Daily Papers

Structural understanding of complex visual objects is an important unsolved component of artificial intelligence. To study this, we develop a new technique for the recently proposed Break-and-Make problem in LTRON where an agent must learn to build a previously unseen LEGO assembly using a single interactive session to gather information about its components and their structure. We attack this problem by building an agent that we call \ours that is able to make its own visual instruction book. By disassembling an unseen assembly and periodically saving images of it, the agent is able to create a set of instructions so that it has the information necessary to rebuild it. These instructions form an explicit memory that allows the model to reason about the assembly process one step at a time, avoiding the need for long-term implicit memory. This in turn allows us to train on much larger LEGO assemblies than has been possible in the past. To demonstrate the power of this model, we release a new dataset of procedurally built LEGO vehicles that contain an average of 31 bricks each and require over one hundred steps to disassemble and reassemble. We train these models using online imitation learning which allows the model to learn from its own mistakes. Finally, we also provide some small improvements to LTRON and the Break-and-Make problem that simplify the learning environment and improve usability.

Instruction tuning unlocks the superior capability of Large Language Models (LLM) to interact with humans. Furthermore, recent instruction-following datasets include images as visual inputs, collecting responses for image-based instructions. However, visual instruction-tuned models cannot comprehend textual details within images well. This work enhances the current visual instruction tuning pipeline with text-rich images (e.g., movie posters, book covers, etc.). Specifically, we first use publicly available OCR tools to collect results on 422K text-rich images from the LAION dataset. Moreover, we prompt text-only GPT-4 with recognized texts and image captions to generate 16K conversations, each containing question-answer pairs for text-rich images. By combining our collected data with previous multi-modal instruction-following data, our model, LLaVAR, substantially improves the LLaVA model's capability on text-based VQA datasets (up to 20% accuracy improvement) while achieving an accuracy of 91.42% on ScienceQA. The GPT-4-based instruction-following evaluation also demonstrates the improvement of our model on both natural images and text-rich images. Through qualitative analysis, LLaVAR shows promising interaction (e.g., reasoning, writing, and elaboration) skills with humans based on the latest real-world online content that combines text and images. We make our code/data/models publicly available at https://llavar.github.io/.

While large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing with their task-agnostic capabilities, visual generation tasks such as image translation, style transfer, and character customization still rely heavily on supervised, task-specific datasets. In this work, we introduce Group Diffusion Transformers (GDTs), a novel framework that unifies diverse visual generation tasks by redefining them as a group generation problem. In this approach, a set of related images is generated simultaneously, optionally conditioned on a subset of the group. GDTs build upon diffusion transformers with minimal architectural modifications by concatenating self-attention tokens across images. This allows the model to implicitly capture cross-image relationships (e.g., identities, styles, layouts, surroundings, and color schemes) through caption-based correlations. Our design enables scalable, unsupervised, and task-agnostic pretraining using extensive collections of image groups sourced from multimodal internet articles, image galleries, and video frames. We evaluate GDTs on a comprehensive benchmark featuring over 200 instructions across 30 distinct visual generation tasks, including picture book creation, font design, style transfer, sketching, colorization, drawing sequence generation, and character customization. Our models achieve competitive zero-shot performance without any additional fine-tuning or gradient updates. Furthermore, ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of key components such as data scaling, group size, and model design. These results demonstrate the potential of GDTs as scalable, general-purpose visual generation systems.

Real-world design tasks - such as picture book creation, film storyboard development using character sets, photo retouching, visual effects, and font transfer - are highly diverse and complex, requiring deep interpretation and extraction of various elements from instructions, descriptions, and reference images. The resulting images often implicitly capture key features from references or user inputs, making it challenging to develop models that can effectively address such varied tasks. While existing visual generative models can produce high-quality images based on prompts, they face significant limitations in professional design scenarios that involve varied forms and multiple inputs and outputs, even when enhanced with adapters like ControlNets and LoRAs. To address this, we introduce IDEA-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark encompassing 100 real-world design tasks, including rendering, visual effects, storyboarding, picture books, fonts, style-based, and identity-preserving generation, with 275 test cases to thoroughly evaluate a model's general-purpose generation capabilities. Notably, even the best-performing model only achieves 22.48 on IDEA-Bench, while the best general-purpose model only achieves 6.81. We provide a detailed analysis of these results, highlighting the inherent challenges and providing actionable directions for improvement. Additionally, we provide a subset of 18 representative tasks equipped with multimodal large language model (MLLM)-based auto-evaluation techniques to facilitate rapid model development and comparison. We releases the benchmark data, evaluation toolkits, and an online leaderboard at https://github.com/ali-vilab/IDEA-Bench, aiming to drive the advancement of generative models toward more versatile and applicable intelligent design systems.

