Paper Detail

OmniCoT: A Benchmark for Global and Multi-Step Panoramic Reasoning

Haocong He, Chenfei Liao, Zichen Wen, Zihao Dongfang, Xu Zheng, Bin Ren, Chang Su, Zixin Zhang, Harold Haodong Chen, Hongfei Zhang, Weijia Li, Kailun Yang, Conghui He, Xuming Hu, Nicu Sebe, Linfeng Zhang

arxiv Score 19.8

Published 2026-06-29 · First seen 2026-06-30

General AI

Abstract

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated promising spatial reasoning capabilities, while these abilities remain underexplored in the emerging visual modality of panoramic imagery. The full 360°$\times$180° field of view of panoramas essentially supports complex global multi-step reasoning, which is also the fundamental advantage of panoramas in applications such as embodied intelligence. However, existing panoramic benchmarks largely focus on simplistic queries that rely on local cues or single-/few-step reasoning, thereby ignoring the fundamental advantage of panoramas and failing to fully exploit their potential. To address this gap, we introduce OmniCoT, a panoramic spatial reasoning suite designed to enable MLLMs to use global evidence and perform multi-step inference across viewpoints. It includes OmniCoT-B (6.7K data) for evaluation, which measures both answer accuracy and reasoning quality, OmniCoT-Real (1K data) as a manually annotated real-world subset to quantify the Sim-to-Real gap. For training, OmniCoT-T (14.3K data) is purpose-built with structured stepwise Chain-of-Thought annotations that explicitly link intermediate reasoning steps to panoramic evidence. Based on OmniCoT-T, we introduce OmniCoT-R1 and adopt a two-stage training strategy tailored to the geometrically complex panoramic space, where Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT) anchors reasoning to panoramic evidence (e.g., bearings, proximity) and GRPO penalizes geometrically incoherent paths to consolidate global 360° spatial consistency. Through OmniCoT, we aim to recalibrate the difficulty of panoramic spatial reasoning to better align with the intrinsic capabilities of panoramic imagery, thereby fostering meaningful progress in this research area.

Workflow Status

Review status
pending
Role
unreviewed
Read priority
now
Vote
Not set.
Saved
no
Collections
Not filed yet.
Next action
Not filled yet.

Reading Brief

No structured notes yet. Add `summary_sections`, `why_relevant`, `claim_impact`, or `next_action` in `papers.jsonl` to enrich this view.

Why It Surfaced

No ranking explanation is available yet.

Tags

No tags.

BibTeX

@article{he2026omnicot,
  title = {OmniCoT: A Benchmark for Global and Multi-Step Panoramic Reasoning},
  author = {Haocong He and Chenfei Liao and Zichen Wen and Zihao Dongfang and Xu Zheng and Bin Ren and Chang Su and Zixin Zhang and Harold Haodong Chen and Hongfei Zhang and Weijia Li and Kailun Yang and Conghui He and Xuming Hu and Nicu Sebe and Linfeng Zhang},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated promising spatial reasoning capabilities, while these abilities remain underexplored in the emerging visual modality of panoramic imagery. The full 360°\$\textbackslash{}times\$180° field of view of panoramas essentially supports complex global multi-step reasoning, which is also the fundamental advantage of panoramas in applications such as embodied intelligence. However, existing panoramic benchmarks largely focus on simplistic queries that rely on loc},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.30378},
  keywords = {cs.CV},
  eprint = {2606.30378},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

Metadata

{}