2026
Deeper Thought, Weaker Aim: Understanding and Mitigating Perceptual Impairment during Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models
CVPR 2026
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, model's visual attention becomes scattered a