# Can Large Language Models Unveil the Mysteries? An Exploration of Their Ability to Unlock Information in Complex Scenarios

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.19973 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19973/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11366/) (2023)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07682/) (2022)
- [Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12966/) (2023)
- [MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06281/) (2023)
- [Towards VQA Models That Can Read](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08920/) (2019)
- [MME: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13394/) (2023)
- [CLEVR: A Diagnostic Dataset for Compositional Language and Elementary Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06890/) (2016)
- [Flickr30k Entities: Collecting Region-to-Phrase Correspondences for Richer Image-to-Sentence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04870/) (2015)
- [OK-VQA: A Visual Question Answering Benchmark Requiring External Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00067/) (2019)
- [The "something something" video database for learning and evaluating visual common sense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04261/) (2017)
- [SEED-Bench: Benchmarking Multimodal LLMs with Generative Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16125/) (2023)
- [NExT-QA:Next Phase of Question-Answering to Explaining Temporal Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08276/) (2021)
- [A-OKVQA: A Benchmark for Visual Question Answering using World Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01718/) (2022)
- [From Recognition to Cognition: Visual Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10830/) (2018)
- [GSM-Symbolic: Understanding the Limitations of Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05229/) (2024)
- [Augmented Language Models: a Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07842/) (2023)
- [Don't Just Assume; Look and Answer: Overcoming Priors for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00377/) (2017)
- [Language Models Are Greedy Reasoners: A Systematic Formal Analysis of Chain-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01240/) (2022)

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

- [Towards Reasoning Era: A Survey of Long Chain-of-Thought for Reasoning Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09567/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Combining multiple perceptual inputs and performing combinatorial reasoning in complex scenarios is a sophisticated cognitive function in humans. With advancements in multi-modal large language models, recent benchmarks tend to evaluate visual understanding across multiple images. However, they often overlook the necessity of combinatorial reasoning across multiple perceptual information. To explore the ability of advanced models to integrate multiple perceptual inputs for combinatorial reasoning in complex scenarios, we introduce two benchmarks: Clue-Visual Question Answering (CVQA), with three task types to assess visual comprehension and synthesis, and Clue of Password-Visual Question Answering (CPVQA), with two task types focused on accurate interpretation and application of visual data. For our benchmarks, we present three plug-and-play approaches: utilizing model input for reasoning, enhancing reasoning through minimum margin decoding with randomness generation, and retrieving semantically relevant visual information for effective data integration. The combined results reveal current models' poor performance on combinatorial reasoning benchmarks, even the state-of-the-art (SOTA) closed-source model achieves only 33.04% accuracy on CVQA, and drops to 7.38% on CPVQA. Notably, our approach improves the performance of models on combinatorial reasoning, with a 22.17% boost on CVQA and 9.40% on CPVQA over the SOTA closed-source model, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing combinatorial reasoning with multiple perceptual inputs in complex scenarios. The code will be publicly available.