Paper ID: 2309.04790

MMHQA-ICL: Multimodal In-context Learning for Hybrid Question Answering over Text, Tables and Images

Weihao Liu, Fangyu Lei, Tongxu Luo, Jiahe Lei, Shizhu He, Jun Zhao, Kang Liu

In the real world, knowledge often exists in a multimodal and heterogeneous form. Addressing the task of question answering with hybrid data types, including text, tables, and images, is a challenging task (MMHQA). Recently, with the rise of large language models (LLM), in-context learning (ICL) has become the most popular way to solve QA problems. We propose MMHQA-ICL framework for addressing this problems, which includes stronger heterogeneous data retriever and an image caption module. Most importantly, we propose a Type-specific In-context Learning Strategy for MMHQA, enabling LLMs to leverage their powerful performance in this task. We are the first to use end-to-end LLM prompting method for this task. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework outperforms all baselines and methods trained on the full dataset, achieving state-of-the-art results under the few-shot setting on the MultimodalQA dataset.

Submitted: Sep 9, 2023