MindTopo: Can Foundation Models Reason in Topological Space?

TL;DR - MindTopo is an 11,030-instance benchmark testing foundation models’ topological reasoning and closed-loop planning across continuity, separation, order, enclosure, and knots. Fourteen multimodal LLMs substantially trail humans, especially when planning requires preserving topology across actions.

• The benchmark spans 13 procedurally generated task types with controllable difficulty and evaluates both reasoning and agentic planning.
• Every tested multimodal LLM performed better on reasoning than planning; even the strongest remained far below observed human performance.
• Supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning improved Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct’s reasoning more than its planning.
• Image- and video-generated observations preserved local cues and plausible endpoints but often violated environment dynamics or topology between transitions.