arXiv AI September 25, 2026 By Jiaqi Deng, Zonghan Wu, Zhan Heng, Xiaoshui Huang, Huan Huo, Guandong Xu

Mind What Matters for Reasoning: Aligning Cross-Modal Attention via Selective Probability Mass Concentration

The paper introduces Selective Probability Mass Concentration (sPMC), a training framework that strengthens implicit visual grounding in multimodal large language models by selectively regularizing attention heads most responsive to visual evidence. sPMC treats attention over visual tokens as a spatial probability distribution and encourages mass to concentrate on semantically relevant regions using segmentation-derived priors, while leaving other heads unconstrained. Across six multimodal benchmarks, sPMC yields an average zero‑shot improvement of 3% and gains up to 11.3% for various models by regularizing only 3%–15% of their attention heads.

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arXiv AI

1d ago

Skip the Talk, Re-Focus on Vision: Latent Reasoning for Reasoning Segmentation in Multimodal Large Language Models

The paper introduces LIRSeg, a method that replaces explicit Chain-of-Thought reasoning in multimodal large language models with a compact set of learnable latent tokens for reasoning segmentation. LIRSeg is trained in two stages—spatial alignment and GRPO—while employing extreme-advantage sampling, decoupled exploration-stability updates, and latent diversity amplification to enhance token informativeness. Experiments show that LIRSeg improves segmentation accuracy and reasoning efficiency, achieving significant gIoU gains over the VisionReasoner baseline and reducing reasoning tokens by about 16×.

By Tianhang Guo, Yulin He, Wei Chen, Wenjuan Zhou, Yuhang Li, Xinbiao Gan

llms agents computer-vision robotics multimodal benchmarks safety

arXiv AI

Aug 5

Balancing Efficiency and Efficacy: Training-Free Attention-Guided Switching Between Explicit and Latent Thoughts for MLLMs

arXiv:2608. 03450v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) requires both fine-grained visual perception and rigorous logical deduction.

By Haoqian Kang, Liupeng Li, Kuofeng Gao, Jinpeng Wang, Zhenyu Lu, Bin Chen, Ke Chen, Yaowei Wang

llms multimodal benchmarks safety

arXiv AI

Jun 2

LookWise: Knowing When and Where to Look for Fine-Grained Visual Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models

arXiv:2603. 00171v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are shifting towards "Thinking with Images" by actively exploring image details.

By Yuxiang Shen, Hailong Huang, Zhenkun Gao, Xueheng Li, Man Zhou, Chengjun Xie, Haoxuan Che, Xuanhua He, Jie Zhang

llms multimodal benchmarks

arXiv AI

Aug 7

Look Twice: Training-Free Evidence Highlighting for Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering

arXiv:2604. 01280v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA) requires Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to identify and combine fine-grained visual cues with retrieved textual evidence.

By Marco Morini, Sara Sarto, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi, Rita Cucchiara

llms nlp multimodal benchmarks

arXiv AI

Jul 28

Disentangling Semantic Attention from Structural Bias in the Attention Manifold

arXiv:2607. 24017v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The empirical success of attention mechanism in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often obscures its inherent, subtle flaws.

By Pengkun Jiao, Bin Zhu, Jingjing Chen, Yu-gang Jiang

llms multimodal benchmarks safety

arXiv Machine Learning

Jun 26

Staying VIGILant: Mitigating Visual Laziness via Counterfactual Visual Alignment in MLLMs

arXiv:2606. 26387v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) extend large language models (LLMs) with visual perception, enabling joint reasoning over images and text.

By Xi Xiao, Chen Liu, Chih-Ting Liao, Yunbei Zhang, Qizhen Lan, Yuxiang Wei, Lin Zhao, Janet Wang, Jianyang Gu, Muchao Ye, Tianyang Wang, Hao Xu

llms reinforcement-learning multimodal benchmarks safety

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Skip the Talk, Re-Focus on Vision: Latent Reasoning for Reasoning Segmentation in Multimodal Large Language Models

Balancing Efficiency and Efficacy: Training-Free Attention-Guided Switching Between Explicit and Latent Thoughts for MLLMs

LookWise: Knowing When and Where to Look for Fine-Grained Visual Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models

Look Twice: Training-Free Evidence Highlighting for Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering

Disentangling Semantic Attention from Structural Bias in the Attention Manifold

Staying VIGILant: Mitigating Visual Laziness via Counterfactual Visual Alignment in MLLMs