McPheat, L., Kaur, N., Blackwell, R.E. et al. (3 more authors) (2025) DecompSR: A dataset for decomposed analyses of compositional multihop spatial reasoning. [Preprint - arXiv]
Abstract
We introduce DecompSR, decomposed spatial reasoning, a large benchmark dataset (over 5m datapoints) and generation framework designed to analyse compositional spatial reasoning ability. The generation of DecompSR allows users to independently vary several aspects of compositionality, namely: productivity (reasoning depth), substitutivity (entity and linguistic variability), overgeneralisation (input order, distractors) and systematicity (novel linguistic elements). DecompSR is built procedurally in a manner which makes it is correct by construction, which is independently verified using a symbolic solver to guarantee the correctness of the dataset. DecompSR is comprehensively benchmarked across a host of Large Language Models (LLMs) where we show that LLMs struggle with productive and systematic generalisation in spatial reasoning tasks whereas they are more robust to linguistic variation. DecompSR provides a provably correct and rigorous benchmarking dataset with a novel ability to independently vary the degrees of several key aspects of compositionality, allowing for robust and fine-grained probing of the compositional reasoning abilities of LLMs.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Preprint |
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| Authors/Creators: |
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| Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | This is an open access preprint under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( CC BY 4.0.) |
| Dates: |
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| Institution: | The University of Leeds |
| Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Engineering & Physical Sciences (Leeds) > School of Computing (Leeds) |
| Funding Information: | Funder Grant number Alan Turing Institute Not Known |
| Date Deposited: | 19 Jan 2026 15:59 |
| Last Modified: | 19 Jan 2026 15:59 |
| Identification Number: | 10.48550/arXiv.2511.02627 |
| Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:236372 |

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