  The development of large vision-language models (LVLMs) offers the potential
to address challenges faced by traditional multimodal recommendations thanks to
their proficient understanding of static images and textual dynamics. However,
the application of LVLMs in this field is still limited due to the following
complexities: First, LVLMs lack user preference knowledge as they are trained
from vast general datasets. Second, LVLMs suffer setbacks in addressing
multiple image dynamics in scenarios involving discrete, noisy, and redundant
image sequences. To overcome these issues, we propose the novel reasoning
scheme named Rec-GPT4V: Visual-Summary Thought (VST) of leveraging large
vision-language models for multimodal recommendation. We utilize user history
as in-context user preferences to address the first challenge. Next, we prompt
LVLMs to generate item image summaries and utilize image comprehension in
natural language space combined with item titles to query the user preferences
over candidate items. We conduct comprehensive experiments across four datasets
with three LVLMs: GPT4-V, LLaVa-7b, and LLaVa-13b. The numerical results
indicate the efficacy of VST.
