PathCoT: Chain-of-Thought Prompting for Zero-shot Pathology Visual Reasoning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Zhou, Junjie, Zuo, Yingli, Feng, Shichang, Wan, Peng, Zhu, Qi, Zhang, Daoqiang, Shao, Wei
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Zhou, Junjie
Zuo, Yingli
Feng, Shichang
Wan, Peng
Zhu, Qi
Zhang, Daoqiang
Shao, Wei
author_facet Zhou, Junjie
Zuo, Yingli
Feng, Shichang
Wan, Peng
Zhu, Qi
Zhang, Daoqiang
Shao, Wei
contents With the development of generative artificial intelligence and instruction tuning techniques, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made impressive progress on general reasoning tasks. Benefiting from the chain-of-thought (CoT) methodology, MLLMs can solve the visual reasoning problem step-by-step. However, existing MLLMs still face significant challenges when applied to pathology visual reasoning tasks: (1) LLMs often underperforms because they lack domain-specific information, which can lead to model hallucinations. (2) The additional reasoning steps in CoT may introduce errors, leading to the divergence of answers. To address these limitations, we propose PathCoT, a novel zero-shot CoT prompting method which integrates the pathology expert-knowledge into the reasoning process of MLLMs and incorporates self-evaluation to mitigate divergence of answers. Specifically, PathCoT guides the MLLM with prior knowledge to perform as pathology experts, and provides comprehensive analysis of the image with their domain-specific knowledge. By incorporating the experts' knowledge, PathCoT can obtain the answers with CoT reasoning. Furthermore, PathCoT incorporates a self-evaluation step that assesses both the results generated directly by MLLMs and those derived through CoT, finally determining the reliable answer. The experimental results on the PathMMU dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on pathology visual understanding and reasoning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_01029
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PathCoT: Chain-of-Thought Prompting for Zero-shot Pathology Visual Reasoning
Zhou, Junjie
Zuo, Yingli
Feng, Shichang
Wan, Peng
Zhu, Qi
Zhang, Daoqiang
Shao, Wei
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
With the development of generative artificial intelligence and instruction tuning techniques, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made impressive progress on general reasoning tasks. Benefiting from the chain-of-thought (CoT) methodology, MLLMs can solve the visual reasoning problem step-by-step. However, existing MLLMs still face significant challenges when applied to pathology visual reasoning tasks: (1) LLMs often underperforms because they lack domain-specific information, which can lead to model hallucinations. (2) The additional reasoning steps in CoT may introduce errors, leading to the divergence of answers. To address these limitations, we propose PathCoT, a novel zero-shot CoT prompting method which integrates the pathology expert-knowledge into the reasoning process of MLLMs and incorporates self-evaluation to mitigate divergence of answers. Specifically, PathCoT guides the MLLM with prior knowledge to perform as pathology experts, and provides comprehensive analysis of the image with their domain-specific knowledge. By incorporating the experts' knowledge, PathCoT can obtain the answers with CoT reasoning. Furthermore, PathCoT incorporates a self-evaluation step that assesses both the results generated directly by MLLMs and those derived through CoT, finally determining the reliable answer. The experimental results on the PathMMU dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on pathology visual understanding and reasoning.
title PathCoT: Chain-of-Thought Prompting for Zero-shot Pathology Visual Reasoning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01029