This paper introduces MM-Instruct, a large-scale dataset of diverse and high-quality visual instruction data designed to enhance the instruction-following capabilities of large multimodal models (LMMs). While existing visual instruction datasets often focus on question-answering, they struggle to generalize to broader application scenarios such as creative writing, summarization, or image analysis. To address these limitations, we propose a novel approach to constructing MM-Instruct that leverages the strong instruction-following capabilities of existing LLMs to generate novel visual instruction data from large-scale but conventional image captioning datasets. MM-Instruct first leverages ChatGPT to automatically generate diverse instructions from a small set of seed instructions through augmenting and summarization. It then matches these instructions with images and uses an open-sourced large language model (LLM) to generate coherent answers to the instruction-image pairs. The LLM is grounded by the detailed text descriptions of images in the whole answer generation process to guarantee the alignment of the instruction data. Moreover, we introduce a benchmark based on the generated instruction data to evaluate the instruction-following capabilities of existing LMMs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of MM-Instruct by training a LLaVA-1.5 model on the generated data, denoted as LLaVA-Instruct, which exhibits significant improvements in instruction-following capabilities compared to LLaVA-1.5 models. The MM-Instruct dataset, benchmark, and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/jihaonew/MM-Instruct.

We introduce the new task of generating Illustrated Instructions, i.e., visual instructions customized to a user's needs. We identify desiderata unique to this task, and formalize it through a suite of automatic and human evaluation metrics, designed to measure the validity, consistency, and efficacy of the generations. We combine the power of large language models (LLMs) together with strong text-to-image generation diffusion models to propose a simple approach called StackedDiffusion, which generates such illustrated instructions given text as input. The resulting model strongly outperforms baseline approaches and state-of-the-art multimodal LLMs; and in 30% of cases, users even prefer it to human-generated articles. Most notably, it enables various new and exciting applications far beyond what static articles on the web can provide, such as personalized instructions complete with intermediate steps and pictures in response to a user's individual situation.

Traditional computer vision generally solves each single task independently by a dedicated model with the task instruction implicitly designed in the model architecture, arising two limitations: (1) it leads to task-specific models, which require multiple models for different tasks and restrict the potential synergies from diverse tasks; (2) it leads to a pre-defined and fixed model interface that has limited interactivity and adaptability in following user' task instructions. To address them, Visual Instruction Tuning (VIT) has been intensively studied recently, which finetunes a large vision model with language as task instructions, aiming to learn from a wide range of vision tasks described by language instructions a general-purpose multimodal model that can follow arbitrary instructions and thus solve arbitrary tasks specified by the user. This work aims to provide a systematic review of visual instruction tuning, covering (1) the background that presents computer vision task paradigms and the development of VIT; (2) the foundations of VIT that introduce commonly used network architectures, visual instruction tuning frameworks and objectives, and evaluation setups and tasks; (3) the commonly used datasets in visual instruction tuning and evaluation; (4) the review of existing VIT methods that categorizes them with a taxonomy according to both the studied vision task and the method design and highlights the major contributions, strengths, and shortcomings of them; (5) the comparison and discussion of VIT methods over various instruction-following benchmarks; (6) several challenges, open directions and possible future works in visual instruction tuning research.

