mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

The Role of Chain-of-Thought in Complex Vision-Language Reasoning Task

arXiv 2311.09193 ↗First posted 15 Nov 2023cs.CL cs.AI cs.CVcited by 32

On the map: LLM reasoning → Multimodal reasoning

Abstract (arXiv)

The study explores the effectiveness of the Chain-of-Thought approach, known for its proficiency in language tasks by breaking them down into sub-tasks and intermediate steps, in improving vision-language tasks that demand sophisticated perception and reasoning. We present the "Description then Decision" strategy, which is inspired by how humans process signals. This strategy significantly improves probing task performance by 50%, establishing the groundwork for future research on reasoning paradigms in complex vision-language tasks.

Key facts. Cited by 32 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 8 of its 21 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 15 Nov 2023.

Builds on

8 of 21 references.

References · 8

  1. 2023InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuningcited by 2,876
  2. 2023MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Modelscited by 2,711
  3. 2023The Dawn of LMMs: Preliminary Explorations with GPT-4V(ision)cited by 681
  4. 2023MiniGPT-v2: large language model as a unified interface for vision-language multi-task learningcited by 625
  5. 2023Set-of-Mark Prompting Unleashes Extraordinary Visual Grounding in GPT-4Vcited by 299
  6. 2023Faithful Chain-of-Thought Reasoningcited by 288
  7. 2023MMICL: Empowering Vision-language Model with Multi-Modal In-Context Learningcited by 172
  8. 2023What You See is What You Read? Improving Text-Image Alignment Evaluationcited by 108

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 13; 2025: 15; 2026: 4.

32 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2025Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning: A Comprehensive Surveycited by 182
  2. 2025PhysBench: Benchmarking and Enhancing Vision-Language Models for Physical World Understandingcited by 160
  3. 2024M3CoT: A Novel Benchmark for Multi-Domain Multi-step Multi-modal Chain-of-Thoughtcited by 121
  4. 2024Large Language Models Meet NLP: A Surveycited by 103
  5. 2025Audio-CoT: Exploring Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Large Audio Language Modelcited by 62
  6. 2025A Survey on (M)LLM-Based GUI Agentscited by 62
  7. 2024Scaffolding Coordinates to Promote Vision-Language Coordination in Large Multi-Modal Modelscited by 57
  8. 2025DeSTA2.5-Audio: Toward General-Purpose Large Audio Language Model with Self-Generated Cross-Modal Alignmentcited by 50
  9. 2024SHIELD : An Evaluation Benchmark for Face Spoofing and Forgery Detection with Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 40
  10. 2024VisOnlyQA: Large Vision Language Models Still Struggle with Visual Perception of Geometric Informationcited by 39
  11. 2024CoMT: A Novel Benchmark for Chain of Multi-modal Thought on Large Vision-Language Modelscited by 30
  12. 2024Fuzz-Testing Meets LLM-Based Agents: An Automated and Efficient Framework for Jailbreaking Text-To-Image Generation Modelscited by 27
20 more
  1. 2024Reflective Instruction Tuning: Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Modelscited by 12
  2. 2024ColorSwap: A Color and Word Order Dataset for Multimodal Evaluationcited by 11
  3. 2024Natural Language Inference Improves Compositionality in Vision-Language Modelscited by 8
  4. 2025Test-Time Matching: Unlocking Compositional Reasoning in Multimodal Modelscited by 6
  5. 2025SDRT: Enhance Vision-Language Models by Self-Distillation with Diverse Reasoning Tracescited by 5
  6. 2025GODBench: A Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models in Video Comment Artcited by 5
  7. 2024BBA: Bi-Modal Behavioral Alignment for Reasoning with Large Vision-Language Modelscited by 4
  8. 2025MathOPEval: A Fine-grained Evaluation Benchmark for Visual Operations of MLLMs in Mathematical Reasoningcited by 4
  9. 2024Image First or Text First? Optimising the Sequencing of Modalities in Large Language Model Prompting and Reasoning Taskscited by 3
  10. 2026Cut to the Chase: Training-free Multimodal Summarization via Chain-of-Eventscited by 3
  11. 2024Exploring Multi-Grained Concept Annotations for Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 2
  12. 2025From Answers to Rationales: Self-Aligning Multimodal Reasoning with Answer-Oriented Chain-of-Thoughtcited by 2
  13. 2025Visual Language Models as Zero-Shot Deepfake Detectorscited by 2
  14. 2025MIND: Multi-rationale INtegrated Discriminative Reasoning Framework for Multi-modal Large Modelscited by 1
  15. 2026Improving Reasoning in Vision-Language Models via Perception Verified Self-Trainingcited by 1
  16. 2025Chain-of-Description: What I can understand, I can put into wordscited by 0
  17. 2025Large Language Models Facilitate Vision Reflection in Image Classificationcited by 0
  18. 2025Conversational Orientation Reasoning: Egocentric-to-Allocentric Navigation with Multimodal Chain-of-Thoughtcited by 0
  19. 2026Beyond Static Vision: Scene Dynamic Field Unlocks Intuitive Physics Understanding in Multi-modal Large Language Modelscited by 0
  20. 2026Symbol and Footprint Database for Electronic Components by Agentic Recognition and Generationcited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026Look Light, Think Heavy: What Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Can and Cannot Do
  2. 2025From Perception to Reasoning: Deep Thinking Empowers Multimodal Large Language Models
  3. 2023Chain of Thought Prompt Tuning in Vision Language Models
  4. 2025Unveiling Chain of Step Reasoning for Vision-Language Models with Fine-grained Rewards
  5. 2025CoFFT: Chain of Foresight-Focus Thought for Visual Language Models
  6. 2026ViThinker: Active Vision-Language Reasoning via Dynamic Perceptual Querying
  7. 2025Visual Thoughts: A Unified Perspective of Understanding Multimodal Chain-of-Thought
  8. 2023Measuring and Improving Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Vision-Language Models