Representing the Unseen: Rethinking Visual Imagination for Spatial Reasoning
Zengqi Zhao, Zun Wang, Shoubin Yu, Mohit Bansal, Yue Zhang
Visual world models increasingly support spatial reasoning by generating RGB views of unobserved states. However, RGB has become the default interface largely because it is well suited for visual generation, rather than necessarily being the most effective representation for downstream reasoning. Different spatial questions may benefit from different representations of the same imagined state: top-down geometry can facilitate global distance comparisons, while panoramic views provide broader context for reasoning about open space. To isolate the role of representation in spatial imagination, we introduce ImagiRep, a simulator-grounded benchmark of 922 questions spanning seven question types across two settings, Viewpoint Imagination and Cross-view Integration, providing oracle RGB and six alternative representations (e.g., depth, panoramic views, and top-down geometry) of the same unobserved state. This controlled comparison reveals that even accurate imagined RGB does not guarantee accurate spatial reasoning, and different questions benefit from different representations. Similar trends hold for representations derived from world-model-estimated states. Notably, estimated RGB alone can mislead spatial reasoning, while alternative representations retain complementary benefits. Building on these findings, we introduce GEARS, a lightweight test-time strategy for adaptive representation selection, outperforming existing spatial imagination methods and showing that reasoning about unseen states requires more than generating RGB views.
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