# Soft-Prompting with Graph-of-Thought for Multi-modal Representation Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.04538 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04538/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 6 of its 98 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Apr 2024.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Multimodal reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/multimodal-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Aircraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.5151/) (2013)
- [Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Server](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00325/) (2015)
- [Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00923/) (2023)
- [Visual Chain of Thought: Bridging Logical Gaps with Multimodal Infillings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02317/) (2023)
- [Chain of Thought Prompt Tuning in Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07919/) (2023)
- [Multi-modal Latent Space Learning for Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08762/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12605/) (2025)
- [Perception, Reason, Think, and Plan: A Survey on Large Multimodal Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04921/) (2025)
- [UniCTokens: Boosting Personalized Understanding and Generation via Unified Concept Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14671/) (2025)
- [Chiron-o1: Igniting Multimodal Large Language Models towards Generalizable Medical Reasoning via Mentor-Intern Collaborative Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16962/) (2025)
- [Reference Trustable Decoding: A Training-Free Augmentation Paradigm for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.20181/) (2024)
- [Optimizing Soft Prompt Tuning via Structural Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16500/) (2026)
- [A Survey of Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning: From Perception, Alignment to Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08291/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The chain-of-thought technique has been received well in multi-modal tasks. It is a step-by-step linear reasoning process that adjusts the length of the chain to improve the performance of generated prompts. However, human thought processes are predominantly non-linear, as they encompass multiple aspects simultaneously and employ dynamic adjustment and updating mechanisms. Therefore, we propose a novel Aggregation-Graph-of-Thought (AGoT) mechanism for soft-prompt tuning in multi-modal representation learning. The proposed AGoT models the human thought process not only as a chain but also models each step as a reasoning aggregation graph to cope with the overlooked multiple aspects of thinking in single-step reasoning. This turns the entire reasoning process into prompt aggregation and prompt flow operations. Experiments show that our multi-modal model enhanced with AGoT soft-prompting achieves good results in several tasks such as text-image retrieval, visual question answering, and image recognition. In addition, we demonstrate that it has good domain generalization performance due to better reasoning.