Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown impressive abilities in understanding and reasoning over conventional images. However, their perception of 360° images remains largely underexplored. Unlike conventional images, 360° images capture the entire surrounding environment, enabling holistic spatial reasoning but introducing challenges such as geometric distortion and complex spatial relations. To comprehensively assess MLLMs' capabilities to perceive 360° images, we introduce 360Bench, a Visual Question Answering (VQA) benchmark featuring 7K-resolution 360° images, seven representative (sub)tasks with annotations carefully curated by human annotators. Using 360Bench, we systematically evaluate seven MLLMs and six enhancement methods, revealing their shortcomings in 360° image perception. To address these challenges, we propose Free360, a training-free scene-graph-based framework for high-resolution 360° VQA. Free360 decomposes the reasoning process into modular steps, applies adaptive spherical image transformations to 360° images tailored to each step, and seamlessly integrates the resulting information into a unified graph representation for answer generation. Experiments show that Free360 consistently improves its base MLLM and provides a strong training-free solution for 360° VQA tasks.
@article{360BenchFree360,
title={360° Image Perception with MLLMs: A Comprehensive Benchmark and a Training-Free Method},
author={Huyen. T. T. Tran, Van-Quang Nguyen, Farros Alferro, Kang-Jun Liu, and Takayuki Okatani},
journal={ECCV},
year={2026}
}