StaR-KVQA: Structured Reasoning Traces for Implicit-Knowledge Visual Question Answering

Use this page to decide whether the paper is strong enough to influence an eval design. It summarizes the abstract plus available structured metadata. If the signal is thin, use it as background context and compare it against stronger hub pages before making protocol choices.

Abstract

Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering (KVQA) requires models to ground entities in images and reason over factual knowledge. Recent work has introduced its implicit-knowledge variant, IK-KVQA, where a multimodal large language model (MLLM) is the sole knowledge source and answers are produced without external retrieval. Existing IK-KVQA approaches, however, are typically trained with answer-only supervision: reasoning remains implicit, justifications are often weak or inconsistent, and generalization after standard supervised fine-tuning (SFT) can be brittle. We propose StaR-KVQA, a framework that equips IK-KVQA with dual-path structured reasoning traces - symbolic relation paths over text and vision together with path-grounded natural-language explanations - to provide a stronger inductive bias than generic answer-only supervision. These traces act as modality-aware scaffolds that guide the model toward relevant entities and attributes, offering more structure than generic chain-of-thought supervision while not constraining reasoning to any single fixed path. With a single open-source MLLM, StaR-KVQA constructs and selects traces to build an offline trace-enriched dataset and then performs structure-aware self-distillation; no external retrievers, verifiers, or curated knowledge bases are used, and inference is a single autoregressive pass. Across benchmarks, StaR-KVQA consistently improves both answer accuracy and the transparency of intermediate reasoning, achieving up to +11.3% higher answer accuracy on OK-VQA over the strongest baseline.