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Linear Spatial World Models Emerge in Large Language Models

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arxiv 2506.02996 v1 pith:OZBJXRSP submitted 2025-06-03 cs.AI

Linear Spatial World Models Emerge in Large Language Models

classification cs.AI
keywords modelsspatialworldlinearwhetherllmsobjectencode
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated emergent abilities across diverse tasks, raising the question of whether they acquire internal world models. In this work, we investigate whether LLMs implicitly encode linear spatial world models, which we define as linear representations of physical space and object configurations. We introduce a formal framework for spatial world models and assess whether such structure emerges in contextual embeddings. Using a synthetic dataset of object positions, we train probes to decode object positions and evaluate geometric consistency of the underlying space. We further conduct causal interventions to test whether these spatial representations are functionally used by the model. Our results provide empirical evidence that LLMs encode linear spatial world models.

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Cited by 3 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Decodable Is Not Grounded: A Vision-Ablation Arbiter for VLM Spatial Reasoning

    cs.CV 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 8.0

    A blank-image ablation test reveals that high probe accuracy on VLM spatial reasoning frequently reflects priors or inverted signs rather than image grounding, with horizontal grounded, vertical prior, and depth inverted.

  2. Cell-Based Representation of Relational Binding in Language Models

    cs.CL 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Large language models encode relational bindings via a cell-based representation: a low-dimensional linear subspace in which each cell corresponds to an entity-relation index pair and attributes are retrieved from the...

  3. Uncovering and Shaping the Latent Representation of 3D Scene Topology in Vision-Language Models

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    VLMs possess a latent 3D scene topology subspace corresponding to Laplacian eigenmaps that can be causally shaped via Dirichlet energy regularization to improve spatial task performance by up to 12.1%.