{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/sparc-a-spatial-pathfinding-reasoning","title":"SPaRC: A Spatial Pathfinding Reasoning Challenge","arxiv_id":"2505.16686","date":"2025-05-22","proceeding":null,"authors":["Lars Benedikt Kaesberg","Jan Philip Wahle","Terry Ruas","Bela Gipp"],"abstract":"Existing reasoning datasets saturate and fail to test abstract, multi-step problems, especially pathfinding and complex rule constraint satisfaction. We introduce SPaRC (Spatial Pathfinding Reasoning Challenge), a dataset of 1,000 2D grid pathfinding puzzles to evaluate spatial and symbolic reasoning, requiring step-by-step planning with arithmetic and geometric rules. Humans achieve near-perfect accuracy (98.0%; 94.5% on hard puzzles), while the best reasoning models, such as o4-mini, struggle (15.8%; 1.1% on hard puzzles). Models often generate invalid paths (>50% of puzzles for o4-mini), and reasoning tokens reveal they make errors in navigation and spatial logic. Unlike humans, who take longer on hard puzzles, models fail to scale test-time compute with difficulty. Allowing models to make multiple solution attempts improves accuracy, suggesting potential for better spatial reasoning with improved training and efficient test-time scaling methods. SPaRC can be used as a window into models' spatial reasoning limitations and drive research toward new methods that excel in abstract, multi-step problem-solving.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.16686v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16686v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"sparc-a-spatial-pathfinding-reasoning","repo_url":"https://github.com/lkaesberg/sparc","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"spatial-reasoning","task_name":"Spatial Reasoning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2505.16686","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}