Grid Spatial Understanding: A Dataset for Textual Spatial Reasoning over Grids, Embodied Settings, and Coordinate Structures

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Sidhu, Risham, Hockenmaier, Julia
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Sidhu, Risham
Hockenmaier, Julia
author_facet Sidhu, Risham
Hockenmaier, Julia
contents We introduce GSU, a text-only grid dataset to evaluate the spatial reasoning capabilities of LLMs over 3 core tasks: navigation, object localization, and structure composition. By forgoing visual inputs, isolating spatial reasoning from perception, we show that while most models grasp basic grid concepts, they struggle with frames of reference relative to an embodied agent and identifying 3D shapes from coordinate lists. We also find that exposure to a visual modality does not provide a generalizable understanding of 3D space that VLMs are able to utilize for these tasks. Finally, we show that while the very latest frontier models can solve the provided tasks (though harder variants may still stump them), fully fine-tuning a small LM or LORA fine-tuning a small LLM show potential to match frontier model performance, suggesting an avenue for specialized embodied agents.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_17333
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Grid Spatial Understanding: A Dataset for Textual Spatial Reasoning over Grids, Embodied Settings, and Coordinate Structures
Sidhu, Risham
Hockenmaier, Julia
Computation and Language
We introduce GSU, a text-only grid dataset to evaluate the spatial reasoning capabilities of LLMs over 3 core tasks: navigation, object localization, and structure composition. By forgoing visual inputs, isolating spatial reasoning from perception, we show that while most models grasp basic grid concepts, they struggle with frames of reference relative to an embodied agent and identifying 3D shapes from coordinate lists. We also find that exposure to a visual modality does not provide a generalizable understanding of 3D space that VLMs are able to utilize for these tasks. Finally, we show that while the very latest frontier models can solve the provided tasks (though harder variants may still stump them), fully fine-tuning a small LM or LORA fine-tuning a small LLM show potential to match frontier model performance, suggesting an avenue for specialized embodied agents.
title Grid Spatial Understanding: A Dataset for Textual Spatial Reasoning over Grids, Embodied Settings, and Coordinate Structures
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.17333