The task of predicting time and location from images is challenging and requires complex human-like puzzle-solving ability over different clues. In this work, we formalize this ability into core skills and implement them using different modules in an expert pipeline called PuzzleGPT. PuzzleGPT consists of a perceiver to identify visual clues, a reasoner to deduce prediction candidates, a combiner to combinatorially combine information from different clues, a web retriever to get external knowledge if the task can't be solved locally, and a noise filter for robustness. This results in a zero-shot, interpretable, and robust approach that records state-of-the-art performance on two datasets -- TARA and WikiTilo. PuzzleGPT outperforms large VLMs such as BLIP-2, InstructBLIP, LLaVA, and even GPT-4V, as well as automatically generated reasoning pipelines like VisProg, by at least 32% and 38%, respectively. It even rivals or surpasses finetuned models.
@article{arxiv.2501.14210,
title = {PuzzleGPT: Emulating Human Puzzle-Solving Ability for Time and Location Prediction},
author = {Hammad Ayyubi and Xuande Feng and Junzhang Liu and Xudong Lin and Zhecan Wang and Shih-Fu Chang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.14210},
year = {2025}
}