The Nugget
- Visualization of Thought (VoT) prompting enables LLMs to achieve spatial reasoning by visualizing reasoning steps, significantly outperforming other techniques and showing LLMs can develop a "mind's eye".
- VoT is used in an open-source "large action model" called Pi win-assistant that can control Windows UIs via natural language, similar to Anthropic's closed-source Claude.
Make it stick
- 🧠 VoT prompting gives LLMs a "mind's eye" to visualize and reason about space
- 🏆 VoT significantly outperformed other prompting techniques for spatial reasoning tasks
- 🖥️ Pi win-assistant uses VoT to control Windows interfaces via natural language
- 🔓 Unlike Anthropic's Claude, Pi win-assistant is open-source so anyone can use it
Key insights
What is spatial reasoning and why is it important?
- Spatial reasoning is the ability to visualize relationships between objects in 2D or 3D space
- It's crucial for many human cognitive tasks like navigation, driving, robotics, chess, etc.
- Large language models have historically been very poor at spatial reasoning
- Some AI experts like Yann LeCun believe lack of spatial reasoning is a key barrier to AGI
How Visualization of Thought (VoT) prompting works
- VoT has the LLM visualize and represent its reasoning at each step, creating a "mind's eye"
- This is done by carefully formatting prompts to describe spatial setups and elicit step-by-step visual reasoning
- Examples include navigating 2D grids to reach a destination, and visual tiling challenges like fitting Tetris-like shapes into a grid
- VoT significantly outperformed other prompting methods like chain-of-thought on spatial reasoning benchmarks
Open-source "large action model" Pi win-assistant
- Microsoft released an open-source project called Pi win-assistant that uses VoT prompting
- It acts as a "large action model" that can control Windows user interfaces via natural language
- Examples include opening apps, clicking buttons, typing text, posting tweets hands-free
- This is similar to Anthropic's closed-source Claude model's ability to use software via language
Key quotes
- "Visualization of thought prompting to elicit the mind's eye of LLMs for spatial reasoning"
- "VoT prompting proposed in this paper consistently induces LLMs to visualize the reasoning steps and inform subsequent steps"
- "The first open source large action model/generalist artificial narrow intelligence that controls complete human user interfaces only by using natural language"
This summary contains AI-generated information and may have important inaccuracies or omissions.