Deeper Thought, Weaker Aim: Understanding and Mitigating Perceptual Impairment during Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models

arXiv:2603.14184v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) often suffer from perceptual impairments under extended reasoning modes, particularly in visual question answering (VQA) tasks. We identify attention dispersion as the underlying cause: during multi-step reasoning, the model's visual attention becomes scattered and drifts away from question-relevant regions, effectively "losing focus" on the visual input. To better understand this phenomenon, we analyze the attention maps of MLLMs and observe that reasoning prompts significantly reduce attention

Source: arXiv cs.AI — read the full report at the original publisher.

This is a curated wire item. The Continuum Brief does not republish full third-party articles; this entry links to the original source.