Thinking Like a Botanist: Challenging Multimodal Language Models with Intent-Driven Chain-of-Inquiry
Fuente:
arXiv
Saved in:
| Main Authors: | , , , , , , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2026
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
| _version_ | 1866918462988746752 |
|---|---|
| author | Sakib, Syed Nazmus Haque, Nafiul Amin, Shahrear Bin Abdullah, Hasan Muhammad Hasan, Md. Mehedi Hossain, Mohammad Zabed Arman, Shifat E. |
| author_facet | Sakib, Syed Nazmus Haque, Nafiul Amin, Shahrear Bin Abdullah, Hasan Muhammad Hasan, Md. Mehedi Hossain, Mohammad Zabed Arman, Shifat E. |
| contents | Vision evaluations are typically done through multi-step processes. In most contemporary fields, experts analyze images using structured, evidence-based adaptive questioning. In plant pathology, botanists inspect leaf images, identify visual cues, infer diagnostic intent, and probe further with targeted questions that adapt to species, symptoms, and severity. This structured probing is crucial for accurate disease diagnosis and treatment formulation. Yet current vision-language models are evaluated on single-turn question answering. To address this gap, we introduce PlantInquiryVQA, a benchmark for studying multi-step, intent-driven visual reasoning in botanical diagnosis. We formalize a Chain of Inquiry framework modeling diagnostic trajectories as ordered question-answer sequences conditioned on grounded visual cues and explicit epistemic intent. We release a dataset of 24,950 expert-curated plant images and 138,068 question-answer pairs annotated with visual grounding, severity labels, and domain-specific reasoning templates. Evaluations on top-tier Multimodal Large Language Models reveal that while they describe visual symptoms adequately, they struggle with safe clinical reasoning and accurate diagnosis. Importantly, structured question-guided inquiry significantly improves diagnostic correctness, reduces hallucination, and increases reasoning efficiency. We hope PlantInquiryVQA serves as a foundational benchmark in advancing research to train diagnostic agents to reason like expert botanists rather than static classifiers. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_20983 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Thinking Like a Botanist: Challenging Multimodal Language Models with Intent-Driven Chain-of-Inquiry Sakib, Syed Nazmus Haque, Nafiul Amin, Shahrear Bin Abdullah, Hasan Muhammad Hasan, Md. Mehedi Hossain, Mohammad Zabed Arman, Shifat E. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language Vision evaluations are typically done through multi-step processes. In most contemporary fields, experts analyze images using structured, evidence-based adaptive questioning. In plant pathology, botanists inspect leaf images, identify visual cues, infer diagnostic intent, and probe further with targeted questions that adapt to species, symptoms, and severity. This structured probing is crucial for accurate disease diagnosis and treatment formulation. Yet current vision-language models are evaluated on single-turn question answering. To address this gap, we introduce PlantInquiryVQA, a benchmark for studying multi-step, intent-driven visual reasoning in botanical diagnosis. We formalize a Chain of Inquiry framework modeling diagnostic trajectories as ordered question-answer sequences conditioned on grounded visual cues and explicit epistemic intent. We release a dataset of 24,950 expert-curated plant images and 138,068 question-answer pairs annotated with visual grounding, severity labels, and domain-specific reasoning templates. Evaluations on top-tier Multimodal Large Language Models reveal that while they describe visual symptoms adequately, they struggle with safe clinical reasoning and accurate diagnosis. Importantly, structured question-guided inquiry significantly improves diagnostic correctness, reduces hallucination, and increases reasoning efficiency. We hope PlantInquiryVQA serves as a foundational benchmark in advancing research to train diagnostic agents to reason like expert botanists rather than static classifiers. |
| title | Thinking Like a Botanist: Challenging Multimodal Language Models with Intent-Driven Chain-of-Inquiry |
| topic | Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.20983 |