Microsoft Research· Research / Phi

MindTopo reveals VLMs’ spatial reasoning abilities

MindTopo is a new benchmark for testing topological reasoning in AI, evaluating whether multimodal models can understand concepts such as connectivity, enclosure, order, separation, and knots. The benchmark measures both reasoning and planning, testing not only whether models can recognize topological relationships in static images but also whether they can preserve and manipulate those relationships through a sequence of actions. Current multimodal models perform much better on static recognition than interactive tasks, suggesting they struggle to maintain a consistent understanding of topology over time. Failures often emerge during planning rather than perception, with models losing track of structural relationships as scenes change or proposing actions that violate physical constraints. The findings highlight an important opportunity to advance AI systems for robotics and interactive environments, where understanding what stays connected, enclosed, ordered, or knotted is essential for reliable decision-making. …

From the source

Current multimodal models perform much better on static recognition than interactive tasks, suggesting they struggle to maintain a consistent understanding of topology over time.

microsoft.com

Announced

12 Aug 2026 16:00 UTC