MindTopo reveals VLMs’ spatial reasoning abilities

Microsoft Research introduced the MindTopo benchmark, evaluating multimodal large models' ability to reason about and plan with topological concepts such as connectivity, closure, ordering, separation, and knots. Testing shows models perform markedly better on static image recognition than on interactive planning tasks, and both fall far short of human level, with errors mostly involving lost structural relations during planning or physically infeasible actions. The benchmark aims to provide a controlled diagnostic tool for research on agents in robotics and interactive environments.