# Improving Generalization in Visual Reasoning via Self-Ensemble

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.20883 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20883/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 60 of its 79 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Oct 2024.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 60)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [Wide Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07146/) (2016)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [A Baseline for Detecting Misclassified and Out-of-Distribution Examples in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02136/) (2016)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [LXMERT: Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07490/) (2019)
- [CLEVR: A Diagnostic Dataset for Compositional Language and Elementary Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06890/) (2016)
- [Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07998/) (2017)
- [Random Erasing Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04896/) (2017)
- [ViLT: Vision-and-Language Transformer Without Convolution or Region Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03334/) (2021)
- [mPLUG-Owl: Modularization Empowers Large Language Models with Multimodality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14178/) (2023)
- [VizWiz Grand Challenge: Answering Visual Questions from Blind People](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08218/) (2018)
- [EVA-CLIP: Improved Training Techniques for CLIP at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15389/) (2023)
- [LLaMA-Adapter: Efficient Fine-tuning of Language Models with Zero-init Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16199/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [STER-VLM: Spatio-Temporal With Enhanced Reference Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13470/) (2025)
- [Hybrid, Unified and Iterative: A Novel Framework for Text-based Person Anomaly Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22470/) (2025)
- [A Lightweight Moment Retrieval System with Global Re-Ranking and Robust Adaptive Bidirectional Temporal Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09298/) (2025)
- [Cycle Training with Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation: Bridging Accuracy and Efficiency for Real-Time Mobile Scene Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09297/) (2025)
- [HDC: Hierarchical Distillation for Multi-level Noisy Consistency in Semi-Supervised Fetal Ultrasound Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09876/) (2025)
- [ITSELF: Attention Guided Fine-Grained Alignment for Vision-Language Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01024/) (2026)
- [Towards Efficient and Robust Moment Retrieval System: A Unified Framework for Multi-Granularity Models and Temporal Reranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08384/) (2025)
- [IGL-DT: Iterative Global-Local Feature Learning with Dual-Teacher Semantic Segmentation Framework under Limited Annotation Scheme](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09797/) (2025)
- [ESC: Emotional Self-Correction for Reliable Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02089/) (2026)
- [Architectural Sampling: Test-Time Scaling via Computational Diversity in Frozen Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.01687/) (2026)
- [MADTempo: An Interactive System for Multi-Event Temporal Video Retrieval with Query Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12929/) (2025)
- [Unified Interactive Multimodal Moment Retrieval via Cascaded Embedding-Reranking and Temporal-Aware Score Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12935/) (2025)
- [LLandMark: A Multi-Agent Framework for Landmark-Aware Multimodal Interactive Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02888/) (2026)
- [Efficient INT8 Single-Image Super-Resolution via Deployment-Aware Quantization and Teacher-Guided Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20291/) (2026)
- [Bridging the Training-Deployment Gap: Gated Encoding and Multi-Scale Refinement for Efficient Quantization-Aware Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21743/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The cognitive faculty of visual reasoning necessitates the integration of multimodal perceptual processing and commonsense and external knowledge of the world. In recent years, a plethora of large vision-language models (LVLMs) have been proposed, demonstrating outstanding power and exceptional proficiency in commonsense reasoning across diverse domains and tasks. Nevertheless, training such LVLMs requires a lot of costly resources. Recent approaches, instead of training LVLMs from scratch on various large datasets, focus on exploring ways to take advantage of the capabilities of many different LVLMs, such as ensemble methods. In this work, we propose self-ensemble, a novel method that improves the generalization and visual reasoning of the model without updating any parameters, a training-free method. Our key insight is that we realized that LVLM itself can ensemble without the need for any other LVLMs, which helps to unlock their internal capabilities. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on SketchyVQA, Outside Knowledge VQA, and out-of-distribution VQA tasks.