mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Visual-O1: Understanding Ambiguous Instructions via Multi-modal Multi-turn Chain-of-thoughts Reasoning

arXiv 2410.03321 ↗First posted 4 Oct 2024cs.CVcited by 17

On the map: LLM reasoning → Multimodal reasoning

Abstract (arXiv)

As large-scale models evolve, language instructions are increasingly utilized in multi-modal tasks. Due to human language habits, these instructions often contain ambiguities in real-world scenarios, necessitating the integration of visual context or common sense for accurate interpretation. However, even highly intelligent large models exhibit significant performance limitations on ambiguous instructions, where weak reasoning abilities of disambiguation can lead to catastrophic errors. To address this issue, this paper proposes Visual-O1, a multi-modal multi-turn chain-of-thought reasoning framework. It simulates human multi-modal multi-turn reasoning, providing instantial experience for highly intelligent models or empirical experience for generally intelligent models to understand ambiguous instructions. Unlike traditional methods that require models to possess high intelligence to understand long texts or perform lengthy complex reasoning, our framework does not significantly increase computational overhead and is more general and effective, even for generally intelligent models. Experiments show that our method not only significantly enhances the performance of models of different intelligence levels on ambiguous instructions but also improves their performance on general datasets. Our work highlights the potential of artificial intelligence to work like humans in real-world scenarios with uncertainty and ambiguity. We will release our data and code.

Key facts. Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 12 of its 32 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 4 Oct 2024.

Builds on

12 of 32 references.

Closest ancestors · 2

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2023Rephrase, Augment, Reason: Visual Grounding of Questions for Vision-Language Models9 Oct
  2. 2023LISA: Reasoning Segmentation via Large Language Model1 Aug

Other references · 10

  1. 2021LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Modelscited by 14,084
  2. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
  3. 2024Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolutioncited by 4,151
  4. 2023ShareGPT4V: Improving Large Multi-Modal Models with Better Captionscited by 1,000
  5. 2023MiniGPT-v2: large language model as a unified interface for vision-language multi-task learningcited by 617
  6. 2023Set-of-Mark Prompting Unleashes Extraordinary Visual Grounding in GPT-4Vcited by 291
  7. 2023InstructDiffusion: A Generalist Modeling Interface for Vision Taskscited by 162
  8. 2023Ref-Diff: Zero-shot Referring Image Segmentation with Generative Modelscited by 33
  9. 2023Follow-Up Differential Descriptions: Language Models Resolve Ambiguities for Image Classificationcited by 13
  10. 2022ULN: Towards Underspecified Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 5

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 1; 2025: 13; 2026: 3.

17 papers.

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  1. 2025Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning: A Comprehensive Surveycited by 176
  2. 2025VLM-R3: Region Recognition, Reasoning, and Refinement for Enhanced Multimodal Chain-of-Thoughtcited by 47
  3. 2025Argus: Vision-Centric Reasoning with Grounded Chain-of-Thoughtcited by 26
  4. 2025MathAgent: Leveraging a Mixture-of-Math-Agent Framework for Real-World Multimodal Mathematical Error Detectioncited by 24
  5. 2025Why Reasoning Matters? A Survey of Advancements in Multimodal Reasoning (v1)cited by 23
  6. 2025CMMCoT: Enhancing Complex Multi-Image Comprehension via Multi-Modal Chain-of-Thought and Memory Augmentationcited by 22
  7. 2025Mind with Eyes: from Language Reasoning to Multimodal Reasoningcited by 22
  8. 2025WeThink: Toward General-purpose Vision-Language Reasoning via Reinforcement Learningcited by 21
  9. 2025Teaching Vision-Language Models to Ask: Resolving Ambiguity in Visual Questionscited by 11
  10. 2024Don't Let Your Robot be Harmful: Responsible Robotic Manipulation via Safety-as-Policycited by 9
  11. 2025Fork-Merge Decoding: Enhancing Multimodal Understanding in Audio-Visual Large Language Modelscited by 7
  12. 2025VFaith: Do Large Multimodal Models Really Reason on Seen Images Rather than Previous Memories?cited by 7
5 more
  1. 2025LiveSearchBench: An Automatically Constructed Benchmark for Retrieval and Reasoning over Dynamic Knowledgecited by 3
  2. 2025Mitigating Visual Context Degradation in Large Multimodal Models: A Training-Free Decoupled Agentic Frameworkcited by 2
  3. 2026Diagnosing Knowledge Conflict in Multimodal Long-Chain Reasoningcited by 1
  4. 2026PointVG-R: Internalizing Geometric Reasoning in MLLMs for Precise Pointing Localization via Visual Chain of Thoughtcited by 0
  5. 2026CRAG-MM-Diagnostics: Enabling Stage-Wise Analysis of Knowledge-Intensive VQAcited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025Can Language Models Follow Multiple Turns of Entangled Instructions?
  2. 2026CoLT: Teaching Multi-Modal Models to Think with Chain of Latent Thoughts
  3. 2024M3CoT: A Novel Benchmark for Multi-Domain Multi-step Multi-modal Chain-of-Thought
  4. 2024Whiteboard-of-Thought: Thinking Step-by-Step Across Modalities
  5. 2023X-InstructBLIP: A Framework for aligning X-Modal instruction-aware representations to LLMs and Emergent Cross-modal Reasoning
  6. 2023Igniting Language Intelligence: The Hitchhiker's Guide From Chain-of-Thought Reasoning to Language Agents
  7. 2026Reasoning Dynamics and the Limits of Monitoring Modality Reliance in Vision-Language Models
  8. 2024Insight-V: Exploring Long-Chain Visual Reasoning with Multimodal Large Language Models