Recursive Visual Programming

Visual Programming (VP) has emerged as a powerful framework for Visual Question Answering (VQA). By generating and executing bespoke code for each question, these methods show advancement in leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for complex problem-solving. Despite their potential, existing VP methods generate all code in a single function, which does not fully utilize LLM's reasoning capacity and the modular adaptability of code. This results in code that is suboptimal in terms of both accuracy and interpretability. Inspired by human coding practices, we propose Recursive Visual Programming (RVP), which better harnesses the reasoning capacity of LLMs, provides modular code structure between code pieces, and assigns different return types for the sub-problems elegantly. RVP approaches VQA tasks with an top-down recursive code generation approach, allowing decomposition of complicated problems into smaller parts. We show RVP's efficacy through extensive experiments on benchmarks including VSR, COVR, GQA, and NextQA, underscoring the value of adopting human-like recursive and modular programming techniques for solving VQA tasks.