Spatial reasoning is a crucial component of both biological and artificial intelligence. In this work, we present a comprehensive study of the capability of current state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) on spatial reasoning. To support our study, we created and contribute a novel Spatial Reasoning Characterization (SpaRC) framework and Spatial Reasoning Paths (SpaRP) datasets, to enable an in-depth understanding of the spatial relations and compositions as well as the usefulness of spatial reasoning chains. We found that all the state-of-the-art LLMs do not perform well on the datasets -- their performances are consistently low across different setups. The spatial reasoning capability improves substantially as model sizes scale up. Finetuning both large language models (e.g., Llama-2-70B) and smaller ones (e.g., Llama-2-13B) can significantly improve their F1-scores by 7--32 absolute points. We also found that the top proprietary LLMs still significantly outperform their open-source counterparts in topological spatial understanding and reasoning.

当前最先进的大型语言模型（LLMs）在空间推理方面性能较差，但随着模型规模的扩大，在空间推理能力上有了显著提升，Finetuning大或小型语言模型可以显著提高它们的F1分数，专有的LLMs在拓扑空间理解和推理方面明显优于开源模型。

SpaRC和SpaRP：用于理解大型语言模型的空间推理能力的空间推理特征描述和路径生成