Why Vision Fails as a Universal Bridge: Rectifying Modality Asynchrony in Multilingual MLLMs
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) exhibit substantial performance degradation in non-English visual reasoning, despite the strong multilingual competence of their text-only backbones. While mechanistic evidence from text-only models suggests that non-English inputs are routed through an English-centric latent space, the multimodal implications of this phenomenon remain unexplored. Through rigorous mechanistic analysis, we identify the \textbf{Ghost Anchor} phenomenon: a temporal modality asynchrony where linguistic translation to the English semantic manifold completes in early layers, while visual semanticization remains immature. Consequently, visual signals are physically presen...
| Authors | Yihang Du, Juhao Liang, Zhengzhao Lai et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 15 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 15 August 2026 |
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