The Ebb and Flow of Multimodal Focus: Scheduling Visual Relay Windows for Grounded VLM Reasoning
Vision-language models increasingly succeed on multimodal reasoning benchmarks, yet their visual evidence often becomes unstable once it enters the language stack, weakening evidence-grounded reasoning. To understand this fragility, we examine the internal dynamics of VLMs through a mechanistic lens and uncover a stable three-stage redistribution of multimodal attention focus across depth: an early question-conditioned organization, a critical middle visual-dominant relay, and a late return to answer formation. We operationalize the middle phase as the Visual Relay Window (VRW), and show that its geometry varies with task demand, is causally tied to grounded generation, and distinguishes ...
| Authors | Wencheng Ye, Yi Bin, Yujuan Ding et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 13 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 17 July 2026 |
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