Evolutionary Multimodal Reasoning via Hierarchical Semantic Representation for Intent Recognition

Abstract: Multimodal intent recognition aims to infer human intents by jointly modeling various modalities, playing a pivotal role in real-world dialogue systems. However, current methods struggle to model hierarchical semantics underlying complex intents and lack the capacity for self-evolving reasoning over multimodal representations. To address these issues, we propose HIER, a novel method that integrates HIerarchical semantic representation with Evolutionary Reasoning based on Multimodal LLM (MLLM). Inspired by human cognition, HIER introduces a structured reasoning paradigm that organizes multimodal semantics into three progressively abstracted levels. It starts with modality-specific tokens capturing localized semantic cues, which are then clustered via a label-guided strategy to form mid-level semantic concepts. To capture higher-order structure, inter-concept relations are selected using JS divergence scores to highlight salient dependencies across concepts. These hierarchical representations are then injected into MLLM via CoT-driven prompting, enabling step-wise reasoning. Besides, HIER utilizes a self-evolution mechanism that refines semantic representations through MLLM feedback, allowing dynamic adaptation during inference. Experiments on three challenging benchmarks show that HIER consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods and MLLMs with 1-3% gains across all metrics. Code and more results are available at https://github.com/thuiar/HIER.