Foundation models excel at metric spatial reasoning (distance, angles) but fail at topological reasoning—a more fundamental aspect of spatial understanding. This gap persists even with fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, suggesting current architectures lack core spatial intuition.
MindTopo is a benchmark testing whether AI models can reason about topological properties—spatial relationships that stay the same under stretching or bending. It evaluates 14 multimodal AI models on five topological concepts (continuity, separation, order, enclosure, knots) through reasoning tasks and embodied planning.