Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in vision-language understanding, yet how they internally integrate visual and textual information remains poorly understood. To bridge this gap, we perform a systematic layer-wise masking analysis across multiple architectures, revealing how visual-text fusion evolves within MLLMs. The results show that fusion emerges at several specific layers rather than being uniformly distributed across the network, and certain models exhibit a late-stage "review" phenomenon where visual signals are reactivated before output generation. Besides, we further analyze layer-wise attention evolution and observe persistent high-attention noise on irrelevant regions, along with gradually increasing attention on text-aligned areas. Guided by these insights, we introduce a training-free contrastive attention framework that models the transformation between early fusion and final layers to highlight meaningful attention shifts. Extensive experiments across various MLLMs and benchmarks validate our analysis and demonstrate that the proposed approach improves multimodal reasoning performance.Code will be released.
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cs.CV · cs.CL
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表
Interpreting natural-language commands to localize target objects is critical for autonomous driving (AD). Existing visual grounding (VG) methods in AD struggle with ambiguous, context-dependent instructions, as they lack reasoning over 3D spatial relations and anticipated scene evolution. Grounded in the principles of world models, we propose ThinkDeeper, a framework that reasons about future spatial states before making grounding decisions. At its core is a Spatial-Aware World Model (SA-WM) that learns to reason ahead by distilling the current scene into a command-aware latent state and rolling out a sequence of future latent states, providing forward-looking cues for disambiguation. Complementing this, a hypergraph-guided decoder then hierarchically fuses these states with the multimodal input, capturing higher-order spatial dependencies for robust localization. In addition, we present DrivePilot, a multi-source VG dataset in AD, featuring semantic annotations generated by a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Chain-of-Thought (CoT)-prompted LLM pipeline. Empirical results on six benchmarks show that ThinkDeeper outperforms SOTA baselines on DrivePilot, MoCAD, Talk2Car, and RefCOCO/+/g. Notably, it also exhibits strong robustness and efficiency in challenging scenarios (long-text, multi-agent, ambiguity) and retains superior performance even when trained on 50% of the data.
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cs.CV · cs.CL · cs.MA
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表