# Mixture of Rationale: Multi-Modal Reasoning Mixture for Visual Question Answering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.01402 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01402/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Dense Information Retrieval with Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09118/) (2021)
- [Leveraging Passage Retrieval with Generative Models for Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01282/) (2020)
- [OK-VQA: A Visual Question Answering Benchmark Requiring External Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00067/) (2019)
- [Image as a Foreign Language: BEiT Pretraining for All Vision and Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10442/) (2022)
- [A Corpus for Reasoning About Natural Language Grounded in Photographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00491/) (2018)
- [Unifying Vision-and-Language Tasks via Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02779/) (2021)
- [BEiT v2: Masked Image Modeling with Vector-Quantized Visual Tokenizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06366/) (2022)
- [An Empirical Study of GPT-3 for Few-Shot Knowledge-Based VQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05014/) (2021)
- [PromptCap: Prompt-Guided Task-Aware Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09699/) (2022)
- [Plug-and-Play VQA: Zero-shot VQA by Conjoining Large Pretrained Models with Zero Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08773/) (2022)
- [Zero-Shot Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05546/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Test-time Scaling of LLMs: A Survey from A Subproblem Structure Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14772/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Zero-shot visual question answering (VQA) is a challenging task that requires reasoning across modalities. While some existing methods rely on a single rationale within the Chain of Thoughts (CoT) framework, they may fall short of capturing the complexity of the VQA problem. On the other hand, some other methods that use multiple rationales may still suffer from low diversity, poor modality alignment, and inefficient retrieval and fusion. In response to these challenges, we propose Mixture of Rationales (MoR), a novel multi-modal reasoning method that mixes multiple rationales for VQA. MoR uses a single frozen Vision-and-Language Pre-trained Models (VLPM) model to dynamically generate, retrieve and fuse multi-modal thoughts. We evaluate MoR on two challenging VQA datasets, i.e. NLVR2 and OKVQA, with two representative backbones OFA and VL-T5. MoR achieves a 12.43% accuracy improvement on NLVR2, and a 2.45% accuracy improvement on OKVQA-S( the science and technology category of OKVQA).