Waymark

Overview #

Waymark answers questions about where things are in a photographed scene. You give it a written sketch of the scene — the list of objects and where they sit, which a vision model produces from the image — and one question; it gives back a single short sentence in everyday words such as left, right, closer or behind. Use it when you need a quick layout answer rather than a route.

Waymark is a 124M-parameter decoder-only language model that answers layout questions about a scene it has never seen. It reads a structured text sketch — the kind of scene, where the viewer stands, a list of objects with viewer-relative positions, pairwise relations and anything uncertain — together with one short question, and returns a single sentence: what is on the left or right, what is closer or farther, what is in front of or behind what, and what is blocking what.

The input is text and the output is text. A vision model that emits the Falcon scene sketch does the seeing; Waymark does the reasoning about the sketch and keeps to its vocabulary of relative positions. It never reports metres, GPS coordinates or compass bearings, and it does not invent objects, doors or paths that the sketch does not mention. Answers are sampled from the model at a low temperature, so they are short, plain and slightly variable from call to call.

Since version 1.1.0 (2026-09-20) Waymark is one model for street and indoor scenes — homes, offices, schools, shops, restaurants, hotels, station concourses and garages as well as streets, paths and plazas. It was reached through an intermediate indoor finetune (published for one day as “Waymark Indoor”, now withdrawn) and then retrained on a balanced mix of street and indoor sketches; the request value "model": "waymark-indoor" still works on /v1/spatial as an alias for these weights.

Waymark is the default model of the Waymark series. Its sibling, Waymark Extra, reads the same sketch grammar and keeps Waymark's layout question-and-answer task, but adds movement: given a sketch and a goal it emits a timed, viewer-relative trace of a person moving through the scene. Waymark Extra is a larger model — 355M parameters with a 1,024-token window, trained from scratch — and the Falcon API binds it to /v1/move; Waymark is the model behind /v1/spatial.

Intended use #

• Answering “which side”, “what is closer”, “what is in front” and “is my view blocked” questions over a sketch produced by a vision model from a street-level scene.
• Turning a sketch of sidewalks, roadways, crossings, plants, stairs, ramps and overpasses into a one-line layout read that a responder can fold into a longer reply.
• Acting as the fallback answer when a larger responder cannot finish, since the sketch is already grounded and the answer is short.

Out of scope #

• Reading pixels: Waymark only ever sees the text sketch.
• Anything metric — distances in metres, heights, headings, sizes in real units.
• Documents, maps, receipts and other non-scene material; sketches of kind document are rejected before they reach the model.
• Navigation, accessibility or safety decisions, such as when to cross a road.

Choose Waymark when #

• The sketch is a plain street-level scene with objects, relations and a viewer line, and you want the smallest model that answers in the trained vocabulary.
• You need a layout answer in about a second, rather than a multi-second trace.
• You need a movement trace rather than a layout sentence — a goal such as “walk to the doorway” turned into timed, viewer-relative steps — or your sketches are long or busy, with a second person, two-leg routes or prompts past 512 tokens: choose Waymark Extra instead, with its 24 layers and 1,024-token window, on /v1/move.

Specification #

Try it #

You send

A sketch with a doorway and a retaining wall, and the question “what’s in front”.

You get back

One sentence: the doorway is on your right, in the foreground.

The same exchange as the API sees it:

{
  "sketch": "kind: scene\nviewer: eye-level on sidewalk\nobjects: doorway (right foreground); retaining wall (center background)\nrelations: doorway in front of retaining wall; doorway right of center; retaining wall behind doorway\nrelative: doorway closer than retaining wall",
  "question": "what's in front"
}

{
  "ok": true,
  "engine": "waymark",
  "model": "waymark",
  "text": "doorway on your right foreground.",
  "from": "sketch"
}

Limits & safety #

It does not see the image; it reads the sketch. Everything Waymark can say about a scene is bounded by what the sketching model wrote down, and anything the sketch omits or gets wrong, Waymark inherits.

• No true distances or sizes: answers are relative — closer, farther, in front, behind — never metres, GPS coordinates or compass bearings. Estimates, never measurements.
• No pixels and no capture details: Waymark's training rows contain no capture, colour, size or ground attributes, so questions about shot type, colour, size or height off the ground are not backed by its training data even when the sketch carries those fields.
• Narrow vocabulary: 45 street-level object names, 10 viewer phrases and 32 question templates. Document, map or unknown sketch kinds, and objects outside the vocabulary, are out of distribution and can draw generic or wrong sentences.
• No guarantee against invention: the model was trained not to name objects, doors or paths absent from the sketch, but this is a property of the data, not a checked constraint on the output. On busy hospital sketches of eight to twelve objects, version 1.1.0 still substitutes a familiar name for an unfamiliar one in about four answers in ten.
• No confidence score: the answer is a single sample at temperature 0.3, so repeated calls can differ in wording and occasionally in substance.
• Context of 512 tokens: a prompt longer than 511 tokens is truncated from the front, silently dropping the sketch header and earliest lines.
• Not a navigation, accessibility or safety aid, and not a substitute for looking: it must not be used to decide when to cross a road or whether a passage is clear.

Related models #

Latest versions #