Visual perspective-taking, an ability to envision others’ perspectives from a single self-perspective, is vital in human-robot interactions. Thus, we introduce a human-centric visual grounding task and a dataset to evaluate this ability. Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have shown potential for inferring others’ perspectives, yet are insensitive to information differences induced by slight perspective changes. To address this problem, we propose a top-view enhanced perspective transformation (TEP) method, which decomposes the transition from robot to human perspectives through an abstract top-view representation. It unifies perspectives and facilitates the capture of information differences from diverse perspectives. Experimental results show that TEP improves performance by up to 18%, exhibits perspective-taking abilities across various perspectives, and generalizes effectively to robotic and dynamic scenarios.

Chain-of-thought (CoT), tree-of-thought (ToT), and related techniques work surprisingly well in practice for some complex reasoning tasks with Large Language Models (LLMs), but why? This work seeks the underlying reasons by conducting experimental case studies and linking the performance benefits to well-established sample and computational complexity principles in machine learning. We experimented with six reasoning tasks, ranging from grade school math, air travel planning, ..., to Blocksworld. The results suggest that (i) both CoT and ToT benefit significantly from task decomposition, which breaks a complex reasoning task into a sequence of steps with low sample complexity and explicitly outlines the reasoning structure; (ii) for computationally hard reasoning tasks, the more sophisticated tree structure of ToT outperforms the linear structure of CoT; (iii) explicitly annotating important variables is important for good performance. These findings provide useful guidelines for using LLM in solving reasoning tasks in practice.