Zero-shot Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a prominent vision-language task that examines both the visual and textual understanding capability of systems in the absence of training data. Recently, by converting the images into captions, information across multi-modalities is bridged and Large Language Models (LLMs) can apply their strong zero-shot generalization capability to unseen questions. To design ideal prompts for solving VQA via LLMs, several studies have explored different strategies to select or generate question-answer pairs as the exemplar prompts, which guide LLMs to answer the current questions effectively. However, they totally ignore the role of question prompts. The original questions in VQA tasks usually encounter ellipses and ambiguity which require intermediate reasoning. To this end, we present Reasoning Question Prompts for VQA tasks, which can further activate the potential of LLMs in zero-shot scenarios. Specifically, for each question, we first generate self-contained questions as reasoning question prompts via an unsupervised question edition module considering sentence fluency, semantic integrity and syntactic invariance. Each reasoning question prompt clearly indicates the intent of the original question. This results in a set of candidate answers. Then, the candidate answers associated with their confidence scores acting as answer heuristics are fed into LLMs and produce the final answer. We evaluate reasoning question prompts on three VQA challenges, experimental results demonstrate that they can significantly improve the results of LLMs on zero-shot setting and outperform existing state-of-the-art zero-shot methods on three out of four data sets. Our source code is publicly released at https://github.com/ECNU-DASE-NLP/RQP.

To extract effective features for the terrain classification of hyperspectral remote-sensing images (HRSIs), a spectral fractional-differentiation (SFD) feature of HRSIs is presented, and a criterion for selecting the fractional-differentiation order is also proposed based on maximizing data separability. The minimum distance (MD) classifier, support vector machine (SVM) classifier, K-nearest neighbor (K-NN) classifier, and logistic regression (LR) classifier are used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed SFD feature, respectively. The obtained SFD feature is sent to the full connected network (FCN) and 1-dimensionality convolutional neural network (1DCNN) for deep-feature extraction and classification, and the SFD-Spa feature cube containing spatial information is sent to the 3-dimensionality convolutional neural network (3DCNN) for deep-feature extraction and classification. The SFD-Spa feature after performing the principal component analysis (PCA) on spectral pixels is directly connected with the first principal component of the original data and sent to 3DCNN_PCA and hybrid spectral net (HybridSN) models to extract deep features. Experiments on four real HRSIs using four traditional classifiers and five network models have shown that the extracted SFD feature can effectively improve the accuracy of terrain classification, and sending SFD feature to deep-learning environments can further improve the accuracy of terrain classification for HRSIs, especially in the case of small-size training samples.