Multi-Modal Generative Fuzzy System: Fuzzy Inference Guided Large Model Interactive Question Answering Framework

In Multimodal Question Answering (MQA), models are required to jointly encode and integrate heterogeneous information from multiple modalities, including text, images, and speech, to perform complex semantic reasoning and decision making. Despite recent advances, existing approaches, including traditional deep learning models and Large Models (LMs) or prompt-based frameworks, continue to face several critical challenges. First, modality bias arises from discrepancies in feature distributions across different modalities, which limits effective cross modal collaborative understanding. Second, many questions require knowledge drawn from multiple domains, introducing significant uncertainty. Third, current methods often rely on shallow semantic matching, resulting in limited reasoning depth an reduced interpretability. To address these issues, inspired by the traditional fuzzy system (FS) framework, we propose a fuzzy-inference-guided multimodal generative architecture termed the Multi-Modal Generative Fuzzy System (MMGFS). The main contributions of MMGFS are two folds. First, it alleviates modality bias through a multimodal collaborative rumination mechanism. Second, it introduces fuzzy rules and a multi-hop inference mechanism to support cross-domain knowledge fusion and hierarchical reasoning, thereby strengthening uncertainty modelling and deepening semantic understanding. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on open-domain question answering datasets, including MultimodalQA and WebQA, as well as domain-specific benchmarks, including BioMol-VQA and EHRxQA. Experimental results demonstrate that MMGFS consistently outperforms existing methods across multiple datasets. It effectively mitigates modality bias and question uncertainty while achieving superior performance in answer accuracy, consistency, and generalization.