Existing visual instruction tuning methods typically prompt large language models with textual descriptions to generate instruction-following data. Despite the promising performance achieved, these descriptions are derived from image annotations, which are oftentimes coarse-grained. Furthermore, the instructions might even contradict the visual content without observing the entire visual context. To address this challenge, we introduce a fine-grained visual instruction dataset, LVIS-Instruct4V, which contains 220K visually aligned and context-aware instructions produced by prompting the powerful GPT-4V with images from LVIS. Through experimental validation and case studies, we demonstrate that high-quality visual instructional data could improve the performance of LLaVA-1.5, a state-of-the-art large multimodal model, across a wide spectrum of benchmarks by clear margins. Notably, by simply replacing the LLaVA-Instruct with our LVIS-Instruct4V, we achieve better results than LLaVA on most challenging LMM benchmarks, e.g., LLaVA^w (76.7 vs. 70.7) and MM-Vet (40.2 vs. 35.4). We release our data and model at https://github.com/X2FD/LVIS-INSTRUCT4V.

Instruction following is crucial in contemporary LLM. However, when extended to multimodal setting, it often suffers from misalignment between specific textual instruction and targeted local region of an image. To achieve more accurate and nuanced multimodal instruction following, we introduce Instruction-guided Visual Masking (IVM), a new versatile visual grounding model that is compatible with diverse multimodal models, such as LMM and robot model. By constructing visual masks for instruction-irrelevant regions, IVM-enhanced multimodal models can effectively focus on task-relevant image regions to better align with complex instructions. Specifically, we design a visual masking data generation pipeline and create an IVM-Mix-1M dataset with 1 million image-instruction pairs. We further introduce a new learning technique, Discriminator Weighted Supervised Learning (DWSL) for preferential IVM training that prioritizes high-quality data samples. Experimental results on generic multimodal tasks such as VQA and embodied robotic control demonstrate the versatility of IVM, which as a plug-and-play tool, significantly boosts the performance of diverse multimodal models, yielding new state-of-the-art results across challenging multimodal benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/2toinf/IVM.

Multistep instructions, such as recipes and how-to guides, greatly benefit from visual aids, such as a series of images that accompany the instruction steps. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have become adept at generating coherent textual steps, Large Vision/Language Models (LVLMs) are less capable of generating accompanying image sequences. The most challenging aspect is that each generated image needs to adhere to the relevant textual step instruction, as well as be visually consistent with earlier images in the sequence. To address this problem, we propose an approach for generating consistent image sequences, which integrates a Latent Diffusion Model (LDM) with an LLM to transform the sequence into a caption to maintain the semantic coherence of the sequence. In addition, to maintain the visual coherence of the image sequence, we introduce a copy mechanism to initialise reverse diffusion processes with a latent vector iteration from a previously generated image from a relevant step. Both strategies will condition the reverse diffusion process on the sequence of instruction steps and tie the contents of the current image to previous instruction steps and corresponding images. Experiments show that the proposed approach is preferred by humans in 46.6% of the cases against 26.6% for the second best method. In addition, automatic metrics showed that the proposed method maintains semantic coherence and visual consistency across steps in both domains.

We introduce VISUAL EMBEDDED INSTRUCTION (VIM), a new framework designed to evaluate the visual instruction following capability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). As illustrated in Figure 2, VIM challenges the MLLMs by embedding the instructions into the visual scenes, demanding strong visual interpretative skills for instruction following. We adapt VIM to various benchmarks, including VQAv2, MME, MM-Vet, and RefCOCO series, compose a VIM bench, and probe diverse MLLMs across three distinct in-context learning settings: Zero Shot, One Shot, and Pair Shot. We observe that there is a significant performance disparity between the open-source MLLMs and GPT-4V, implying that their proficiency in visual instruction comprehension is not up to par. Our results highlight a promising direction for the enhancement of MLLMs capabilities on instruction following. We aim VIM to serve as a useful norm for advancing the state of the art and driving further progress in the field.

