Training large language models (LLMs) with synthetic reasoning data has become a popular approach to enhancing their reasoning capabilities, while a key factor influencing the effectiveness of this paradigm is the quality of the generated multi-step reasoning data. To generate high-quality reasoning data, many recent methods generate synthetic reasoning paths and filter them based on final answer correctness, often overlooking flaws in intermediate reasoning steps. To enhance the verification of intermediate reasoning steps, prior work primarily resorts to code execution or symbolic reasoning engines. However, code-based validation is restricted to code or mathematical tasks, and reasoning engines require a well-structured and complete context. As a result, existing methods fail to function effectively in natural language reasoning tasks that involve ambiguous or incomplete contexts. In these tasks, synthetic data still lack reliable checks for verifying each reasoning step. To address this challenge, we introduce ORACLE, a structured data generation framework inspired by syllogistic reasoning. ORACLE integrates the generative strengths of LLMs with symbolic supervision: the LLM produces step-wise reasoning contexts, while a symbolic reasoning engine verifies the validity of each intermediate step. By employing a unified prompting template to elicit modular reasoning chains, ORACLE enables fine-grained, step-level validation, facilitating the construction of high-quality multi-step reasoning data. Across six logical, factual, and commonsense reasoning benchmarks, our ORACLE consistently outperforms strong baselines on multiple models.

Recent methods to enhance Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for Visual Question Answering (VQA) have focused on strengthening their inference capabilities, enabling them to tackle VQA tasks independently rather than merely as aids to Large Language Models (LLMs). However, these approaches often ignore the rich commonsense knowledge inside the given VQA image sampled from the real world, limiting the full potential of VLMs. Inspired by the human top-down reasoning process, i.e., systematically exploring relevant issues to derive a comprehensive answer, this work introduces a novel, explainable multi-agent collaboration framework by leveraging the expansive knowledge of LLMs to enhance the capabilities of VLMs themselves. Our framework comprises three agents, i.e.,Responder,Seeker, andIntegrator, to collaboratively answer the given VQA question by seeking its relevant issues and generating the final answer in such a top-down reasoning process. The VLM-basedResponderagent generates the answer candidates for the question and responds to other relevant issues. TheSeekeragent, primarily based on LLM, identifies relevant issues related to the question to inform theResponderagent and constructs a Multi-View Knowledge Base (MVKB) for the given visual scene by leveraging the build-in world knowledge of LLM. TheIntegratoragent combines knowledge from theSeekeragent and theResponderagent to produce the final VQA answer. Extensive and comprehensive evaluations on diverse VQA datasets with a variety of VLMs demonstrate the superior performance and interpretability of our framework over the baseline method, e.g., 5.7% improvement on VQA-RAD and 5.2% on Winoground in the zero-shot setting without extra training cost.

Deductive reasoning is a crucial logical capability that assists us in solving complex problems based on existing knowledge. Although augmented by Chain-of-Thought prompts, Large Language Models (LLMs) might not follow the correct reasoning paths. Enhancing the deductive reasoning abilities of LLMs, and leveraging their extensive built-in knowledge for various reasoning tasks, remains an open question. Attempting to mimic the human deductive reasoning paradigm, we propose a multi-stage Syllogistic-Reasoning Framework of Thought (SR-FoT) that enables LLMs to perform syllogistic deductive reasoning to handle complex knowledge-based reasoning tasks. Our SR-FoT begins by interpreting the question and then uses the interpretation and the original question to propose a suitable major premise. It proceeds by generating and answering minor premise questions in two stages to match the minor premises. Finally, it guides LLMs to use the previously generated major and minor premises to perform syllogistic deductive reasoning to derive the answer to the original question. Extensive and thorough experiments on knowledge-based reasoning tasks have demonstrated the effectiveness and advantages of our SR-FoT.

Recent improvements in visual synthesis have significantly enhanced the depiction of generated human photos, which are pivotal due to their wide applicability and demand. Nonetheless, the existing text-to-image or text-to-video models often generate low-quality human photos that might differ considerably from real-world body structures, referred to as "abnormal human bodies". Such abnormalities, typically deemed unacceptable, pose considerable challenges in the detection and repair of them within human photos. These challenges require precise abnormality recognition capabilities, which entail pinpointing both the location and the abnormality type. Intuitively, Visual Language Models (VLMs) that have obtained remarkable performance on various visual tasks are quite suitable for this task. However, their performance on abnormality detection in human photos is quite poor. Hence, it is quite important to highlight this task for the research community. In this paper, we first introduce a simple yet challenging task, i.e., Fine-grained Human-body Abnormality Detection (FHAD), and construct two high-quality datasets for evaluation. Then, we propose a meticulous framework, named HumanCalibrator, which identifies and repairs abnormalities in human body structures while preserving the other content. Experiments indicate that our HumanCalibrator achieves high accuracy in abnormality detection and accomplishes an increase in visual comparisons while preserving the other visual content.

Generalization on out-of-distribution (OOD) test data is an essential but underexplored topic in visual question answering. Current state-of-the-art VQA models often exploit the biased correlation between data and labels, which results in a large performance drop when the test and training data have different distributions. Inspired by the fact that humans can recognize novel concepts by composing existed concepts and capsule network’s ability of representing part-whole hierarchies, we propose to use capsules to represent parts and introduce "Linguistically Routing" to merge parts with human-prior hierarchies. Specifically, we first fuse visual features with a single question word as atomic parts. Then we introduce the "Linguistically Routing" to reweight the capsule connections between two layers such that: 1) the lower layer capsules can transfer their outputs to the most compatible higher capsules, and 2) two capsules can be merged if their corresponding words are merged in the question parse tree. The routing process maximizes the above unary and binary potentials across multiple layers and finally carves a tree structure inside the capsule network. We evaluate our proposed routing method on the CLEVR compositional generation test, the VQA-CP2 dataset and the VQAv2 dataset. The experimental results show that our proposed method can improve current VQA models on OOD split without losing performance on the in-domain test data.