arxivcs.CVcs.AI2026-07-24
Visual Saliency Steering Distillation for Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
Hao Yang, Jin Wang, Xuejie Zhang
Multimodal chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning integrates visual and textual cues through step-by-step inference. In small models with limited token budgets, modality-interaction fusion often suppresses tiny cross-modal differences. In particular, multimodal CoT often struggles when…