  In recent years, cross-modal reasoning (CMR), the process of understanding
and reasoning across different modalities, has emerged as a pivotal area with
applications spanning from multimedia analysis to healthcare diagnostics. As
the deployment of AI systems becomes more ubiquitous, the demand for
transparency and comprehensibility in these systems' decision-making processes
has intensified. This survey delves into the realm of interpretable cross-modal
reasoning (I-CMR), where the objective is not only to achieve high predictive
performance but also to provide human-understandable explanations for the
results. This survey presents a comprehensive overview of the typical methods
with a three-level taxonomy for I-CMR. Furthermore, this survey reviews the
existing CMR datasets with annotations for explanations. Finally, this survey
summarizes the challenges for I-CMR and discusses potential future directions.
In conclusion, this survey aims to catalyze the progress of this emerging
research area by providing researchers with a panoramic and comprehensive
perspective, illuminating the state of the art and discerning the
opportunities. The summarized methods, datasets, and other resources are
available at
https://github.com/ZuyiZhou/Awesome-Interpretable-Cross-modal-Reasoning.
