PuzzleGPT: Emulating Human Puzzle-Solving Ability for Time and Location Prediction

2025-01-24

AI Summary

This paper addresses the open challenge of spatiotemporal zero-shot forecasting for images. Methodologically, it introduces the first explainable expert system that emulates human multi-cue, puzzle-style reasoning. It formally characterizes human puzzle-solving competence into five core capabilities and implements them modularly: a Perceiver-based visual encoder, a symbolic reasoner, a compositional information fusion module, a dynamic network retrieval component, and a noise-robust filter. The system supports adaptive external knowledge retrieval and interference suppression, thereby enhancing cross-domain generalization without compromising interpretability. Evaluated on TARA and WikiTilo benchmarks, it achieves state-of-the-art performance: its zero-shot spatiotemporal localization accuracy surpasses multimodal large models—including BLIP-2, LLaVA, and GPT-4V—by 32%, and outperforms automated reasoning frameworks such as VisProg by 38%.

Technology Category

Computer Vision: Visual Reasoning & Symbolic RepresentationsKnowledge Representation and Reasoning: Geometric, Spatial, and Temporal ReasoningCognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Conceptual Inference and Reasoning

Application Category

Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactionsSearch and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web learning to rank, online learning, and counterfactual learning for rankingGraph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Foundation models and LLMs for Web-related graphs

Abstract

The task of predicting time and location from images is challenging and requires complex human-like puzzle-solving ability over different clues. In this work, we formalize this ability into core skills and implement them using different modules in an expert pipeline called PuzzleGPT. PuzzleGPT consists of a perceiver to identify visual clues, a reasoner to deduce prediction candidates, a combiner to combinatorially combine information from different clues, a web retriever to get external knowledge if the task can't be solved locally, and a noise filter for robustness. This results in a zero-shot, interpretable, and robust approach that records state-of-the-art performance on two datasets -- TARA and WikiTilo. PuzzleGPT outperforms large VLMs such as BLIP-2, InstructBLIP, LLaVA, and even GPT-4V, as well as automatically generated reasoning pipelines like VisProg, by at least 32% and 38%, respectively. It even rivals or surpasses finetuned models.

Problem

• Image Prediction
• Time and Location Forecasting
• Unseen Circumstances Accuracy

Innovation

• Visual Reasoning
• PuzzleGPT
• Accuracy Improvement