Position Rebinding Cache Reuse: Replay-Free Visual Revisiting for Interleaved Multimodal Reasoning

Abstract

Interleaved multimodal reasoning improves visual grounding by revisiting visual evidence during multi-step generation, yet existing methods typically rely on token replay, repeatedly forwarding selected visual tokens. A natural shortcut is to reuse the historical visual key-value (KV) cache directly. However, we identify a critical failure mode of this strategy: cached visual keys are already bound to their original positional context. Such stale positional binding distorts attention under later decoding contexts and can trigger severe autoregressive decoding collapse. This failure suggests that effective cache reuse requires reconstructing visual evidence under positions compatible with the current decoding state, rather than directly copying position-bound historical cache entries. To this end, we propose Position Rebinding Cache Reuse (PRCR), a cache-level framework for replay-free visual revisiting. PRCR stores raw visual KV cache together with their original spatial coordinates, then reassigns position-compatible coordinates to select entries and rebinds their keys before injecting the reconstructed cache into the active decoder cache. This design reuses historical visual evidence while preserving textual positional continuity and relative visual structure. Experiments across multiple multimodal reasoning benchmarks show that PRCR achieves replay-level or better performance, improving average accuracy by 5 percent and reducing visual-revisiting computation by up to tens of thousands of times.