  Zero-shot Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a prominent vision-language task
that examines both the visual and textual understanding capability of systems
in the absence of training data. Recently, by converting the images into
captions, information across multi-modalities is bridged and Large Language
Models (LLMs) can apply their strong zero-shot generalization capability to
unseen questions. To design ideal prompts for solving VQA via LLMs, several
studies have explored different strategies to select or generate
question-answer pairs as the exemplar prompts, which guide LLMs to answer the
current questions effectively. However, they totally ignore the role of
question prompts. The original questions in VQA tasks usually encounter
ellipses and ambiguity which require intermediate reasoning. To this end, we
present Reasoning Question Prompts for VQA tasks, which can further activate
the potential of LLMs in zero-shot scenarios. Specifically, for each question,
we first generate self-contained questions as reasoning question prompts via an
unsupervised question edition module considering sentence fluency, semantic
integrity and syntactic invariance. Each reasoning question prompt clearly
indicates the intent of the original question. This results in a set of
candidate answers. Then, the candidate answers associated with their confidence
scores acting as answer heuristics are fed into LLMs and produce the final
answer. We evaluate reasoning question prompts on three VQA challenges,
experimental results demonstrate that they can significantly improve the
results of LLMs on zero-shot setting and outperform existing state-of-the-art
zero-shot methods on three out of four data sets. Our source code is publicly
released at \url{https://github.com/ECNU-DASE-NLP/RQP}.
