← Findings
LowReasoningReviewer-confirmedPublished

Spatial and geometric reasoning errors

Models struggle with relative positions, rotations, and simple geometric/visual reasoning.

Published June 26, 2026

Reproducibility
Often
Severity
Low
Confidence
Reviewer-confirmed

Details

Tasks involving spatial relations ('what's left of X after rotating'), grid navigation, or geometry yield frequent errors, including in multimodal settings where the model misreads layout.

Found with

🔬 Boundary & edge-case testing

Evidence

Q: After a 90° clockwise rotation, where is the top-left object?
A: Incorrect quadrant.
Illustrative example — see the linked reference for the documented evidence.

Affected versions

Anthropic · claude-opus-4-8OpenAI · gpt-4oGoogle · gemini-2.0-flash

References

Reasoning failureMultimodal

Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.03991

Cite this

Qlarify Labs. (2026). Spatial and geometric reasoning errors. Retrieved from https://labs.qlarify.fi/findings/spatial-reasoning-errors