Multimodal Multi-Hop Question Answering Through a Conversation Between Tools and Efficiently Finetuned Large Language Models

Abstract: We employ a tool-interacting divide-and-conquer strategy enabling LLMs to answer complex multimodal multi-hop questions. In particular, we harness the power of LLMs to divide a given multimodal multi-hop question into unimodal single-hop sub-questions to be answered by the appropriate tool from a predefined set of tools. After all corresponding tools provide the LLM with their answers, the LLM generates the next relevant unimodal single-hop question. To increase the reasoning ability of LLMs, we prompt chatGPT to generate a tool-interacting divide-and-conquer dataset. This dataset is then used to efficiently finetune the corresponding LLM. To assess the effectiveness of this approach, we conduct an evaluation on two recently introduced complex question-answering datasets. The experimental analysis demonstrate substantial improvements over existing state-of-the-art solutions, indicating the efficacy and generality of our strategy