Trace4D: Grounded Spatiotemporal Reasoning via 4D State Sequences

Abstract

Understanding how objects and their spatial relationships evolve in 3D space over time remains challenging for vision-language models (VLMs), particularly under changing viewpoints. Recent approaches incorporate geometric information into reasoning, but explicit supervision for temporally ordered 4D state evolution and its use as intermediate evidence remains limited. We introduce \textbf{Trace4D}, which trains VLMs to predict 4D state sequences and reason over their inter-timestep changes alongside temporal visual observations. Its 4D-grounded chain-of-thought (CoT) explicitly represents 4D states, analyzes temporal visual context, and connects both as evidence for the answer. We construct Trace4D-Train from in-the-wild videos with 600K 4D perception examples and approximately 70K grounded QA examples, and train with joint supervised fine-tuning followed by geometry-aware GRPO. At inference, Trace4D predicts 4D states and reasoning directly from video without reference annotations or an external geometric model. Experiments on Trace4D-Bench and VLM4D show improved QA accuracy over the base VLMs and benefits from reasoning over 4D state changes and temporal visual observations.