Spatial Competence Benchmark

Researchers introduce SCBench, a new benchmark to evaluate AI's spatial competence through hierarchical tasks. Findings reveal that frontier models struggle with global geometric constraints despite performing well on local structures.
Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence
Title:Spatial Competence Benchmark
View PDF HTML (experimental)Abstract:Spatial competence is the quality of maintaining a consistent internal representation of an environment and using it to infer discrete structure and plan actions under constraints. Prevailing spatial evaluations for large models are limited to probing isolated primitives through 3D transformations or visual question answering. We introduce the Spatial Competence Benchmark (SCBench), spanning three hierarchical capability buckets whose tasks require executable outputs verified by deterministic checkers or simulator-based evaluators. On SCBench, three frontier models exhibit monotonically decreasing accuracy up the capability ladder. Sweeping output-token caps shows that accuracy gains concentrate at low budgets and saturate quickly, and failures are dominated by locally plausible geometry that breaks global constraints. We release the task generators, verifiers, and visualisation tooling.
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Source: arXiv cs.AI Recent









