Can Vision-Language Models See Squares? Text-Recognition Mediates Spatial Reasoning Across Three Model Families
arXiv:2602.15950v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a simple experiment that exposes a fundamental limitation in vision-language models (VLMs): the inability to accurately localize filled cells in binary grids when those cells lack textual identity. We generate fifteen 15×15 grids with varying density (10.7%-41.8% filled cells) and render each as two image types — text symbols (. and #) and filled squares without gridlines — then ask three frontier VLMs (Claude Opus, ChatGPT 5.2, and Gemini 3 Thinking) […]