Mitigating Visual Forgetting via Take-along Visual Conditioning for
  Multi-modal Long CoT Reasoning
Authors: name: Hai-Long Sun; name: Zhun Sun; name: Houwen Peng; name: Han-Jia Ye
Published: 2025-03-17 16:45:12

Abstract: 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% vs previous sota), demonstrating the effectiveness of TVC in
enhancing multimodal reasoning systems.