COCO-Tree: Compositional Hierarchical Concept Trees for Enhanced Reasoning in Vision Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Sinha, Sanchit, Xiong, Guangzhi, Zhang, Aidong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Sinha, Sanchit
Xiong, Guangzhi
Zhang, Aidong
author_facet Sinha, Sanchit
Xiong, Guangzhi
Zhang, Aidong
contents Compositional reasoning remains a persistent weakness of modern vision language models (VLMs): they often falter when a task hinges on understanding how multiple objects, attributes, and relations interact within an image. Multiple research works have attempted to improve compositionality performance by creative tricks such as improving prompt structure, chain of thought reasoning, etc. A more recent line of work attempts to impart additional reasoning in VLMs using well-trained Large Language Models (LLMs), which are far superior in linguistic understanding than VLMs to compensate for the limited linguistic prowess of VLMs. However, these approaches are either resource-intensive or do not provide an interpretable reasoning process. In this paper, we present 'COCO-Tree' - a novel approach that augments VLM outputs with carefully designed neurosymbolic concept trees learned from LLMs to improve VLM's linguistic reasoning. COCO-Tree's beam search-inspired reasoning process boosts compositionality performance and provides a rationale behind VLM predictions. Empirical results on four compositionality benchmarks, Winoground, EqBench, ColorSwap, and SugarCrepe, in seven different open-source VLMs with varying sizes, demonstrate that COCO-Tree significantly improves compositional generalization by 5-10% over baselines.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_11012
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle COCO-Tree: Compositional Hierarchical Concept Trees for Enhanced Reasoning in Vision Language Models
Sinha, Sanchit
Xiong, Guangzhi
Zhang, Aidong
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Compositional reasoning remains a persistent weakness of modern vision language models (VLMs): they often falter when a task hinges on understanding how multiple objects, attributes, and relations interact within an image. Multiple research works have attempted to improve compositionality performance by creative tricks such as improving prompt structure, chain of thought reasoning, etc. A more recent line of work attempts to impart additional reasoning in VLMs using well-trained Large Language Models (LLMs), which are far superior in linguistic understanding than VLMs to compensate for the limited linguistic prowess of VLMs. However, these approaches are either resource-intensive or do not provide an interpretable reasoning process. In this paper, we present 'COCO-Tree' - a novel approach that augments VLM outputs with carefully designed neurosymbolic concept trees learned from LLMs to improve VLM's linguistic reasoning. COCO-Tree's beam search-inspired reasoning process boosts compositionality performance and provides a rationale behind VLM predictions. Empirical results on four compositionality benchmarks, Winoground, EqBench, ColorSwap, and SugarCrepe, in seven different open-source VLMs with varying sizes, demonstrate that COCO-Tree significantly improves compositional generalization by 5-10% over baselines.
title COCO-Tree: Compositional Hierarchical Concept Trees for Enhanced Reasoning in Vision Language Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11012