Investigating Prompting Techniques for Zero- and Few-Shot Visual Question Answering

Abstract

In this paper, we explore effective prompting techniques to enhance zero- and few-shot Visual Question Answering (VQA) performance in contemporary Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Central to our investigation is the role of question templates in guiding VLMs to generate accurate answers. We identify that specific templates significantly influence VQA outcomes, underscoring the need for strategic template selection. Another pivotal aspect of our study is augmenting VLMs with image captions, providing them with additional visual cues alongside direct image features in VQA tasks. Surprisingly, this augmentation significantly improves the VLMs' performance in many cases, even though VLMs "see" the image directly! We explore chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning and find that while standard CoT reasoning causes drops in performance, advanced methods like self-consistency can help recover it. Furthermore, we find that text-only few-shot examples enhance VLMs' alignment with the task format, particularly benefiting models prone to verbose zero-shot answers. Lastly, to mitigate the challenges associated with evaluating free-form open-ended VQA responses using string-matching based VQA metrics, we introduce a straightforward LLM-guided pre-processing technique to adapt the model responses to the expected ground-truth answer distribution. In summary, our research sheds light on the intricacies of prompting strategies in VLMs for VQA, emphasizing the synergistic use of captions, templates, and pre-processing to enhance model efficacy.