Fanqing Zhou

Pukun Zhao, Longxiang Wang, Chen Chen et al.

Structured spatial navigation is a core benchmark for Large Language Models (LLMs) spatial reasoning. Existing paradigms like Visualization-of-Thought (VoT) are prone to cascading errors in complex topologies. To solve this, we propose STAR, a two-stage framework grounded on topological anchors, and introduce the RedMaze-23K dataset with human-inspired turnpoint annotations. The first stage uses supervised fine-tuning to help models internalize spatial semantics and prune redundant paths. The second adopts Spatial-aware Segment-level Direct Preference Optimization (SDPO) to refine self-correction in long-horizon navigation. Experiments show STAR achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models: its 32B variant outperforms DeepSeek-V3 (29.27% vs. 25.00%) and reaches 82.4% of GPT-4's performance.

Pukun Zhao, Longxiang Wang, Miaowei Wang et al.

Most existing spatial reasoning benchmarks focus on static or globally observable environments, failing to capture the challenges of long-horizon reasoning and memory utilization under partial observability and dynamic changes. We introduce two dynamic spatial benchmarks, locally observable maze navigation and match-2 elimination that systematically evaluate models' abilities in spatial understanding and adaptive planning when local perception, environment feedback, and global objectives are tightly coupled. Each action triggers structural changes in the environment, requiring continuous update of cognition and strategy. We further propose a subjective experience-based memory mechanism for cross-task experience transfer and validation. Experiments show that our benchmarks reveal key limitations of mainstream models in dynamic spatial reasoning and long-term memory, providing a comprehensive platform for future methodological advances. Our code and data are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/EvoEmpirBench-143C/.