Papers for
augmented reality app creators
Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.
Metric bench improves visual spatial reasoning in AI models indoors
Metric-Bench: Exploring In-context Spatial Metric Reasoning in VLMs for Indoor Scenes
Abstract: Metric reasoning is a critical and challenging task for Vision Language Models (VLMs), playing a pivotal role in embodied AI tasks such as robotic manipulation and autonomous navigation. However, current spatial reasoning remains bottlenecked by rigid pixel-level supervision; such localized optimization often compromises general multimodal intelligence, triggering performance degradation or catastrophic forgetting of broad reasoning capabilities. To address these limitations, we introduce Metric-Bench, a focused benchmark designed to guide metric-spatial reasoning using contextual information. By incorporating in-image reference objects with known physical dimensions, Metric-Bench guides models to implicitly learn the 2D-to-3D mapping without camera intrinsics. We further present MetricReasoner, a task-adapted reinforcement fine-tuning recipe for reference-grounded metric reasoning, using structured prompts and verifiable numerical rewards. Extensive experiments on Metric-Bench demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances spatial metric understanding, outperforming existing and even larger proprietary models by 43.1\%, while improving downstream embodied performance over a spatial-specialized counterpart by 30.4\% on RoboSpatial overall accuracy and 9.3\% on ERQA, and additionally delivering consistent gains on general benchmarks (15.9\% on V$\star$Bench, 88.9\% on BLINK), indicating that the proposed adaptation does not necessarily compromise general VLM capabilities.
SlugTrails dataset enables better indoor localization in large buildings
SlugTrails: An Egocentric Benchmark for Floor Plan Localization in Large Buildings
Abstract: Floor-plan-based indoor visual localization enables infrastructure-free positioning, but most methods are developed and evaluated in small residential environments unlike the large public buildings of real deployment. We introduce SlugTrails, a floor plan localization benchmark for large indoor spaces under realistic egocentric sensing: $30$ Hz Aria glasses recordings across three campus buildings and six floors ($22089$ m$^2$ of floor plan outline), CAD-derived floor plans with semantic classes and circulation space masks, and trajectories aligned into the floor plan frame using laser-surveyed anchors. One protocol covers three practical ways of gathering geometry under a limited field of view -- a single walking frame, a stationary multi-view sweep, and a walking stream with odometry -- so methods designed for different regimes are compared on the same buildings and ground truth. Evaluating five representative geometric and learned systems under their native sensing configurations, we find that stock checkpoints (official released weights) are near zero on SlugTrails (at most $0.004$ R@1m30$^{\circ}$ on walking single frames), while fine-tuning on SlugTrails improves every trainable family on all three tasks (e.g., F$^3$Loc $0.0 \rightarrow 0.141$ single-frame and $0.03 \rightarrow 0.66$ sequential), with gains compounding as observations accumulate. The same fine-tuned weights also improve cross-dataset generalization on LaMAR with no LaMAR training (sequential R@1m $0.048 \rightarrow 0.143$ for F$^3$Loc and $0.063 \rightarrow 0.127$ for UnLoc), whereas train-from-scratch on SlugTrails alone stays far below fine-tuning from stock weights -- evidence that floor plan localization is currently limited by indoor data rather than by architecture. We release the dataset, protocols, and tools at https://github.com/Head-inthe-Cloud/SlugTrails.