Papers › Prophet: Prompting Large Language Models with Complementary Answer Heuristics for...

Prophet: Prompting Large Language Models with Complementary Answer Heuristics for Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering

3 Mar 2023CVPR 2023 1arXiv:2303.01903archive 2025-07-28

Zhou Yu, Xuecheng Ouyang, Zhenwei Shao, Meng Wang, Jun Yu

Knowledge-based visual question answering (VQA) requires external knowledge beyond the image to answer the question. Early studies retrieve required knowledge from explicit knowledge bases (KBs), which often introduces irrelevant information to the question, hence restricting the performance of their models. Recent works have resorted to using a powerful large language model (LLM) as an implicit knowledge engine to acquire the necessary knowledge for answering. Despite the encouraging results achieved by these methods, we argue that they have not fully activated the capacity of the \emph{blind} LLM as the provided textual input is insufficient to depict the required visual information to answer the question. In this paper, we present Prophet -- a conceptually simple, flexible, and general framework designed to prompt LLM with answer heuristics for knowledge-based VQA. Specifically, we first train a vanilla VQA model on a specific knowledge-based VQA dataset without external knowledge. After that, we extract two types of complementary answer heuristics from the VQA model: answer candidates and answer-aware examples. The two types of answer heuristics are jointly encoded into a formatted prompt to facilitate the LLM's understanding of both the image and question, thus generating a more accurate answer. By incorporating the state-of-the-art LLM GPT-3, Prophet significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on four challenging knowledge-based VQA datasets. Prophet is general that can be instantiated with the combinations of different VQA models (i.e., both discriminative and generative ones) and different LLMs (i.e., both commercial and open-source ones). Moreover, Prophet can also be integrated with modern large multimodal models in different stages, which is named Prophet++, to further improve the capabilities on knowledge-based VQA tasks.

Code

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

8 samples harvested; 0 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 8 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

Licence: 0 of the 8 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.

Harvested from milvlg/prophet. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.

Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.

Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.

Tasks

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections