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arXiv · 2606.08511

Look Less, Reason More: Block-wise Attention Skipping for Efficient Multimodal LLMs

Jie Ma·Zhike Qiu·Jiayi Ji·Xiaoshuai Sun·Rongrong Ji
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Abstract

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) face a significant inference bottleneck due to the quadratic computational cost of self-attention over long visual token sequences. However, we identify a critical inefficiency in current architectures: Visual Attention Saturation. Our analysis reveals that visual tokens rapidly establish their spatial structure and intra-modal relationships in early layers, rendering visual-to-visual self-attention in deeper layers computationally redundant. Conversely, Feed-Forward Networks (FFNs) in these layers remain essential for projecting visual features into the evolving textual semantic space. Leveraging this insight, we present Visual-Skip (V-Skip), a training-free inference paradigm that decouples spatial interaction from semantic evolution. Rather than discarding tokens, V-Skip imposes block-wise structured sparsity by selectively bypassing saturated visual self-attention modules. Furthermore, recognizing that varying downstream tasks demand distinct reasoning depths, V-Skip employs a lightweight, few-shot calibration to dynamically route the task-optimal sparsity path. Extensive experiments demonstrate that V-Skip effectively bypasses redundant vision attention to achieve block-wise sparsity, maintaining a 94.16% to 100.31% performance retention across diverse MLLMs. Ultimately, we prove that to reason more effectively, models do not need to discard what they see -- they simply need to "look less" at the right depth.

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Jie Ma, Zhike Qiu, Jiayi Ji, Xiaoshuai Sun, Rongrong Ji. 2026-06-07. Look Less, Reason More: Block-wise Attention Skipping for Efficient Multimodal LLMs. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.08511

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