Mind the Gap Between Spatial Reasoning and Acting! Step-by-Step Evaluation of Agents With Spatial-Gym
Spatial reasoning is central to navigation and robotics, yet measuring model capabilities on these tasks remains difficult. Existing benchmarks evaluate models in a one-shot setting, requiring full solution generation in a single response, unlike humans, who work in interactive environments step-by-step. We introduce Spatial-Gym, a Gymnasium environment that isolates spatial constraint reasoning by testing pathfinding in 2D-grid puzzles as a sequential decision task with optional backtracking. We evaluate eight models in three settings (one-shot, step-by-step, step-by-step with backtracking) against human, random, and A* baselines on 500 episodes. The best model, GPT-OSS 120B, achieves a ...
| Authors | Lars Benedikt Kaesberg, Tianyu Yang, Niklas Bauer et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 10 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 10 April 2026 |
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