Pith Number

pith:LG5OKHXJ

pith:2026:LG5OKHXJGHRS7B2ZX5RDKTUBVF

not attested not anchored not stored refs pending

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

Brian Potetz, Chun-Ta Lu, Howard Zhou, Leonidas Guibas, Xia Hu, Zhenrui Yue, Zhicheng Wang

Current multimodal models achieve high visual reasoning scores by exploiting grid-based coordinates rather than understanding spatial relationships directly.

arxiv:2605.09883 v2 · 2026-05-11 · cs.CV · cs.AI

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\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{LG5OKHXJGHRS7B2ZX5RDKTUBVF}

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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

frontier models achieving 70--83% on Cartesian layouts collapse to 31--39% on Polar equivalents, with degradation persisting even under complete logical equivalence.

C2weakest assumption

Re-formulating the 53 tasks in polar coordinates preserves identical logical constraints, task semantics, and difficulty levels without introducing unrelated visual or reasoning challenges.

C3one line summary

MLLMs scoring 70-83% on Cartesian visual tasks drop to 31-39% on logically equivalent polar versions, exposing reliance on grid discretization shortcuts instead of topology-invariant reasoning.

Formal links

2 machine-checked theorem links

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-06-02T01:03:48.359039Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

59bae51ee931e32f8759bf62354e81a9774bee397df4ab0050033e892b583ce6

Aliases

arxiv: 2605.09883 · arxiv_version: 2605.09883v2 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2605.09883 · pith_short_12: LG5OKHXJGHRS · pith_short_16: LG5OKHXJGHRS7B2Z · pith_short_8: LG5OKHXJ

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/LG5OKHXJGHRS7B2ZX5RDKTUBVF \
  | 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: 59bae51ee931e32f8759bf62354e81a9774bee397df4ab0050033e892b583ce6

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "d3ad5e1b5375361286f17b144713d09ba955fb5529b0bd13e7561262516f1bb1",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [
      "cs.AI"
    ],
    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.CV",
    "submitted_at": "2026-05-11T02:16:48Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "cae32c8f94241fd2acec258b15935b72ecb8b85a67d2e53c2bb0a1d973c3da9c"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2605.09883",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 2
  }
}