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arXiv · 2406.04566

SpaRC and SpaRP: Spatial Reasoning Characterization and Path Generation for Understanding Spatial Reasoning Capability of Large Language Models

Md Imbesat Hassan Rizvi·Xiaodan Zhu·Iryna Gurevych
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Abstract

Spatial reasoning is a crucial component of both biological and artificial intelligence. In this work, we present a comprehensive study of the capability of current state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) on spatial reasoning. To support our study, we created and contribute a novel Spatial Reasoning Characterization (SpaRC) framework and Spatial Reasoning Paths (SpaRP) datasets, to enable an in-depth understanding of the spatial relations and compositions as well as the usefulness of spatial reasoning chains. We found that all the state-of-the-art LLMs do not perform well on the datasets -- their performances are consistently low across different setups. The spatial reasoning capability improves substantially as model sizes scale up. Finetuning both large language models (e.g., Llama-2-70B) and smaller ones (e.g., Llama-2-13B) can significantly improve their F1-scores by 7--32 absolute points. We also found that the top proprietary LLMs still significantly outperform their open-source counterparts in topological spatial understanding and reasoning.

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Md Imbesat Hassan Rizvi, Xiaodan Zhu, Iryna Gurevych. 2024-06-07. SpaRC and SpaRP: Spatial Reasoning Characterization and Path Generation for Understanding Spatial Reasoning Capability of Large Language Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.04566

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