测AI空间感:画出来比说出来更准
AI的空间感一直很难测——让它说“球在桌子左边”,它可能蒙对坐标,但真让它画出来就露馅。这篇论文发现:让AI用像素(画图)而不是文字回答空间问题,能更真实反映它的空间认知。研究者设计了一套框架,让图像生成模型像做填空题一样在图上标出位置、路径,然后自动评分。结果很反直觉:在“指位置”这类任务上,画图模型比文本模型更准;但一旦涉及“把三个物体按顺序摆好”这种组合推理,文本模型又反超。简单说:AI的空间感分两种——能画出来不代表能想明白。
📄 原文摘要(英文)
Spatial intelligence is essential for agents to move from static semantic understanding toward interacting with the physical world. Many spatial tasks are grounded in continuous visual scenes, where locations, regions, and paths are more naturally expressed by pointing, marking, or drawing than by reporting precise coordinates or discrete textual symbols. Yet existing spatial reasoning benchmarks usually require coordinates, options, or text, creating an answer-interface mismatch for image-generation models. This makes it difficult to evaluate image-generation models under the same task semantics as text-output VLMs, despite their ability to externalize spatial judgments directly in pixel space. We propose ProVisE (Protocolized Visual Evaluation), a benchmark-agnostic framework that elicits protocol-constrained visual answers from image-generation models and parses them into structured predictions compatible with original metrics. ProVisE also includes an Agentic builder that constructs and validates task-specific protocols for new benchmarks. We further introduce SpatialGen-Bench, a curated diagnostic benchmark of 470 samples across 14 spatial subtasks, four capability levels, and diverse answer forms. We evaluate representative text-output VLMs and image-generation models in a unified setting and validate Agentic protocol construction on six external spatial benchmarks. Results show that image-generation models are competitive when spatial answers can be externalized directly in pixel space, while text-output VLMs retain a clear advantage in compositional spatial reasoning. These findings reveal complementary strengths of pixel-space expression and text-based reasoning and establish a metric-compatible testbed for studying spatial cognition in image-generation models.