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Mind's Eye of LLMs: Visualization-of-Thought Elicits Spatial Reasoning in Large Language Models

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arxiv 2404.03622 v3 pith:VLRUFG5O submitted 2024-04-04 cs.CL

Mind's Eye of LLMs: Visualization-of-Thought Elicits Spatial Reasoning in Large Language Models

classification cs.CL
keywords reasoningspatiallanguagellmslargemindmodelstasks
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive performance in language comprehension and various reasoning tasks. However, their abilities in spatial reasoning, a crucial aspect of human cognition, remain relatively unexplored. Human possess a remarkable ability to create mental images of unseen objects and actions through a process known as the Mind's Eye, enabling the imagination of the unseen world. Inspired by this cognitive capacity, we propose Visualization-of-Thought (VoT) prompting. VoT aims to elicit spatial reasoning of LLMs by visualizing their reasoning traces, thereby guiding subsequent reasoning steps. We employed VoT for multi-hop spatial reasoning tasks, including natural language navigation, visual navigation, and visual tiling in 2D grid worlds. Experimental results demonstrated that VoT significantly enhances the spatial reasoning abilities of LLMs. Notably, VoT outperformed existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in these tasks. While VoT works surprisingly well on LLMs, the ability to generate mental images to facilitate spatial reasoning resembles the mind's eye process, suggesting its potential viability in MLLMs. Please find the dataset and codes at https://microsoft.github.io/visualization-of-thought

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Cited by 5 Pith papers

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  3. AtomWorld: A Benchmark for Evaluating Spatial Reasoning in Large Language Models on Crystalline Materials

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  4. Grounded Reinforcement Learning for Visual Reasoning

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