Mitigating Visual Forgetting via Take-along Visual Conditioning for Multi-modal Long CoT Reasoning

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Main Authors: Sun, Hai-Long, Sun, Zhun, Peng, Houwen, Ye, Han-Jia
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Sun, Hai-Long
Sun, Zhun
Peng, Houwen
Ye, Han-Jia
author_facet Sun, Hai-Long
Sun, Zhun
Peng, Houwen
Ye, Han-Jia
contents Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated enhanced reasoning capabilities, evolving from Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting to advanced, product-oriented solutions like OpenAI o1. During our re-implementation of this model, we noticed that in multimodal tasks requiring visual input (e.g., geometry problems), Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) struggle to maintain focus on the visual information, in other words, MLLMs suffer from a gradual decline in attention to visual information as reasoning progresses, causing text-over-relied outputs. To investigate this, we ablate image inputs during long-chain reasoning. Concretely, we truncate the reasoning process midway, then re-complete the reasoning process with the input image removed. We observe only a ~2% accuracy drop on MathVista's test-hard subset, revealing the model's textual outputs dominate the following reasoning process. Motivated by this, we propose Take-along Visual Conditioning (TVC), a strategy that shifts image input to critical reasoning stages and compresses redundant visual tokens via dynamic pruning. This methodology helps the model retain attention to the visual components throughout the reasoning. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on average across five mathematical reasoning benchmarks (+3.4 points vs previous sota), demonstrating the effectiveness of TVC in enhancing multimodal reasoning systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_13360
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mitigating Visual Forgetting via Take-along Visual Conditioning for Multi-modal Long CoT Reasoning
Sun, Hai-Long
Sun, Zhun
Peng, Houwen
Ye, Han-Jia
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated enhanced reasoning capabilities, evolving from Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting to advanced, product-oriented solutions like OpenAI o1. During our re-implementation of this model, we noticed that in multimodal tasks requiring visual input (e.g., geometry problems), Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) struggle to maintain focus on the visual information, in other words, MLLMs suffer from a gradual decline in attention to visual information as reasoning progresses, causing text-over-relied outputs. To investigate this, we ablate image inputs during long-chain reasoning. Concretely, we truncate the reasoning process midway, then re-complete the reasoning process with the input image removed. We observe only a ~2% accuracy drop on MathVista's test-hard subset, revealing the model's textual outputs dominate the following reasoning process. Motivated by this, we propose Take-along Visual Conditioning (TVC), a strategy that shifts image input to critical reasoning stages and compresses redundant visual tokens via dynamic pruning. This methodology helps the model retain attention to the visual components throughout the reasoning. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on average across five mathematical reasoning benchmarks (+3.4 points vs previous sota), demonstrating the effectiveness of TVC in enhancing multimodal reasoning systems.
title Mitigating Visual Forgetting via Take-along Visual Conditioning for Multi-modal Long CoT Reasoning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.13360