When presented with questions involving visual thinking, humans naturally switch reasoning modalities, often forming mental images or drawing visual aids. Large language models have shown promising results in arithmetic and symbolic reasoning by expressing intermediate reasoning in text as a chain of thought, yet struggle to extend this capability to answer text queries that are easily solved by visual reasoning, even with extensive multimodal pretraining. We introduce a simple method, whiteboard-of-thought prompting, to unlock the visual reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models across modalities. Whiteboard-of-thought prompting provides multimodal large language models with a metaphorical ‘whiteboard’ to draw out reasoning steps as images, then returns these images back to the model for further processing. We find this can be accomplished with no demonstrations or specialized modules, instead leveraging models’ existing ability to write code with libraries such as Matplotlib and Turtle. This simple approach shows state-of-the-art results on four difficult natural language tasks that involve visual and spatial reasoning. We identify multiple settings where GPT-4o using chain-of-thought fails dramatically, including more than one where it achieves 0% accuracy, while whiteboard-of-thought enables up to 92% accuracy in these same settings. We present a detailed exploration of where the technique succeeds as well as its sources of error.

We introduce RESIN-11, a new schema-guided event extraction&prediction framework that can be applied to a large variety of newsworthy scenarios. The framework consists of two parts: (1) an open-domain end-to-end multimedia multilingual information extraction system with weak-supervision and zero-shot learningbased techniques. (2) schema matching and schema-guided event prediction based on our curated schema library. We build a demo website based on our dockerized system and schema library publicly available for installation (https://github.com/RESIN-KAIROS/RESIN-11). We also include a video demonstrating the system.

Images are often more significant than only the pixels to human eyes, as we can infer, associate, and reason with contextual information from other sources to establish a more complete picture. For example, in Figure 1, we can find a way to identify the news articles related to the picture through segment-wise understandings of the signs, the buildings, the crowds, and more. This reasoning could provide the time and place the image was taken, which will help us in subsequent tasks, such as automatic storyline construction, correction of image source in intended effect photographs, and upper-stream processing such as image clustering for certain location or time. In this work, we formulate this problem and introduce TARA: a dataset with 16k images with their associated news, time, and location, automatically extracted from New York Times, and an additional 61k examples as distant supervision from WIT. On top of the extractions, we present a crowdsourced subset in which we believe it is possible to find the images’ spatio-temporal information for evaluation purpose. We show that there exists a 70% gap between a state-of-the-art joint model and human performance, which is slightly filled by our proposed model that uses segment-wise reasoning, motivating higher-level vision-language joint models that can conduct open-ended reasoning with world knowledge. The data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/zeyofu/TARA.

We present a new information extraction system that can automatically construct temporal event graphs from a collection of news documents from multiple sources, multiple languages (English and Spanish for our experiment), and multiple data modalities (speech, text, image and video). The system advances state-of-the-art from two aspects: (1) extending from sentence-level event extraction to cross-document cross-lingual cross-media event extraction, coreference resolution and temporal event tracking; (2) using human curated event schema library to match and enhance the extraction output. We have made the dockerlized system publicly available for research purpose at GitHub, with a demo video.