# Skeleton-and-Strategy Prompting: Training-Free Negation Understanding for Vision-Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01180 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.01180/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 8 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Oct 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Qwen3-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21631/) (2025)
- [InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10479/) (2025)
- [An Empirical Study of GPT-3 for Few-Shot Knowledge-Based VQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05014/) (2021)
- [Learn "No" to Say "Yes" Better: Improving Vision-Language Models via Negations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20312/) (2024)
- [LLaVA-OneVision-2: Towards Next-Generation Perceptual Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25979/) (2026)
- [VL-ICL Bench: The Devil in the Details of Multimodal In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13164/) (2024)
- [TNG-CLIP:Training-Time Negation Data Generation for Negation Awareness of CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18434/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite the strong performance of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) on a wide range of visual question answering (VQA) tasks, these models consistently struggle to understand negation and produce incorrect answers when questions involve negated clauses. To address this limitation, we propose Skeleton-and-Strategy Prompting (SSP), a training-free, in-context learning method that improves VLM negation understanding capabilities without any parameter updates. Given a negation question, our method first abstracts the underlying question structure into a skeleton, retrieves a small set of same-skeleton questions from a lightweight question pool, then prompts the VLM to analyze their shared negation pattern and synthesize a single-sentence answering strategy. The skeleton and strategy are prepended to the test sample to guide the model correctly tackle the negation problems. Experiments on multiple negation VQA benchmarks show that SSP achieves state-of-the-art performance on negation-focused VQA tasks while remaining computationally efficient.