MM-PhyRLHF: Reinforcement Learning Framework for Multimodal Physics Question-Answering

Recent advancements in LLMs have shown their significant potential in tasks like text summarization and generation. Yet, they often encounter difficulty while solving complex physics problems that require arithmetic calculation and a good understanding of concepts. Moreover, many physics problems include images that contain important details required to understand the problem's context. We propose an LMM-based chatbot to answer multimodal physics MCQs. For domain adaptation, we utilize the MM-PhyQA dataset comprising Indian high school-level multimodal physics problems. To improve the LMM's performance, we experiment with two techniques, RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback) and Image Captioning. In image captioning, we add a detailed explanation of the diagram in each image, minimizing hallucinations and image processing errors. We further explore the integration of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) methodology inspired by the ranking approach in RLHF to enhance the human-like problem-solving abilities of the models. The RLHF approach incorporates human feedback into the learning process of LLMs, improving the model's problem-solving skills, truthfulness, and reasoning capabilities, minimizing the hallucinations in the answers, and improving the quality instead of using vanilla-supervised fine-tuned models. We employ the LLaVA open-source model to answer multimodal physics MCQs and compare the performance with and without using RLHF.

MM-PhyQA: Multimodal Physics Question-Answering With Multi-Image CoT Prompting

While Large Language Models (LLMs) can achieve human-level performance in various tasks, they continue to face challenges when it comes to effectively tackling multi-step physics reasoning tasks. To identify the shortcomings of existing models and facilitate further research in this area, we curated a novel dataset, MM-PhyQA, which comprises well-constructed, high schoollevel multimodal physics problems. By evaluating the performance of contemporary LLMs that are publicly available, both with and without the incorporation of multimodal elements in these problems, we aim to shed light on their capabilities. For generating answers for questions consisting of multimodal input (in this case, images and text) we employed Zero-shot prediction using GPT-4 and utilized LLaVA (LLaVA and LLaVA-1.5), the latter of which were fine-tuned on our dataset. For evaluating the performance of LLMs consisting solely of textual input, we tested the performance of the base and fine-tuned versions of the Mistral-7B and LLaMA2-7b models. We also showcased the performance of the novel Multi-Image Chain-of-Thought (MI-CoT) Prompting technique, which when used to train LLaVA-1.5 13b yielded the best results when tested on our dataset, with superior scores in most metrics and the highest accuracy of 71.65% on the test set.