  Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in
natural language processing tasks by leveraging chain of thought (CoT) that
enables step-by-step thinking. Extending LLMs with multimodal capabilities is
the recent interest, but incurs computational cost and requires substantial
hardware resources. To address these challenges, we propose KAM-CoT a framework
that integrates CoT reasoning, Knowledge Graphs (KGs), and multiple modalities
for a comprehensive understanding of multimodal tasks. KAM-CoT adopts a
two-stage training process with KG grounding to generate effective rationales
and answers. By incorporating external knowledge from KGs during reasoning, the
model gains a deeper contextual understanding reducing hallucinations and
enhancing the quality of answers. This knowledge-augmented CoT reasoning
empowers the model to handle questions requiring external context, providing
more informed answers. Experimental findings show KAM-CoT outperforms the
state-of-the-art methods. On the ScienceQA dataset, we achieve an average
accuracy of 93.87%, surpassing GPT-3.5 (75.17%) by 18% and GPT-4 (83.99%) by
10%. Remarkably, KAM-CoT achieves these results with only 280M trainable
parameters at a time, demonstrating its cost-efficiency and effectiveness.
