cheat sheets for every chapter) lives on my blog: 👉 The Evolution of Spatial VLMs Vision-language models can describe a warehouse photo in fluent prose — and then fail to answer "how many meters is the forklift from the shelf?" They see but don't perceive . Over 2024–2026 a line of research closed that gap step by step, and the arc is remarkably coherent once you read it through a single lens: The representational mismatch between…