# Beyond Generation: Multi-Hop Reasoning for Factual Accuracy in Vision-Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20531 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20531/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 13 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Nov 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Multimodal reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/multimodal-reasoning/)
- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/vlm-benchmarks-and-visual-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [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)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Server](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00325/) (2015)
- [Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07998/) (2017)
- [Show and Tell: A Neural Image Caption Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4555/) (2014)
- [Object Hallucination in Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02156/) (2018)
- [Meshed-Memory Transformer for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08226/) (2019)
- [KG-BERT: BERT for Knowledge Graph Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03193/) (2019)
- [Google Landmarks Dataset v2 -- A Large-Scale Benchmark for Instance-Level Recognition and Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01804/) (2020)
- [CLIFF: Contrastive Learning for Improving Faithfulness and Factuality in Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09209/) (2021)
- [Knowledge Graph-Augmented Language Models for Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18846/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visual Language Models (VLMs) are powerful generative tools but often produce factually inaccurate outputs due to a lack of robust reasoning capabilities. While extensive research has been conducted on integrating external knowledge for reasoning in large language models (LLMs), such efforts remain underexplored in VLMs, where the challenge is compounded by the need to bridge multiple modalities seamlessly. This work introduces a framework for knowledge-guided reasoning in VLMs, leveraging structured knowledge graphs for multi-hop verification using image-captioning task to illustrate our framework. Our approach enables systematic reasoning across multiple steps, including visual entity recognition, knowledge graph traversal, and fact-based caption refinement. We evaluate the framework using hierarchical, triple-based and bullet-point based knowledge representations, analyzing their effectiveness in factual accuracy and logical inference. Empirical results show that our approach improves factual accuracy by approximately 31% on preliminary experiments on a curated dataset of mixtures from Google Landmarks v2, Conceptual captions and Coco captions revealing key insights into reasoning patterns and failure modes. This work demonstrates the potential of integrating external knowledge for advancing reasoning in VLMs, paving the way for more reliable and knowledgable multimodal systems.