SpaCE: Rethinking Spatial Capacity and Generalization in Multi-Frame Multimodal Large Language Models

Abstract

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable empirical progress in spatial understanding through large-scale training on spatial visual question answering datasets. However, the theoretical foundations of multi-frame spatial reasoning remain entirely unexplored. We present SpaCE, a rigorous theoretical framework that characterizes the spatial reasoning capacity, sample complexity, and generalization guarantees of MLLMs operating on multi-frame inputs. We establish four main results. First, we prove an information-theoretic upper bound on spatial reasoning accuracy in terms of the mutual information between multi-frame observations and spatial targets. Second, we derive a sample complexity bound of order $Θ(d_{\mathrm{eff}} \cdot K_{\max} / (\varepsilon^2 \cdot δ))$, where $d_{\mathrm{eff}}$ is the effective spatial dimension and $K_{\max}$ bounds the KL divergence of the learned posterior. Third, we provide a PAC-Bayes generalization bound for multi-frame spatial reasoning under distribution shift. Fourth, we formally characterize the bias-variance trade-off between explicit 3D representations and implicit reasoning approaches, identifying the crossover conditions under which each paradigm is provably preferable. We validate our theoretical predictions on the MultiSPA, CA-VQA, and SpatialRGPT benchmarks, demonstrating that our bounds are empirically tight and that frame complementarity is the key driver of multi-frame spatial capacity. Our framework provides the first principled theoretical foundation for understanding when, why, and how multi-frame spatial reasoning in MLLs succeeds.