Pith. sign in

REVIEW 16 cited by

Image-of-Thought Prompting for Visual Reasoning Refinement in Multimodal Large Language Models

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2405.13872 v2 pith:MEMFY45K submitted 2024-05-22 cs.AI cs.CLcs.CV

Image-of-Thought Prompting for Visual Reasoning Refinement in Multimodal Large Language Models

classification cs.AI cs.CLcs.CV
keywords visualmultimodalreasoningpromptingcomplexlargemllmsmodels
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
read the original abstract

Recent advancements in Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and related rationale-based works have significantly improved the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in complex reasoning tasks. With the evolution of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), enhancing their capability to tackle complex multimodal reasoning problems is a crucial frontier. However, incorporating multimodal rationales in CoT has yet to be thoroughly investigated. We propose the Image-of-Thought (IoT) prompting method, which helps MLLMs to extract visual rationales step-by-step. Specifically, IoT prompting can automatically design critical visual information extraction operations based on the input images and questions. Each step of visual information refinement identifies specific visual rationales that support answers to complex visual reasoning questions. Beyond the textual CoT, IoT simultaneously utilizes visual and textual rationales to help MLLMs understand complex multimodal information. IoT prompting has improved zero-shot visual reasoning performance across various visual understanding tasks in different MLLMs. Moreover, the step-by-step visual feature explanations generated by IoT prompting elucidate the visual reasoning process, aiding in analyzing the cognitive processes of large multimodal models

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 16 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. LAGO: Language-Guided Adaptive Object-Region Focus for Zero-Shot Visual-Text Alignment

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    LAGO achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance with fewer image regions by using class-agnostic object discovery followed by confidence-controlled language-guided refinement and dual-channel aggregation.

  2. AnchorSeg: Language Grounded Query Banks for Reasoning Segmentation

    cs.CV 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    AnchorSeg uses ordered query banks of latent reasoning tokens plus a spatial anchor token and a Token-Mask Cycle Consistency loss to achieve 67.7% gIoU and 68.1% cIoU on the ReasonSeg benchmark.

  3. Enhancing MLLM Spatial Understanding via Active 3D Scene Exploration for Multi-Perspective Reasoning

    cs.CV 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    A training-free Visual Chain-of-Thought framework reconstructs high-fidelity 3D meshes from single images and iteratively synthesizes optimal novel views to enhance MLLM spatial comprehension on benchmarks like 3DSRBench.

  4. DeltaV: Thinking with Visual State Updates in Unified Large Multimodal Models

    cs.CV 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    Modeling sparse visual state updates instead of full images cuts generated visual tokens ~55.6% and improves interleaved multimodal reasoning over full-image ULMMs.

  5. Spectral-Progressive Thought Flow for Lightweight Multimodal Reasoning

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    SpecFlow represents intermediate visual thoughts in fixed-size DCT space and uses classifier-free guidance to steer updates from textual thoughts, achieving up to 2.1x lower computation and KV cache costs.

  6. VESTA: Visual Exploration with Statistical Tool Agents

    cs.AI 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    VESTA introduces dynamic tool creation for VLMs that outperforms static-tool and no-tool baselines on distribution fitting, time series, and astronomy tasks in the new DAWN benchmark.

  7. Vision-OPD: Learning to See Fine Details for Multimodal LLMs via On-Policy Self-Distillation

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Vision-OPD transfers an MLLM's privileged regional perception to its full-image policy through on-policy token-level self-distillation, yielding competitive results on fine-grained visual benchmarks.

  8. Vision-OPD: Learning to See Fine Details for Multimodal LLMs via On-Policy Self-Distillation

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Vision-OPD uses on-policy self-distillation from crop-conditioned to full-image policies within the same MLLM to close the regional-to-global perception gap.

  9. Visual Latents Know More Than They Say: Unsilencing Latent Reasoning in MLLMs

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Visual latents in MLLMs are systematically silenced by autoregressive training but can be unsilenced at inference via query-guided contrastive alignment followed by a confidence-progression reward.

  10. Mull-Tokens: Modality-Agnostic Latent Thinking

    cs.CV 2025-12 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Mull-Tokens are modality-agnostic latent tokens that enable free-form multimodal thinking and deliver up to 16% gains on spatial reasoning benchmarks.

  11. GoViG: Goal-Conditioned Visual Navigation Instruction Generation via Multimodal Reasoning

    cs.CV 2025-08 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    GoViG decomposes goal-conditioned navigation instruction generation into visual state prediction and instruction synthesis using an autoregressive multimodal LLM with one-pass and interleaved reasoning, showing gains ...

  12. Grounded Reinforcement Learning for Visual Reasoning

    cs.CV 2025-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    ViGoRL introduces visually grounded RL that anchors reasoning steps to image coordinates and uses multi-turn zooming to outperform standard RL and supervised baselines on spatial and GUI reasoning benchmarks.

  13. From Structure to Synergy: A Survey of Vision-Language Perception Paradigm Evolution in Multimodal Large Language Models

    cs.CL 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    The survey formalizes MLLM perception as a unified vision-language capability and traces its evolution via a new five-stage taxonomy while outlining future challenges.

  14. Mixture-of-Visual-Thoughts: Exploring Context-Adaptive Reasoning Mode Selection for General Visual Reasoning

    cs.AI 2025-09 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    MoVT unifies different visual reasoning modes in a single model and uses the AdaVaR two-stage framework with supervised cold-start and RL via AdaGRPO to enable context-adaptive mode selection, yielding consistent gain...

  15. Bridging Brains and Machines: A Unified Frontier in Neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence, and Neuromorphic Systems

    q-bio.NC 2025-07 unverdicted novelty 2.0

    A position and survey paper that identifies convergence between neuroscience, AGI, and neuromorphic computing and outlines four key integration challenges.

  16. Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning: A Comprehensive Survey

    cs.CV 2025-03 unverdicted novelty 2.0

    The paper provides the first comprehensive survey of multimodal chain-of-thought reasoning, including foundational concepts, a taxonomy of methodologies, application analyses, challenges, and future directions.