Do multimodal models imagine electric sheep?

📰 ArXiv cs.AI

Discover how multimodal models develop mental imagery to solve spatial puzzles, and learn to apply this concept to your own AI projects

advanced Published 12 May 2026
Action Steps
  1. Fine-tune a multimodal model like Qwen3.5 VLM on diverse visual reasoning tasks to develop its mental imagery capabilities
  2. Use open-loop sequence prediction to supervise the model and improve its performance on tasks like tangram, jigsaw, and sokoban
  3. Apply the concept of mental imagery to solve spatial puzzles and understand geometry, spatial relationships, and the consequences of actions
  4. Evaluate the model's performance on 3D mental rotation and rush hour tasks to assess its ability to reason visually
  5. Compare the results of the fine-tuned model with other state-of-the-art models to identify areas for improvement
Who Needs to Know This

AI researchers and engineers working on multimodal models can benefit from understanding how these models develop mental imagery, and apply this knowledge to improve their models' performance on visual reasoning tasks

Key Insight

💡 Multimodal models can develop mental imagery, enabling them to solve complex visual reasoning tasks and understand spatial relationships

Share This
🤖 Multimodal models can develop mental imagery to solve spatial puzzles! 📝 New research on Qwen3.5 VLM reveals the potential of these models to reason visually and understand geometry and spatial relationships

Key Takeaways

Discover how multimodal models develop mental imagery to solve spatial puzzles, and learn to apply this concept to your own AI projects

Full Article

Title: Do multimodal models imagine electric sheep?

Abstract:
arXiv:2605.09693v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Yes. We find that large multimodal models develop mental imagery when solving spatial puzzles, and they do imagine sheep when solving sheep puzzles. We fine-tune a Qwen3.5 VLM to solve twelve diverse visual reasoning tasks -- including tangram, jigsaw, sokoban, 3D mental rotation, and rush hour -- that require understanding geometry, spatial relationships, and the consequences of actions. By supervising the model to predict the open-loop sequence
Read full paper → ← Back to Reads

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