Sirui Xia, Aili Chen, Xintao Wang, Tinghui Zhu University of California, Davis, Yikai Zhang, Jiangjie Chen ByteDance Seed, Yanghua Xiao Fudan University
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in tasks such as code generation and mathematical reasoning. However, their potential to internalize structured spatial knowledge remains underexplored. This study investigates whether LLMs, grounded in locally relative human observations, can construct coherent global spatial cognition by integrating fragmented relational descriptions. We focus on two core aspects of spatial cognition: spatial perception, where models infer consistent global layouts from local positional relationships, and spatial navigation, where models learn road connectivity from trajectory data and plan optimal paths between unconnected locations. Experiments conducted in a simulated urban environment demonstrate that LLMs not only generalize to unseen spatial relationships between points of interest (POIs) but also exhibit latent representations aligned with real-world spatial distributions. Furthermore, LLMs can learn road connectivity from trajectory descriptions, enabling accurate path planning and dynamic spatial awareness during navigation.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Qianyu He, Junting Lu, Yikai Zhang, Siyu Yuan, Xiaojun Meng Large Model Data Technology Lab, Huawei Technologies Ltd., Jiansheng Wei, Jiaqing Liang Fudan University, Yanghua Xiao Fudan University
Metaphor reasoning is an essential cognitive ability that maps knowledge from familiar domains to more abstract domains. This ability functions as a meta-ability underlying many types of reasoning. However, existing work rarely investigates how metaphor reasoning affects other reasoning abilities. To bridge this gap, we systematically study how metaphor reasoning, particularly through metaphorical riddles, can enhance broader reasoning abilities in large language models. We propose MetaR, an automated system for synthesizing metaphorical riddles that satisfy five quality dimensions: diverse, balanced, reasoning-oriented, challenging, and verifiable. Leveraging that answer categories determine riddle categories, we employ a hierarchical answer taxonomy for the former three criteria and a multi-agent refinement framework for the latter two, generating a high-quality dataset. Training with reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards using only thousands of metaphorical riddles, we demonstrate improvements across six out-of-distribution reasoning domains. Analysis reveals transfer effectiveness depends on model scale and pattern-target domain alignment. The datasets and code are publicly available at https://github.com/Abbey4799/MetaR.
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cs.CL · cs.MA
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表