Chain-of-Thought Degrades Visual Spatial Reasoning Capabilities of Multimodal LLMs
Summary
Research shows Chain-of-Thought prompting harms visual-spatial reasoning in multimodal LLMs due to shortcut learning and hallucinating visual details from text alone.
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Paper page - Chain-of-Thought Degrades Visual Spatial Reasoning Capabilities of Multimodal LLMs
Source: https://huggingface.co/papers/2604.16060
Abstract
Chain-of-Thought prompting in multimodal reasoning models degrades performance in visual spatial reasoning due to shortcut learning and hallucination of visual details from text alone.
Multimodal Reasoning Models(MRMs) leveragingChain-of-Thought(CoT) based thinking have revolutionized mathematical and logical problem-solving. However, we show that this paradigm struggles with generalized spatial intelligence. We perform a comprehensive evaluation of seventeen models across thirteen spatial benchmarks and identify a critical gap: CoT prompting consistently degrades performance invisual spatial reasoning. Furthermore, through a novel No-Image++ ablation, we demonstrate that MRMs and CoT prompted MLMs suffer from severeshortcut learning, and hallucinate visual details from textual priors even when the image is absent. These findings challenge the efficacy of text-only CoT for spatial tasks and underscore the need for vision-centric reasoning paradigms.
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