# DetToolChain: A New Prompting Paradigm to Unleash Detection Ability of MLLM

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.12488 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12488/

## Key facts

- Cited by 46 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Driving VLMs and open-vocabulary detection, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 66 of its 79 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Mar 2024.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Driving VLMs and open-vocabulary detection](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/driving-vlms-and-open-vocabulary-detection/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 66)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10601/) (2023)
- [Improving Factuality and Reasoning in Language Models through Multiagent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14325/) (2023)
- [Kosmos-2: Grounding Multimodal Large Language Models to the World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14824/) (2023)
- [Modeling Context in Referring Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00272/) (2016)
- [Teaching Large Language Models to Self-Debug](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05128/) (2023)
- [Open-vocabulary Object Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13921/) (2021)
- [Shikra: Unleashing Multimodal LLM's Referential Dialogue Magic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15195/) (2023)
- [Generation and Comprehension of Unambiguous Object Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02283/) (2015)
- [Graph of Thoughts: Solving Elaborate Problems with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09687/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00923/) (2023)
- [OFA: Unifying Architectures, Tasks, and Modalities Through a Simple Sequence-to-Sequence Learning Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03052/) (2022)
- [Eyes Wide Shut? Exploring the Visual Shortcomings of Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06209/) (2024)
- [SpatialVLM: Endowing Vision-Language Models with Spatial Reasoning Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12168/) (2024)
- [Automatic Chain of Thought Prompting in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03493/) (2022)
- [The Dawn of LMMs: Preliminary Explorations with GPT-4V(ision)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17421/) (2023)
- [MiniGPT-v2: large language model as a unified interface for vision-language multi-task learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09478/) (2023)
- [RegionCLIP: Region-based Language-Image Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09106/) (2021)
- [Ferret: Refer and Ground Anything Anywhere at Any Granularity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07704/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Thinking with Images for Multimodal Reasoning: Foundations, Methods, and Future Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23918/) (2025)
- [Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12605/) (2025)
- [Many-Shot In-Context Learning in Multimodal Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09798/) (2024)
- [Image-of-Thought Prompting for Visual Reasoning Refinement in Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13872/) (2024)
- [Number it: Temporal Grounding Videos like Flipping Manga](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10332/) (2024)
- [Visual Prompting in Multimodal Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15310/) (2024)
- [Visual Agents as Fast and Slow Thinkers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08862/) (2024)
- [Improved Visual-Spatial Reasoning via R1-Zero-Like Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00883/) (2025)
- [TextCoT: Zoom In for Enhanced Multimodal Text-Rich Image Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09797/) (2024)
- [Visual Large Language Models for Generalized and Specialized Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02765/) (2025)
- [From Seeing to Doing: Bridging Reasoning and Decision for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08548/) (2025)
- [MMRC: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Understanding Multimodal Large Language Model in Real-World Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11903/) (2025)
- [Beyond Seeing: Evaluating Multimodal LLMs on Tool-Enabled Image Perception, Transformation, and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12712/) (2025)
- [Think3D: Thinking with Space for Spatial Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13029/) (2026)
- [Prompt-based Adaptation in Large-scale Vision Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13219/) (2025)
- [RSVP: Reasoning Segmentation via Visual Prompting and Multi-modal Chain-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04277/) (2025)
- [VipAct: Visual-Perception Enhancement via Specialized VLM Agent Collaboration and Tool-use](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16400/) (2024)
- [Visual Position Prompt for MLLM based Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15426/) (2025)
- [ONLY: One-Layer Intervention Sufficiently Mitigates Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00898/) (2025)
- [How Well Does GPT-4o Understand Vision? Evaluating Multimodal Foundation Models on Standard Computer Vision Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01955/) (2025)
- [PixelCraft: A Multi-Agent System for High-Fidelity Visual Reasoning on Structured Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25185/) (2025)
- [How Well Do Models Follow Visual Instructions? VIBE: A Systematic Benchmark for Visual Instruction-Driven Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01851/) (2026)
- [Lost in Time: Clock and Calendar Understanding Challenges in Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05092/) (2025)
- [Octopus: Agentic Multimodal Reasoning with Six-Capability Orchestration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15351/) (2025)
- [From Illusion to Intention: Visual Rationale Learning for Vision-Language Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.23031/) (2025)
- [MangaVQA and MangaLMM: A Benchmark and Specialized Model for Multimodal Manga Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20298/) (2025)
- [MageBench: Bridging Large Multimodal Models to Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04531/) (2024)
- [3DAxisPrompt: Promoting the 3D Grounding and Reasoning in GPT-4o](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13185/) (2025)
- [PostAlign: Multimodal Grounding as a Corrective Lens for MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17901/) (2025)
- [Segmentation as A Plug-and-Play Capability for Frozen Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16785/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present DetToolChain, a novel prompting paradigm, to unleash the zero-shot object detection ability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), such as GPT-4V and Gemini. Our approach consists of a detection prompting toolkit inspired by high-precision detection priors and a new Chain-of-Thought to implement these prompts. Specifically, the prompts in the toolkit are designed to guide the MLLM to focus on regional information (e.g., zooming in), read coordinates according to measure standards (e.g., overlaying rulers and compasses), and infer from the contextual information (e.g., overlaying scene graphs). Building upon these tools, the new detection chain-of-thought can automatically decompose the task into simple subtasks, diagnose the predictions, and plan for progressive box refinements. The effectiveness of our framework is demonstrated across a spectrum of detection tasks, especially hard cases. Compared to existing state-of-the-art methods, GPT-4V with our DetToolChain improves state-of-the-art object detectors by +21.5% AP50 on MS COCO Novel class set for open-vocabulary detection, +24.23% Acc on RefCOCO val set for zero-shot referring expression comprehension, +14.5% AP on D-cube describe object detection FULL setting.