Fact :Teaching MLLMs with Faithful, Concise and Transferable Rationales
On the map: Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models → MLLM training and visual instruction tuning
Abstract (arXiv)
The remarkable performance of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has unequivocally demonstrated their proficient understanding capabilities in handling a wide array of visual tasks. Nevertheless, the opaque nature of their black-box reasoning processes persists as an enigma, rendering them uninterpretable and struggling with hallucination. Their ability to execute intricate compositional reasoning tasks is also constrained, culminating in a stagnation of learning progression for these models. In this work, we introduce Fact, a novel paradigm designed to generate multimodal rationales that are faithful, concise, and transferable for teaching MLLMs. This paradigm utilizes verifiable visual programming to generate executable code guaranteeing faithfulness and precision. Subsequently, through a series of operations including pruning, merging, and bridging, the rationale enhances its conciseness. Furthermore, we filter rationales that can be transferred to end-to-end paradigms from programming paradigms to guarantee transferability. Empirical evidence from experiments demonstrates the superiority of our method across models of varying parameter sizes, significantly enhancing their compositional reasoning and generalization ability. Our approach also reduces hallucinations owing to its high correlation between images and text.
Key facts. Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in MLLM training and visual instruction tuning, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models. Builds on 33 of its 58 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 17 Apr 2024.
Builds on
33 of 58 references.
Closest ancestors · 7
Same direction, newest first
- 2024COSMO: COntrastive Streamlined MultimOdal Model with Interleaved Pre-Training1 Jan
- 2023mPLUG-Owl2: Revolutionizing Multi-modal Large Language Model with Modality Collaboration7 Nov
- 2023NExT-GPT: Any-to-Any Multimodal LLM11 Sep
- 2023Fine-tuning Multimodal LLMs to Follow Zero-shot Demonstrative Instructions8 Aug
- 2023SEED-Bench: Benchmarking Multimodal LLMs with Generative Comprehension30 Jul
- 2023MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?12 Jul
- 2023InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning11 May
Other references · 26
- 2014Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Contextcited by 17,608
- 2016Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answeringcited by 2,516
- 2015Flickr30k Entities: Collecting Region-to-Phrase Correspondences for Richer Image-to-Sentence Modelscited by 1,362
- 2023Language Models Don't Always Say What They Think: Unfaithful Explanations in Chain-of-Thought Promptingcited by 1,122
- 2023mPLUG-Owl: Modularization Empowers Large Language Models with Multimodalitycited by 1,040
- 2019DROP: A Reading Comprehension Benchmark Requiring Discrete Reasoning Over Paragraphscited by 903
- 2023Large Language Models Can Be Easily Distracted by Irrelevant Contextcited by 841
- 2023Distilling Step-by-Step! Outperforming Larger Language Models with Less Training Data and Smaller Model Sizescited by 737
- 2023ViperGPT: Visual Inference via Python Execution for Reasoningcited by 603
- 2017Adversarial Examples for Evaluating Reading Comprehension Systemscited by 571
- 2022Visual Programming: Compositional visual reasoning without trainingcited by 516
- 2017Scene Graph Generation by Iterative Message Passingcited by 462
14 more
- 2023Logic-LM: Empowering Large Language Models with Symbolic Solvers for Faithful Logical Reasoningcited by 391
- 2022Visual Spatial Reasoningcited by 293
- 2023Orca 2: Teaching Small Language Models How to Reasoncited by 159
- 2018TallyQA: Answering Complex Counting Questionscited by 153
- 2021Few-Shot Self-Rationalization with Natural Language Promptscited by 83
- 2023OtterHD: A High-Resolution Multi-modality Modelcited by 72
- 2022Fine-Grained Semantically Aligned Vision-Language Pre-Trainingcited by 68
- 2023VL-GPT: A Generative Pre-trained Transformer for Vision and Language Understanding and Generationcited by 41
- 2023Incorporating Structured Representations into Pretrained Vision & Language Models Using Scene Graphscited by 39
- 2023Are Machine Rationales (Not) Useful to Humans? Measuring and Improving Human Utility of Free-Text Rationalescited by 37
- 2024Can LLMs Reason with Rules? Logic Scaffolding for Stress-Testing and Improving LLMscited by 28
- 2023Scene Graph as Pivoting: Inference-time Image-free Unsupervised Multimodal Machine Translation with Visual Scene Hallucinationcited by 27
- 2023Localized Symbolic Knowledge Distillation for Visual Commonsense Modelscited by 12
- 2023De-fine: Decomposing and Refining Visual Programs with Auto-Feedbackcited by 10
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2024: 3; 2025: 4.
7 papers.
- 2025Advancing Multimodal Reasoning: From Optimized Cold Start to Staged Reinforcement Learningcited by 53
- 2024Enhancing Video-LLM Reasoning via Agent-of-Thoughts Distillationcited by 37
- 2024STEP: Enhancing Video-LLMs' Compositional Reasoning by Spatio-Temporal Graph-guided Self-Trainingcited by 22
- 2025ARES: Multimodal Adaptive Reasoning via Difficulty-Aware Token-Level Entropy Shapingcited by 17
- 2025Benchmarking Multimodal CoT Reward Model Stepwise by Visual Programcited by 10
- 2024Hallucination in Multimodal Foundation Models: A Survey on Causes, Corrections, and Evaluationscited by 8
- 2025Empowering Multimodal LLMs with External Tools: A Comprehensive Surveycited by 2
- 2025ARES: Multimodal Adaptive Reasoning via Difficulty-Aware Token-Level Entropy Shaping9 Oct 2025
- 2025Empowering Multimodal LLMs with External Tools: A Comprehensive Survey14 Aug 2025
- 2025Advancing Multimodal Reasoning: From Optimized Cold Start to Staged Reinforcement Learning4 Jun 2025
- 2025Benchmarking Multimodal CoT Reward Model Stepwise by Visual Program9 Apr 2025
- 2024Enhancing Video-LLM Reasoning via Agent-of-Thoughts Distillation2 Dec 2024
- 2024STEP: Enhancing Video-LLMs' Compositional Reasoning by Spatio-Temporal Graph-guided Self-Training29 Nov 2024
- 2024Hallucination in Multimodal Foundation Models: A Survey on Causes, Corrections, and Evaluations20 Oct 2024
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2024Exploring the Reasoning Abilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs): A Comprehensive Survey on Emerging Trends in Multimodal Reasoning
- 2025LENS: Multi-level Evaluation of Multimodal Reasoning with Large Language Models
- 2025Reasoning Multimodal Large Language Model: Data Contamination and Dynamic Evaluation
- 2024MAmmoTH-VL: Eliciting Multimodal Reasoning with Instruction Tuning at Scale
- 2024Meaningful Learning: Enhancing Abstract Reasoning in Large Language Models via Generic Fact Guidance
- 2023A Survey on Multimodal Large Language Models
- 2023What Makes for Good Visual Instructions? Synthesizing Complex Visual Reasoning Instructions for Visual Instruction Tuning
- 2024The Curious Case of Nonverbal Abstract Reasoning with Multi-Modal Large Language Models