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If a robotic agent wants to exploit symbolic planning techniques to achieve some goal, it must be able to properly ground an abstract planning domain in the environment in which it operates. However, if the environment is initially unknown…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-04-11 Leonardo Lamanna , Luciano Serafini , Alessandro Saetti , Alfonso Gerevini , Paolo Traverso

Spatial reasoning is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence. One key concept in spatial cognition is the Frame of Reference, which identifies the perspective of spatial expressions. Despite its significance, FoR has received limited…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Tanawan Premsri , Parisa Kordjamshidi

This position paper explores the rapid development of Foundation Models (FMs) in AI and their implications for intelligence and reasoning. It examines the characteristics of FMs, including their training on vast datasets and use of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Alan F. Smeaton

Making sense of the world and acting in it relies on building simplified mental representations that abstract away aspects of reality. This principle of cognitive mapping is universal to agents with limited resources. Living organisms,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-30 Marta Kryven , Cole Wyeth , Aidan Curtis , Kevin Ellis

Cognitive maps play a crucial role in facilitating flexible behaviour by representing spatial and conceptual relationships within an environment. The ability to learn and infer the underlying structure of the environment is crucial for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-06-26 Daria de Tinguy , Toon Van de Maele , Tim Verbelen , Bart Dhoedt

Vision language models (VLMs) can simultaneously reason about images and texts to tackle many tasks, from visual question answering to image captioning. This paper focuses on map parsing, a novel task that is unexplored within the VLM…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-11-26 David DeFazio , Hrudayangam Mehta , Meng Wang , Ping Yang , Jeremy Blackburn , Shiqi Zhang

Reasoning is a fundamental cognitive process underlying inference, problem-solving, and decision-making. While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning capabilities in closed-world settings, they struggle in open-ended and…

Spatial reasoning, which requires ability to perceive and manipulate spatial relationships in the 3D world, is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence, yet remains a persistent challenge for Multimodal large language models (MLLMs).…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Weichen Liu , Qiyao Xue , Haoming Wang , Xiangyu Yin , Boyuan Yang , Wei Gao

The interpretation of spatial references is highly contextual, requiring joint inference over both language and the environment. We consider the task of spatial reasoning in a simulated environment, where an agent can act and receive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-11-15 Michael Janner , Karthik Narasimhan , Regina Barzilay

Understanding how large language models (LLMs) represent and reason about spatial information is crucial for building robust agentic systems that can navigate real and simulated environments. In this work, we investigate the influence of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Nicolas Martorell

Humans build viewpoint-independent cognitive maps through navigation, enabling intuitive reasoning about object permanence and spatial relations. We argue that multimodal large language models (MLLMs), despite extensive video training, lack…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Jacob Thompson , Emiliano Garcia-Lopez , Yonatan Bisk

We deal with the navigation problem where the agent follows natural language instructions while observing the environment. Focusing on language understanding, we show the importance of spatial semantics in grounding navigation instructions…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-05-17 Yue Zhang , Quan Guo , Parisa Kordjamshidi

Decision making demands intricate interplay between perception, memory, and reasoning to discern optimal policies. Conventional approaches to decision making face challenges related to low sample efficiency and poor generalization. In…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Xiaoqian Liu , Xingzhou Lou , Jianbin Jiao , Junge Zhang

The imagination of the surrounding environment based on experience and semantic cognition has great potential to extend the limited observations and provide more information for mapping, collision avoidance, and path planning. This paper…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-04-09 Zhengcheng Shen , Linh Kästner , Jens Lambrecht

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in tasks such as code and mathematics. However, their potential to internalize structured spatial knowledge remains underexplored. This study investigates…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Sirui Xia , Aili Chen , Xintao Wang , Tinghui Zhu , Yikai Zhang , Jiangjie Chen , Yanghua Xiao

Large Language Models (LLM) have emerged as a tool for robots to generate task plans using common sense reasoning. For the LLM to generate actionable plans, scene context must be provided, often through a map. Recent works have shifted from…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-09-25 Mike Zhang , Kaixian Qu , Vaishakh Patil , Cesar Cadena , Marco Hutter

While large language models have become the prevailing approach for agentic reasoning and planning, their success in symbolic domains does not readily translate to the physical world. Spatial intelligence, the ability to perceive 3D…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Gloria Felicia , Nolan Bryant , Handi Putra , Ayaan Gazali , Eliel Lobo , Esteban Rojas

Memory plays a pivotal role in enabling large language model~(LLM)-based agents to engage in complex and long-term interactions, such as question answering (QA) and dialogue systems. While various memory modules have been proposed for these…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-23 Ruihong Zeng , Jinyuan Fang , Siwei Liu , Zaiqiao Meng

In this paper, we argue that simulation platforms enable a novel type of embodied spatial reasoning, one facilitated by a formal model of object and event semantics that renders the continuous quantitative search space of an open-world,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-02-07 James Pustejovsky , Nikhil Krishnaswamy

How do large language models solve spatial navigation tasks? We investigate this by training GPT-2 models on three spatial learning paradigms in grid environments: passive exploration (Foraging Model- predicting steps in random walks),…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Caroline Baumgartner , Eleanor Spens , Neil Burgess , Petru Manescu