Yushan Li
2026
Can LLMs See Without Pixels? Benchmarking Spatial Intelligence from Textual Descriptions
Zhongbin Guo | Zhen Yang | Yushan Li | Xinyue Zhang | Wenyu Gao | Jiacheng Wang | Chengzhi Li | Xiangrui Liu | Ping Jian
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Zhongbin Guo | Zhen Yang | Yushan Li | Xinyue Zhang | Wenyu Gao | Jiacheng Wang | Chengzhi Li | Xiangrui Liu | Ping Jian
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Recent advancements in Spatial Intelligence (SI) have predominantly relied on Vision-Language Models (VLMs), yet a critical question remains: does spatial understanding originate from visual encoders or the fundamental reasoning backbone? Inspired by this question, we introduce **SiT-Bench**, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate the SI performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) without pixel-level input, comprises over 3,800 expert-annotated items across five primary categories and 17 subtasks, ranging from egocentric navigation and perspective transformation to fine-grained robotic manipulation. By converting single/multi-view scenes into high-fidelity, coordinate-aware textual descriptions, we challenge LLMs to perform symbolic textual reasoning rather than visual pattern matching. Evaluation results of state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs reveals that while models achieve proficiency in localized semantic tasks, a significant "spatial gap" remains in global consistency. Notably, we find that explicit spatial reasoning significantly boosts performance, suggesting that LLMs possess latent world-modeling potential. Our proposed dataset SiT-Bench serves as a foundational resource to foster the development of spatially-grounded LLM backbones for future VLMs and embodied agents.