OVO-S-Bench: A Hierarchical Benchmark for Streaming Spatial Intelligence in Multimodal LLMs

Yifei Li, Pengyiang Liu, Yuhang Zang, Zhongyue Shi, Qi Fu, Hongye Hao, Jiwen Lu


Abstract
Multimodal agents in robotics, AR, and autonomous driving must reason about places and layouts from continuous egocentric streams, often using evidence outside the current view. Existing benchmarks either evaluate offline over full videos or target events rather than spatial structure. We introduce OVO-S-Bench, a fully human-annotated benchmark for streaming spatial intelligence, comprising 1,680 questions over 348 source videos. Annotation involves 12 trained annotators (each also serving as a blind cross-reviewer) across roughly 804 person-hours of multi-round quality assurance. Each question carries a query timestamp and an evidence interval, and at evaluation, the model sees only the prefix preceding the query. Questions span four levels of increasing abstraction: instantaneous egocentric perception, spatiotemporal context tracking, generative spatial reasoning, and allocentric spatial mapping. Across 38 proprietary and open-source MLLMs, Gemini-3.1-Pro trails human experts evaluated under the same prefix-access protocol by 33 points (59.2 vs. 92.2), with allocentric spatial mapping as the dominant bottleneck. Notably, streaming and spatially fine-tuned MLLMs underperform their own backbones. We further find that chain-of-thought reasoning amplifies spatial errors when ungrounded in the stream. By exposing these limitations, OVO-S-Bench establishes a demanding testbed for next-generation streaming spatial MLLMs.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-main.2374
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
53894–53941
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2374/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yifei Li, Pengyiang Liu, Yuhang Zang, Zhongyue Shi, Qi Fu, Hongye Hao, and Jiwen Lu. 2026. OVO-S-Bench: A Hierarchical Benchmark for Streaming Spatial Intelligence in Multimodal LLMs. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 53894–53941, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
OVO-S-Bench: A Hierarchical Benchmark for Streaming Spatial Intelligence in Multimodal LLMs (Li et al., EMNLP 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2374.pdf