Visual-O1: Understanding Ambiguous Instructions via Multi-modal Multi-turn Chain-of-thoughts Reasoning
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
- 2023Rephrase, Augment, Reason: Visual Grounding of Questions for Vision-Language Models9 Oct
- 2023LISA: Reasoning Segmentation via Large Language Model1 Aug
Other references · 10
- 2021LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Modelscited by 14,084
- 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
- 2024Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolutioncited by 4,151
- 2023ShareGPT4V: Improving Large Multi-Modal Models with Better Captionscited by 1,000
- 2023MiniGPT-v2: large language model as a unified interface for vision-language multi-task learningcited by 617
- 2023Set-of-Mark Prompting Unleashes Extraordinary Visual Grounding in GPT-4Vcited by 291
- 2023InstructDiffusion: A Generalist Modeling Interface for Vision Taskscited by 162
- 2023Ref-Diff: Zero-shot Referring Image Segmentation with Generative Modelscited by 33
- 2023Follow-Up Differential Descriptions: Language Models Resolve Ambiguities for Image Classificationcited by 13
- 2022ULN: Towards Underspecified Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 5
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Citing papers per year: 2024: 1; 2025: 13; 2026: 3.
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- 2025Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning: A Comprehensive Surveycited by 176
- 2025VLM-R3: Region Recognition, Reasoning, and Refinement for Enhanced Multimodal Chain-of-Thoughtcited by 47
- 2025Argus: Vision-Centric Reasoning with Grounded Chain-of-Thoughtcited by 26
- 2025MathAgent: Leveraging a Mixture-of-Math-Agent Framework for Real-World Multimodal Mathematical Error Detectioncited by 24
- 2025Why Reasoning Matters? A Survey of Advancements in Multimodal Reasoning (v1)cited by 23
- 2025CMMCoT: Enhancing Complex Multi-Image Comprehension via Multi-Modal Chain-of-Thought and Memory Augmentationcited by 22
- 2025Mind with Eyes: from Language Reasoning to Multimodal Reasoningcited by 22
- 2025WeThink: Toward General-purpose Vision-Language Reasoning via Reinforcement Learningcited by 21
- 2025Teaching Vision-Language Models to Ask: Resolving Ambiguity in Visual Questionscited by 11
- 2024Don't Let Your Robot be Harmful: Responsible Robotic Manipulation via Safety-as-Policycited by 9
- 2025Fork-Merge Decoding: Enhancing Multimodal Understanding in Audio-Visual Large Language Modelscited by 7
- 2025VFaith: Do Large Multimodal Models Really Reason on Seen Images Rather than Previous Memories?cited by 7
5 more
- 2025LiveSearchBench: An Automatically Constructed Benchmark for Retrieval and Reasoning over Dynamic Knowledgecited by 3
- 2025Mitigating Visual Context Degradation in Large Multimodal Models: A Training-Free Decoupled Agentic Frameworkcited by 2
- 2026Diagnosing Knowledge Conflict in Multimodal Long-Chain Reasoningcited by 1
- 2026PointVG-R: Internalizing Geometric Reasoning in MLLMs for Precise Pointing Localization via Visual Chain of Thoughtcited by 0
- 2026CRAG-MM-Diagnostics: Enabling Stage-Wise Analysis of Knowledge-Intensive VQAcited by 0
- 2026CRAG-MM-Diagnostics: Enabling Stage-Wise Analysis of Knowledge-Intensive VQA23 Jul 2026
- 2026PointVG-R: Internalizing Geometric Reasoning in MLLMs for Precise Pointing Localization via Visual Chain of Thought23 Jun 2026
- 2026Diagnosing Knowledge Conflict in Multimodal Long-Chain Reasoning16 Feb 2026
- 2025LiveSearchBench: An Automatically Constructed Benchmark for Retrieval and Reasoning over Dynamic Knowledge3 Nov 2025
- 2025Mitigating Visual Context Degradation in Large Multimodal Models: A Training-Free Decoupled Agentic Framework27 Sep 2025
- 2025Teaching Vision-Language Models to Ask: Resolving Ambiguity in Visual Questions18 Jul 2025
- 2025VFaith: Do Large Multimodal Models Really Reason on Seen Images Rather than Previous Memories?13 Jun 2025
- 2025WeThink: Toward General-purpose Vision-Language Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning9 Jun 2025
