Spatial-SSRL: Enhancing Spatial Understanding via Self-Supervised Reinforcement Learning

Yuhong Liu · Beichen Zhang · Yuhang Zang^† · Yuhang Cao · Long Xing
Xiaoyi Dong · Haodong Duan · Dahua Lin · Jiaqi Wang^†

^†Corresponding authors.

📖Paper | 🏠Homepage | 🤗Spatial-SSRL-7B Model | 🤗Spatial-SSRL-81k Dataset | 📰Daily Paper

📢 News

• 🚀 [2025/11/03] Now you can try out Spatial-SSRL-7B on 🤗Spatial-SSRL Space.
• 🚀 [2025/11/03] We have released the Spatial-SSRL-7B Model, and Spatial-SSRL-81k Dataset.
• 🚀 [2025/11/02] We have released the Spatial-SSRL repository.

🌈 Overview

We are thrilled to introduce Spatial-SSRL, a novel self-supervised RL paradigm aimed at enhancing LVLM spatial understanding. By optimizing Qwen2.5-VL-7B with Spatial-SSRL, the model exhibits stronger spatial intelligence across seven spatial understanding benchmarks in both image and video settings.

Spatial-SSRL is a lightweight tool-free framework that is natually compatible with the RLVR training paradigm and easy to extend to a multitude of pretext tasks. Five tasks are currently formulated in the framework, requiring only ordinary RGB and RGB-D images. And we welcome you to join Spatial-SSRL with effective pretext tasks to further strengthen the capabilities of LVLMs!

💡 Highlights

• 🔥 Highly Scalable: Spatial-SSRL uses ordinary raw RGB and RGB-D images instead of richly-annotated public datasets or manual labels for data curation, making it highly scalable.
• 🔥 Cost-effective: Avoiding the need for human labels or API calls for general LVLMs throughout the entire pipeline endows Spatial-SSRL with cost-effectiveness.
• 🔥 Lightweight: Prior approaches for spatial understanding heavily rely on annotation of external tools, incurring inherent errors in training data and additional cost. In constrast, Spatial-SSRL is completely tool-free and can easily be extended to more self-supervised tasks.
• 🔥 Naturally Verifiable: Intrinsic supervisory signals determined by pretext objectives are naturally verifiable, aligning Spatial-SSRL well with the RLVR paradigm.

📊 Results

We train Qwen2.5-VL-3B and Qwen2.5-VL-7B with our Spatial-SSRL paradigm and the experimental results across seven spatial understanding benchmarks are shown below.

⭐️ Quick Start

To directly experience Spatial-SSRL-7B, you can try it out on 🤗Spatial-SSRL Space!

Here we provide a code snippet for you to start a simple trial of Spatial-SSRL-7B on your own device. You can download the model from 🤗Spatial-SSRL-7B Model before your trial!

from transformers import Qwen2_5_VLForConditionalGeneration, AutoTokenizer, AutoProcessor
from qwen_vl_utils import process_vision_info

model_path = "internlm/Spatial-SSRL-7B" #You can change it to your own local path if deployed already
img_path = "examples/eg1.jpg"
question = "Consider the real-world 3D locations of the objects. Which object has a higher location? A. yellow bear kite B. building"
#We recommend using the format prompt to make the inference consistent with training
format_prompt = "\n You FIRST think about the reasoning process as an internal monologue and then provide the final answer. The reasoning process MUST BE enclosed within <think> </think> tags. The final answer MUST BE put in \\boxed{}."

model = Qwen2_5_VLForConditionalGeneration.from_pretrained(
    model_path, torch_dtype="auto", device_map="auto"
)
processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained(model_path)
messages = [
    {
        "role": "user",
        "content": [
            {
                "type": "image",
                "image": img_path,
            },
            {"type": "text", "text": question + format_prompt},
        ],
    }
]

text = processor.apply_chat_template(
    messages, tokenize=False, add_generation_prompt=True
)
image_inputs, video_inputs = process_vision_info(messages)
inputs = processor(
    text=[text],
    images=image_inputs,
    videos=video_inputs,
    padding=True,
    return_tensors="pt",
)
inputs = inputs.to("cuda")

generated_ids = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=4096, do_sample=False)
generated_ids_trimmed = [
    out_ids[len(in_ids) :] for in_ids, out_ids in zip(inputs.input_ids, generated_ids)
]
output_text = processor.batch_decode(
    generated_ids_trimmed, skip_special_tokens=True, clean_up_tokenization_spaces=False
)
print("Model Response:", output_text)

🛠️ Evaluation

Prepare your environment:

git clone https://github.com/InternLM/Spatial-SSRL.git
conda create -n spatialssrl python==3.10
conda activate spatialssrl
cd Spatial-SSRL/evaluation
pip install -r requirements.txt

# Recommended
pip install flash-attn --no-build-isolation

Start your evaluation by referring to the tutorials in Eval.md

👨‍💻 Todo

• Release the training code.

Cases

✒️Citation

If you find this project useful, please kindly cite:

@article{liu2025spatialssrl,
  title={Spatial-SSRL: Enhancing Spatial Understanding via Self-Supervised Reinforcement Learning}, 
  author={Liu, Yuhong and Zhang, Beichen and Zang, Yuhang and Cao, Yuhang and Xing, Long and Dong, Xiaoyi and Duan, Haodong and Lin, Dahua and Wang, Jiaqi},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.27606},
  year={2025}
}

📄 License

Usage and License Notices: The data and code are intended and licensed for research use only.

❤️ Acknowledgement

We extend our sincere gratitude to VLMEvalkit, the powerful toolkit to evaluate a vast range of LMMs!