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Evaluating Spatial Understanding of Large Language Models

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arxiv 2310.14540 v3 pith:RIOFC5YC submitted 2023-10-23 cs.CL cs.AI

Evaluating Spatial Understanding of Large Language Models

classification cs.CL cs.AI
keywords spatialllmsmodelstasksacrossaspectscapturegrounded
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Large language models (LLMs) show remarkable capabilities across a variety of tasks. Despite the models only seeing text in training, several recent studies suggest that LLM representations implicitly capture aspects of the underlying grounded concepts. Here, we explore LLM representations of a particularly salient kind of grounded knowledge -- spatial relationships. We design natural-language navigation tasks and evaluate the ability of LLMs, in particular GPT-3.5-turbo, GPT-4, and Llama2 series models, to represent and reason about spatial structures. These tasks reveal substantial variability in LLM performance across different spatial structures, including square, hexagonal, and triangular grids, rings, and trees. In extensive error analysis, we find that LLMs' mistakes reflect both spatial and non-spatial factors. These findings suggest that LLMs appear to capture certain aspects of spatial structure implicitly, but room for improvement remains.

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Cited by 6 Pith papers

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