  Aligning the recent large language models (LLMs) with computer vision models
leads to large vision-language models (LVLMs), which have paved the way for
zero-shot image reasoning tasks. However, LVLMs are usually trained on short
high-level captions only referring to sparse focus regions in images. Such a
``tunnel vision'' limits LVLMs to exploring other relevant contexts in complex
scenes. To address this challenge, we introduce Question-Driven Visual
Exploration (QVix), a novel prompting strategy that enhances the exploratory
capabilities of LVLMs in zero-shot reasoning tasks. QVix leverages LLMs' strong
language prior to generate input-exploratory questions with more details than
the original query, guiding LVLMs to explore visual content more
comprehensively and uncover subtle or peripheral details. QVix enables a wider
exploration of visual scenes, improving the LVLMs' reasoning accuracy and depth
in tasks such as visual question answering and visual entailment. Our
evaluations on various challenging zero-shot vision-language benchmarks,
including ScienceQA and fine-grained visual classification, demonstrate that
QVix significantly outperforms existing methods, highlighting its effectiveness
in bridging the gap between complex visual data and LVLMs' exploratory
abilities.
