Summary:

• Visualization-of-Thought (VoT) promotes spatial reasoning by visualizing reasoning steps, akin to the human ‘mind’s eye’.
• Tested on spatially intense tasks like natural and visual navigation, resulting in superior performance over existing multimodal LLMs.
• Enables LLMs to ‘imagine’ or construct mental images, facilitating spatial reasoning and navigation.
• VoT’s success in LLMs suggests it might also enhance the spatial reasoning in multimodal LLMs.

Opinion:

Enabling LLMs to mimic human spatial cognition is a remarkable step, potentially revolutionizing tasks that require environmental understanding and interaction, like robotics and virtual assistants.

Further research:

• Application to 3D environments
• Integration with sensorimotor systems in robotics
• Development of LLMs with inherent spatial cognition