Yuheng Zha, Yilei Wang, Qiyue Gao, Junrong Chen, Yujia Wu, Zhengfeng Lai, Zhengzhong Liu, Eric P. Xing
Humans often solve spatial problems by mentally simulating visual transformations. In contrast, conventional vision-language models (VLMs) reason primarily through language. We investigate whether VLMs can solve spatial problems by reasoning with both text and generated visual states. To this end, we introduce WM-VLM, which equips a pretrained VLM with a lightweight world model branch for generating intermediate visual states. Our two-stage training first teaches the model to generate the next visual state and then to use that state for reasoning. We programmatically construct spatial reasoning tasks with verifiable intermediate visual states. These tasks allow us to evaluate how well the model generates visual states and how much it relies on them to answer the question. On 2D and 3D mental rotation tasks, WM-VLM consistently outperforms the supervised fine-tuned backbone, with gains of up to 39.25 percentage points. Ablations suggest that these gains depend on the generated visual states, as removing or corrupting them sharply reduces performance. Together, these results suggest that internal world models offer a promising path toward VLMs that reason in both language and visual space. Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/yuh-zha/WM-VLM
Yanbin Yin, Kun Zhou University of California, San Diego, Zhen Wang University of California, San Diego, Xiangdong Zhang New York University, Yifei Shao, Shibo Hao University of California, San Diego, Yi Gu University of California, San Diego, Jieyuan Liu 等 14 位作者
The recent explosion of large language models (LLMs), each with its own general or specialized strengths, makes scalable, reliable benchmarking more urgent than ever. Standard practices nowadays face fundamental trade-offs: closed-ended question-based benchmarks (MMLU) struggle with saturation as newer models emerge, while crowd-sourced leaderboards (Chatbot Arena) rely on costly and slow human judges. Recently, automated methods (LLM-as-a-judge) shed light on the scalability, but risk bias by relying on one or a few “authority” models. To tackle these issues, we propose Decentralized Arena (), a fully automated framework leveraging collective intelligence from all LLMs to evaluate each other. It mitigates single-model judge bias by democratic, pairwise evaluation, and remains efficient at scale through two key components: (1) a coarse-to-fine ranking algorithm for fast incremental insertion of new models with sub-quadratic complexity, and (2) an automatic question selection strategy for the construction of new evaluation dimensions. Across extensive experiments across 66 LLMs, attains up to 97% correlation with human judgements, while significantly reducing the cost.
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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