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Does Spatial Cognition Emerge in Frontier Models?

Artificial Intelligence 2025-04-21 v2 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Machine Learning

Abstract

Not yet. We present SPACE, a benchmark that systematically evaluates spatial cognition in frontier models. Our benchmark builds on decades of research in cognitive science. It evaluates large-scale mapping abilities that are brought to bear when an organism traverses physical environments, smaller-scale reasoning about object shapes and layouts, and cognitive infrastructure such as spatial attention and memory. For many tasks, we instantiate parallel presentations via text and images, allowing us to benchmark both large language models and large multimodal models. Results suggest that contemporary frontier models fall short of the spatial intelligence of animals, performing near chance level on a number of classic tests of animal cognition. Code and data are available: https://github.com/apple/ml-space-benchmark

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2410.06468,
  title  = {Does Spatial Cognition Emerge in Frontier Models?},
  author = {Santhosh Kumar Ramakrishnan and Erik Wijmans and Philipp Kraehenbuehl and Vladlen Koltun},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.06468},
  year   = {2025}
}

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Published in ICLR 2025

R2 v1 2026-06-28T19:13:41.515Z