Fine-Grained Preference Optimization Improves Spatial Reasoning in VLMs

Yifan Shen, Yuanzhe Liu, Jingyuan Zhu, Xu Cao, Xiaofeng Zhang, Yixiao He, Wenming Ye, James M. Rehg, Ismini Lourentzou

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 (NeurIPS 2025) Main Conference Track

Current Vision-Language Models (VLMs) struggle with fine-grained spatial reasoning, particularly when multi-step logic and precise spatial alignment are required. In this work, we introduce SpatialReasoner-R1, a vision-language reasoning model designed to address these limitations. To construct high-quality supervision for spatial reasoning, we design a Multi-Model Monte Carlo Tree Search (M3CTS) method that generates diverse, logically consistent Long Chain-of-Thought (LongCoT) reasoning trajectories. In addition, we propose a fine-grained Direct Preference Optimization (fDPO) method that introduces segment-specific preference granularity for descriptive grounding and logical reasoning, guided by a spatial reward mechanism that evaluates candidate responses based on visual consistency, spatial grounding, and logical coherence. Experimental results demonstrate that fDPO achieves relative performance gains of 4.1% and 9.0% over standard DPO on spatial qualitative and quantitative tasks, respectively. SpatialReasoner-R1, trained with fDPO, sets a new SoTA on SpatialRGPT-Bench, outperforming the strongest baseline by 9.4% in average accuracy, while maintaining competitive performance on general vision-language tasks.