# Plug-and-Play Grounding of Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.19322 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19322/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 41 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Mar 2024.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Multimodal reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/multimodal-reasoning/)
- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/vlm-benchmarks-and-visual-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10997/) (2023)
- [ChartQA: A Benchmark for Question Answering about Charts with Visual and Logical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10244/) (2022)
- [DocVQA: A Dataset for VQA on Document Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00398/) (2020)
- [MM-Vet: Evaluating Large Multimodal Models for Integrated Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02490/) (2023)
- [HuggingGPT: Solving AI Tasks with ChatGPT and its Friends in Hugging Face](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17580/) (2023)
- [Kosmos-2: Grounding Multimodal Large Language Models to the World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14824/) (2023)
- [mPLUG-Owl: Modularization Empowers Large Language Models with Multimodality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14178/) (2023)
- [SEED-Bench: Benchmarking Multimodal LLMs with Generative Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16125/) (2023)
- [The Flan Collection: Designing Data and Methods for Effective Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13688/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek-VL: Towards Real-World Vision-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05525/) (2024)
- [CogVLM: Visual Expert for Pretrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03079/) (2023)
- [NExT-GPT: Any-to-Any Multimodal LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05519/) (2023)
- [LLaMA-Adapter V2: Parameter-Efficient Visual Instruction Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.15010/) (2023)
- [Language Is Not All You Need: Aligning Perception with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14045/) (2023)
- [V*: Guided Visual Search as a Core Mechanism in Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14135/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Efficient Multimodal Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10739/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Benchmarks of Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08632/) (2024)
- [Visual Agents as Fast and Slow Thinkers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08862/) (2024)
- [VisRL: Intention-Driven Visual Perception via Reinforced Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07523/) (2025)
- [Explain Before You Answer: A Survey on Compositional Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17298/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Multimodal Benchmarks: In the Era of Large AI Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18142/) (2024)
- [SV-RAG: LoRA-Contextualizing Adaptation of MLLMs for Long Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01106/) (2024)
- [Towards Visual Text Grounding of Multimodal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04974/) (2025)
- [Describe-then-Reason: Improving Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning through Visual Comprehension Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14604/) (2024)
- [On the Generalization Capacities of MLLMs for Spatial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06704/) (2026)
- [Task-Core Memory Management and Consolidation for Long-term Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09952/) (2025)
- [On Data Synthesis and Post-training for Visual Abstract Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01324/) (2025)
- [SNS-Bench-VL: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models in Social Networking Services](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23065/) (2025)
- [Uncovering Understanding-Generation Synergy in Native Unified Multimodal Models: From Representation, Task to System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01607/) (2026)
- [From Perception to Reasoning: Deep Thinking Empowers Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12861/) (2025)
- [Automated Re-Identification of Holstein-Friesian Cattle in Dense Crowds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15962/) (2026)
- [Detect in Any Scene: An Agentic Framework for Object Detection with Experience-Aware Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.31174/) (2026)
- [From Structure to Synergy: A Survey of Vision-Language Perception Paradigm Evolution in Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.26196/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The rise of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), renowned for their advanced instruction-following and reasoning capabilities, has significantly propelled the field of visual reasoning. However, due to limitations in their image tokenization processes, most MLLMs struggle to capture fine details of text and objects in images, especially in high-resolution samples. To overcome this limitation, we introduce P2G, a novel framework for plug-and-play grounding in MLLMs. P2G utilizes the tool-usage potential of MLLMs to employ expert agents for on-the-fly grounding of reasoning into critical visual and textual elements in images, thereby enabling deliberate reasoning through multimodal prompting. Additionally, we develop P2GB, a benchmark designed to evaluate MLLMs' proficiency in understanding inter-object relationships and textual content in challenging high-resolution images. Extensive experiments on visual reasoning tasks demonstrate the superiority of P2G, achieving performance comparable to GPT-4V on P2GB with a 7B backbone. Our work underscores the potential of grounding reasoning with external agents in MLLMs, presenting a promising alternative to mere model scaling.