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AlphaMaze: Enhancing Large Language Models' Spatial Intelligence via GRPO

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arxiv 2502.14669 v3 pith:DHFJL7GB submitted 2025-02-20 cs.CL

AlphaMaze: Enhancing Large Language Models' Spatial Intelligence via GRPO

classification cs.CL
keywords grpolanguagemodelreasoningvisualmazemodelsspatial
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in language processing, yet they often struggle with tasks requiring genuine visual spatial reasoning. In this paper, we introduce a novel two-stage training framework designed to equip standard LLMs with visual reasoning abilities for maze navigation. First, we leverage Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT) on a curated dataset of tokenized maze representations to teach the model to predict step-by-step movement commands. Next, we apply Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO)-a technique used in DeepSeekR1-with a carefully crafted reward function to refine the model's sequential decision-making and encourage emergent chain-of-thought behaviors. Experimental results on synthetically generated mazes show that while a baseline model fails to navigate the maze, the SFT-trained model achieves 86% accuracy, and further GRPO fine-tuning boosts accuracy to 93%. Qualitative analyses reveal that GRPO fosters more robust and self-corrective reasoning, highlighting the potential of our approach to bridge the gap between language models and visual spatial tasks. These findings offer promising implications for applications in robotics, autonomous navigation, and other domains that require integrated visual and sequential reasoning.

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Forward citations

Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Lost in Aggregation: A Multi-Scale Diagnostic Benchmark for LLM Spatial Navigation

    physics.soc-ph 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    A new diagnostic benchmark decomposes LLM spatial navigation into three cognitive scales and shows that cross-scale aggregation, not single-level deficits, causes failure beyond small mazes.

  2. Does RLVR Extend Reasoning Boundaries? Investigating Capability Expansion in Vision-Language Models

    cs.AI 2025-11 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    RLVR on synthetic mazes enables VLMs to solve spatial reasoning tasks unreachable by the base model and generalizes to real-world navigation benchmarks.

  3. Distilling Counterfactual Reasoning from Language to Vision: Causal Graph Guided Post-Training for Video Understanding

    cs.CV 2025-11 reject novelty 5.0

    A new video benchmark and post-training recipe claim to improve VLMs' counterfactual 'what if' reasoning, but the reported gains likely come from training on the test set.

  4. Constructing coherent spatial memory in LLM agents through graph rectification

    cs.AI 2025-10 conditional novelty 5.0

    LLM-MapRepair uses versioned graph history and an edge-impact score to detect and repair structural errors in incrementally built LLM navigation graphs, improving repair accuracy from ~6% to ~55% on cleaned MANGO games.

  5. Assessing Consciousness-Related Behaviors in Large Language Models Using the Maze Test

    cs.CL 2025-08 conditional novelty 5.0

    A new maze-navigation benchmark for LLMs reports that reasoning models outperform standard ones, but the link from performance gaps to a lack of persistent self-awareness is an overreach.

  6. Entropy-KL Divergence-based Token Masking: A Novel Approach for Selective Fine-tuning of Large Language Models

    cs.AI 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    EKSFT masks high-entropy or high-KL tokens in low-data SFT to preserve pre-trained distribution and improve downstream RL performance on math reasoning tasks.