Pith Number

pith:DMNDIYZ6

pith:2026:DMNDIYZ6LD3KV44VFERAOOUZQY

not attested not anchored not stored refs pending

From Pixels to BFS: High Maze Accuracy Does Not Imply Visual Planning

Alberto G. Rodriguez Salgado

Multimodal models solve maze images by converting them to text grids and enumerating paths token by token rather than through visual planning.

arxiv:2603.26839 v2 · 2026-03-27 · cs.LG · cs.CV

Open paper page JSON Open Graph Bundle Merged state Verified badge What is a Pith Number?

Add to your LaTeX paper

\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{DMNDIYZ6LD3KV44VFERAOOUZQY}

Prints a linked badge after your title and injects PDF metadata. Compiles on arXiv. Learn more · Embed verified badge

Record completeness

1 Bitcoin timestamp

2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

✓ Portable graph bundle live · download bundle · merged state

The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

MazeBench therefore shows that high accuracy on visual planning tasks does not imply human-like spatial understanding.

C2weakest assumption

That the two-stage image-to-grid plus token enumeration strategy observed in traces is the dominant mechanism driving performance rather than an artifact of the specific prompting or model configurations tested.

C3one line summary

Multimodal models achieve high maze accuracy by translating images to text grids and performing token-level BFS search, not through visual planning.

Formal links

2 machine-checked theorem links

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-18T03:09:22.499408Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

1b1a34633e58f6aaf3952922073a99861b264bfad4e1494fc56067e07e3f0740

Aliases

arxiv: 2603.26839 · arxiv_version: 2603.26839v2 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2603.26839 · pith_short_12: DMNDIYZ6LD3K · pith_short_16: DMNDIYZ6LD3KV44V · pith_short_8: DMNDIYZ6

Agent API

Resolver JSON Graph JSON Events JSON Schema Signing key

Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/DMNDIYZ6LD3KV44VFERAOOUZQY \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: 1b1a34633e58f6aaf3952922073a99861b264bfad4e1494fc56067e07e3f0740

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "7111c05fde22dd9f75c971e49ca175237b4901d279b78cd95c37ba1faa83da92",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [
      "cs.CV"
    ],
    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.LG",
    "submitted_at": "2026-03-27T08:10:05Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "643eafe4d72694bb367d0827179831d9525fd75bafb8ce520b2208c13252d20c"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2603.26839",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 2
  }
}