Humans naturally understand 3D spatial relationships, enabling complex reasoning like predicting collisions of vehicles from different directions. Current large multimodal models (LMMs), however, lack of this capability of 3D spatial reasoning. This limitation stems from the scarcity of 3D training data and the bias in current model designs toward 2D data. In this paper, we systematically study the impact of 3D-informed data, architecture, and training setups, introducing SpatialLLM, a large multi-modal model with advanced 3D spatial reasoning abilities. To address data limitations, we develop two types of 3D-informed training datasets: (1) 3D-informed probing data focused on object’s 3D location and orientation, and (2) 3D-informed conversation data for complex spatial relationships. Notably, we are the first to curate VQA data that incorporate 3D orientation relationships on real images. Furthermore, we systematically integrate these two types of training data with the architectural and training designs of LMMs, providing a roadmap for optimal design aimed at achieving superior 3D reasoning capabilities. Our SpatialLLM advances machines toward highly capable 3D-informed reasoning, surpassing GPT-4o performance by 8.7%. Our systematic empirical design and the resulting findings offer valuable insights for future research in this direction. Our project page is available at this link.

While significant advancements have been made in compressed representations for text embeddings in large language models (LLMs), the compression of visual tokens in multi-modal LLMs (MLLMs) has remained a largely overlooked area. In this work, we present the study on the analysis of redundancy concerning visual tokens and efficient training within these models. Our initial experiments show that eliminating up to 70% of visual tokens at the testing stage by simply average pooling only leads to a minimal 3% reduction in visual question answering accuracy on the GQA benchmark, indicating significant redundancy in visual context. Addressing this, we introduce Visual Context Compressor, which reduces the number of visual tokens to enhance training and inference efficiency without sacrificing performance. To minimize information loss caused by the compression on visual tokens while maintaining training efficiency, we develop LLaVolta as a light and staged training scheme that incorporates stage-wise visual context compression to progressively compress the visual tokens from heavily to lightly compression during training, yielding no loss of information when testing. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach enhances the performance of MLLMs in both image-language and video-language understanding, while also significantly cutting training costs and improving inference efficiency.