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

Md Imbesat Rizvi, Xiaodan Zhu, Iryna Gurevych


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.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.261
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4750–4767
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.261
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.261
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Md Imbesat Rizvi, Xiaodan Zhu, and Iryna Gurevych. 2024. SpaRC and SpaRP: Spatial Reasoning Characterization and Path Generation for Understanding Spatial Reasoning Capability of Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 4750–4767, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SpaRC and SpaRP: Spatial Reasoning Characterization and Path Generation for Understanding Spatial Reasoning Capability of Large Language Models (Rizvi et al., ACL 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.261.pdf