# Where to Look: Can Foundation Models Reach a Target Viewpoint Through Active Exploration?

Source: [Where to Look: Can Foundation Models Reach a Target Viewpoint Through Active Exploration?](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/6a1e6408dbd7150506f8562a>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2026-06-05T06:00:03.812Z

Authors: Liyang Li, Muzhi Zhu, Zhiyue Zhao, Hengyu Zhao, Ke Liu, Linhao Zhong, Hao Chen, Chunhua Shen

Published: 2026-05-31T14:00:10.000Z

## Abstract

Humans can reproduce the viewpoint specified by a target image through active head and body motion, yet spatial intelligence in foundation models has largely been studied as passive understanding of pre-collected observations. We introduce Target Viewpoint Reproduction (TVR) -- an active task where an agent adjusts its viewpoint in a 3D environment until its observation matches a given target image -- and TVRBench, an indoor-simulation benchmark spanning scene scale and target-view visual richness. TVR is far from solved: on the evaluation split, the strongest open-source and closed-source models reach only 7.8% and 12.0% success. Fine-grained analysis identifies two consistent bottlenecks: off-the-shelf models struggle with multi-turn visual history, and performance drops sharply when viewpoint reproduction requires body translation rather than in-place rotation, exposing a gap in mapping spatial discrepancies to embodied movement. To study reducing this gap, we build a unified TVR post-training framework covering expert-trajectory SFT, rationale-supervised CoT-SFT, offline Single-turn GRPO, and on-policy Multi-turn GRPO from live simulator rollouts. Visual-action SFT supplies the main gain, raising a 9B open-source model to 50.8% success; Multi-turn GRPO provides targeted multi-room refinement and reaches 51.4% overall, while CoT supervision and Single-turn GRPO degrade closed-loop performance. These results establish TVRBench as a testbed for measuring and training foundation models that actively perceive and act in 3D environments. Our code, data, and models are available at https://github.com/aim-uofa/TVRBench.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

- [Target Viewpoint Reproduction on TVRBench (test)](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/target-viewpoint-reproduction-on-tvrbench-test.md>): Target Viewpoint Reproduction; TVRBench (test); Overall Performance: 51.4.

- [Target Viewpoint Reproduction on TVRBench 500-task (test)](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/target-viewpoint-reproduction-on-tvrbench-500-task-test.md>): Target Viewpoint Reproduction; TVRBench 500-task (test); Overall Success Rate: not recorded.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.01247>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.01247.pdf>)

[Implementation](<https://github.com/aim-uofa/TVRBench>)
