The Cartesian Shortcut: Re-evaluate Vision Reasoning in Polar Coordinate Space
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 Cartesian Shortcut: models frequently discretize the orthogonal grid-based layouts prevalent in visual reasoning benchmarks into explicit textual coordinates, offloading reasoning from visual perception to text-based deduction. To re-evaluate visual reasoning when this shortcut is unavailable, we introduce Polaris-Bench, which re-formulates 53 visual reasoning tasks in Polar coordinate space with paired Cartesian counterparts that preserve task semantics, ...
| Authors | Xia Hu, Zhenrui Yue, Brian Potetz et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 11 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 30 September 2026 |
Models and datasets referencing this paper
- google/polaris-benchDataset
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