The Cartesian Shortcut: Re-evaluate Vision Reasoning in Polar Coordinate Space

ArXi:2605.09883v1 Announce Type: cross As current Multimodal Large Language Models rapidly saturate canonical visual reasoning benchmarks, a key question emerges: do these strong scores genuinely reflect robust visual understanding? We identify a pervasive vulnerability, the \textbf{Cartesian Shortcut}: visual reasoning benchmarks prevalently build on orthogonal grid-based layouts that can be readily discretized into explicit textual coordinates. Models systematically exploit this property, heavily leveraging text-based deductive reasoning to assist visual problem-solving.