- 2025Argus: Vision-Centric Reasoning with Grounded Chain-of-Thought29 May 2025
- 2025Fork-Merge Decoding: Enhancing Multimodal Understanding in Audio-Visual Large Language Models27 May 2025
- 2025VLM-R3: Region Recognition, Reasoning, and Refinement for Enhanced Multimodal Chain-of-Thought22 May 2025
- 2025Why Reasoning Matters? A Survey of Advancements in Multimodal Reasoning (v1)4 Apr 2025
5 more
- 2025MathAgent: Leveraging a Mixture-of-Math-Agent Framework for Real-World Multimodal Mathematical Error Detection23 Mar 2025
- 2025Mind with Eyes: from Language Reasoning to Multimodal Reasoning23 Mar 2025
- 2025Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning: A Comprehensive Survey16 Mar 2025
- 2025CMMCoT: Enhancing Complex Multi-Image Comprehension via Multi-Modal Chain-of-Thought and Memory Augmentation7 Mar 2025
- 2024Don't Let Your Robot be Harmful: Responsible Robotic Manipulation via Safety-as-Policy27 Nov 2024
- 2025Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning: A Comprehensive Surveycited by 176
- 2025VLM-R3: Region Recognition, Reasoning, and Refinement for Enhanced Multimodal Chain-of-Thoughtcited by 47
- 2025Argus: Vision-Centric Reasoning with Grounded Chain-of-Thoughtcited by 26
- 2025MathAgent: Leveraging a Mixture-of-Math-Agent Framework for Real-World Multimodal Mathematical Error Detectioncited by 24
- 2025Why Reasoning Matters? A Survey of Advancements in Multimodal Reasoning (v1)cited by 23
- 2025CMMCoT: Enhancing Complex Multi-Image Comprehension via Multi-Modal Chain-of-Thought and Memory Augmentationcited by 22
- 2025Mind with Eyes: from Language Reasoning to Multimodal Reasoningcited by 22
- 2025WeThink: Toward General-purpose Vision-Language Reasoning via Reinforcement Learningcited by 21
- 2025VFaith: Do Large Multimodal Models Really Reason on Seen Images Rather than Previous Memories?cited by 7
- 2025LiveSearchBench: An Automatically Constructed Benchmark for Retrieval and Reasoning over Dynamic Knowledgecited by 3
- 2025Mitigating Visual Context Degradation in Large Multimodal Models: A Training-Free Decoupled Agentic Frameworkcited by 2
- 2026Diagnosing Knowledge Conflict in Multimodal Long-Chain Reasoningcited by 1
12 most cited of 13 All 13 (JSON)
- 2026PointVG-R: Internalizing Geometric Reasoning in MLLMs for Precise Pointing Localization via Visual Chain of Thought23 Jun 2026
- 2026Diagnosing Knowledge Conflict in Multimodal Long-Chain Reasoning16 Feb 2026
- 2025LiveSearchBench: An Automatically Constructed Benchmark for Retrieval and Reasoning over Dynamic Knowledge3 Nov 2025
- 2025Mitigating Visual Context Degradation in Large Multimodal Models: A Training-Free Decoupled Agentic Framework27 Sep 2025
- 2025VFaith: Do Large Multimodal Models Really Reason on Seen Images Rather than Previous Memories?13 Jun 2025
- 2025WeThink: Toward General-purpose Vision-Language Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning9 Jun 2025
- 2025Argus: Vision-Centric Reasoning with Grounded Chain-of-Thought29 May 2025
- 2025VLM-R3: Region Recognition, Reasoning, and Refinement for Enhanced Multimodal Chain-of-Thought22 May 2025
- 2025Why Reasoning Matters? A Survey of Advancements in Multimodal Reasoning (v1)4 Apr 2025
- 2025MathAgent: Leveraging a Mixture-of-Math-Agent Framework for Real-World Multimodal Mathematical Error Detection23 Mar 2025
- 2025Mind with Eyes: from Language Reasoning to Multimodal Reasoning23 Mar 2025
- 2025Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning: A Comprehensive Survey16 Mar 2025
12 newest of 13 All 13 (JSON)
Similar, not cited
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- 2024Whiteboard-of-Thought: Thinking Step-by-Step Across Modalities
- 2023X-InstructBLIP: A Framework for aligning X-Modal instruction-aware representations to LLMs and Emergent Cross-modal Reasoning
- 2023Igniting Language Intelligence: The Hitchhiker's Guide From Chain-of-Thought Reasoning to Language Agents
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- 2024Insight-V: Exploring Long-Chain Visual Reasoning with Multimodal Large Language Models