EDMA: Entropy-Driven Multimodal Answering

Abstract

Multimodal question answering (MMQA) is based on integrating heterogeneous data sources, selectively leveraging relevant modalities, and ignoring distractors. Existing approaches based on Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) improve performance by splitting the task into intermediate steps, but do not quantify how each modality contributes to reaching the final answer. We argue that quantifying the effect that each modality has on the answering process improves process traceability and final performance. Thus, we propose Entropy-Driven Multimodal Answering (EDMA), which uses logical entropy to formalise multimodal QA as an iterative process of entropy reduction and to quantify the contribution of each modality in distinguishing correct from incorrect candidate answers. This enables the construction of quantifiable answering trajectories, where each step is associated with a measurable entropy reduction. EDMA introduces (i) modality-conditioned partitioning to estimate unimodal entropy reduction, (ii) entropy-driven multimodal fusion to capture complementary information across modalities, and (iii) entropy-based selection of the answering trajectory that minimises the most logical entropy. Evaluated across standard MMQA benchmarks, EDMA outperforms competitive prompting baselines, with average gains of 12.8 F1 and 4.6 LLM-J points over Planning Prompting and 18.6 F1 and 8.3 LLM-J points over Chain-of-Thought. Moreover, EDMA outperforms self-consistency baselines and is competitive with the multi-agent system baseline. Moreover, we show that higher entropy correlates with more false positives and, through controlled trajectory selection, demonstrate that logical entropy serves as an effective, monotonic selector for correct reasoning paths, validating entropy level as a reliable proxy for performance.