How do prompts change for multimodal (text+image) models?
Describe what to look at and why: regions, objects, relationships, and the decision to be made. Provide textual context the image can’t show (policy, thresholds). Ask for both a conclusion and a short justification grounded in visible evidence. If you need structured output, define a schema. For safety or compliance, include refusal rules for uncertain cases.
In practice
Point the model’s attention: ‘Focus on the chart’s legend and the rightmost bar; ignore the background text.’
Where to start
- [01]Write a template with ‘visual focus’, ‘task’, and ‘output’ sections.
- [02]Collect 15 example images with known answers.
- [03]Score precision/recall on critical labels.
- [04]Add a fallback: escalate if confidence is low.
multimodal promptingimage plus text promptsvision language models