MM-Reasoner: A Multi-Modal Knowledge-Aware Framework for Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering

Thanks to the strong reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), recent approaches to knowledge-based visual question answering (KVQA) utilize LLMs with a global caption of an input image to answer a question. However, these approaches may miss key visual information that is not captured by the caption. Moreover, they cannot fully utilize the visual information required to answer the question. To address these issues, we introduce a new framework called Multi-Modal Knowledge-Aware Reasoner (MM-Reasoner) for KVQA. MM-Reasoner first utilizes a set of vision APIs, such as dense captioners, object detectors, and OCR, to extract detailed information from the image in textual format. Then, it prompts an LLM to extract query-specific knowledge from the extracted textual information to provide a rich representation that contains external knowledge, commonsense, explicit supporting facts, and rationales required for reasoning. Finally, the knowledge, query, and visual input are used to fine-tune a Vision-Language Model (VLM). At test time, MM-Reasoner uses the potential answers predicted by the VLM to iteratively update and optimize the prompt, refining its answer. Empirical studies show that MM-Reasoner achieves state-of-the-art performance on several KVQA datasets.