Cantor: Inspiring Multimodal Chain-of-Thought of MLLM

TL;DR

Cantor introduces a novel multimodal chain-of-thought framework for large language models that enhances visual reasoning by integrating visual analysis and cognitive functions, leading to significant performance improvements without additional fine-tuning.

Contribution

The paper proposes a perception-decision architecture for multimodal CoT, enabling better visual reasoning in MLLMs through integrated visual analysis and higher-level cognitive functions.

Findings

Significant performance improvements on complex visual reasoning datasets.

Effective without fine-tuning or ground-truth rationales.

Demonstrates the importance of converging visual context and reasoning.

Abstract

With the advent of large language models(LLMs) enhanced by the chain-of-thought(CoT) methodology, visual reasoning problem is usually decomposed into manageable sub-tasks and tackled sequentially with various external tools. However, such a paradigm faces the challenge of the potential "determining hallucinations" in decision-making due to insufficient visual information and the limitation of low-level perception tools that fail to provide abstract summaries necessary for comprehensive reasoning. We argue that converging visual context acquisition and logical reasoning is pivotal for tackling visual reasoning tasks. This paper delves into the realm of multimodal CoT to solve intricate visual reasoning tasks with multimodal large language models(MLLMs) and their cognitive capability. To this end, we propose an innovative multimodal CoT framework, termed Cantor, characterized by a perception-decision architecture. Cantor first acts as a decision generator and integrates visual inputs to analyze the image and problem, ensuring a closer alignment with the actual context. Furthermore, Cantor leverages the advanced cognitive functions of MLLMs to perform as multifaceted experts for deriving higher-level information, enhancing the CoT generation process. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework, showing significant improvements in multimodal CoT performance across two complex visual reasoning datasets, without necessitating fine-tuning or ground-truth rationales. Project Page: https://ggg0919.github.io/cantor/ .