Instruction following vision-language (VL) models offer a flexible interface that supports a broad range of multimodal tasks in a zero-shot fashion. However, interfaces that operate on full images do not directly enable the user to "point to" and access specific regions within images. This capability is important not only to support reference-grounded VL benchmarks, but also, for practical applications that require precise within-image reasoning. We build Localized Visual Commonsense models, which allow users to specify (multiple) regions as input. We train our model by sampling localized commonsense knowledge from a large language model (LLM): specifically, we prompt an LLM to collect commonsense knowledge given a global literal image description and a local literal region description automatically generated by a set of VL models. With a separately trained critic model that selects high-quality examples, we find that training on the localized commonsense corpus can successfully distill existing VL models to support a reference-as-input interface. Empirical results and human evaluations in a zero-shot setup demonstrate that our distillation method results in more precise VL models of reasoning compared to a baseline of passing a generated referring expression to an LLM.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently sparked significant interest, which demonstrates emergent capabilities to serve as a general-purpose model for various vision-language tasks. However, existing methods mainly focus on limited types of instructions with a single image as visual context, which hinders the widespread availability of MLLMs. In this paper, we introduce the I4 benchmark to comprehensively evaluate the instruction following ability on complicated interleaved vision-language instructions, which involve intricate image-text sequential context, covering a diverse range of scenarios (e.g., visually-rich webpages/textbooks, lecture slides, embodied dialogue). Systematic evaluation on our I4 benchmark reveals a common defect of existing methods: the Visual Prompt Generator (VPG) trained on image-captioning alignment objective tends to attend to common foreground information for captioning but struggles to extract specific information required by particular tasks. To address this issue, we propose a generic and lightweight controllable knowledge re-injection module, which utilizes the sophisticated reasoning ability of LLMs to control the VPG to conditionally extract instruction-specific visual information and re-inject it into the LLM. Further, we introduce an annotation-free cross-attention guided counterfactual image training strategy to methodically learn the proposed module by collaborating a cascade of foundation models. Enhanced by the proposed module and training strategy, we present Cheetor, a Transformer-based MLLM that can effectively handle a wide variety of interleaved vision-language instructions and achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance across all tasks of I4, without high-quality multimodal instruction tuning data. Cheetor also exhibits competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art instruction tuned models on MME benchmark.

Despite rapid advancements in the capabilities of generative models, pretrained text-to-image models still struggle in capturing the semantics conveyed by complex prompts that compound multiple objects and instance-level attributes. Consequently, we are witnessing growing interests in integrating additional structural constraints, typically in the form of coarse bounding boxes, to better guide the generation process in such challenging cases. In this work, we take the idea of structural guidance a step further by making the observation that contemporary image generation models can directly provide a plausible fine-grained structural initialization. We propose a technique that couples this image-based structural guidance with LLM-based instance-level instructions, yielding output images that adhere to all parts of the text prompt, including object counts, instance-level attributes, and spatial relations between instances.

We introduce VisIT-Bench (Visual InsTruction Benchmark), a benchmark for evaluation of instruction-following vision-language models for real-world use. Our starting point is curating 70 'instruction families' that we envision instruction tuned vision-language models should be able to address. Extending beyond evaluations like VQAv2 and COCO, tasks range from basic recognition to game playing and creative generation. Following curation, our dataset comprises 592 test queries, each with a human-authored instruction-conditioned caption. These descriptions surface instruction-specific factors, e.g., for an instruction asking about the accessibility of a storefront for wheelchair users, the instruction-conditioned caption describes ramps/potential obstacles. These descriptions enable 1) collecting human-verified reference outputs for each instance; and 2) automatic evaluation of candidate multimodal generations using a text-only LLM, aligning with human judgment. We quantify quality gaps between models and references using both human and automatic evaluations; e.g., the top-performing instruction-following model wins against the GPT-4 reference in just 27% of the comparison. VisIT-Bench is dynamic to participate, practitioners simply submit their model's response on the project website; Data, code and leaderboard is available at visit-bench.github.io.

There are substantial instructional videos on the Internet, which provide us tutorials for completing various tasks. Existing instructional video datasets only focus on specific steps at the video level, lacking experiential guidelines at the task level, which can lead to beginners struggling to learn new tasks due to the lack of relevant experience. Moreover, the specific steps without guidelines are trivial and unsystematic, making it difficult to provide a clear tutorial. To address these problems, we present the GUIDE (Guideline-Guided) dataset, which contains 3.5K videos of 560 instructional tasks in 8 domains related to our daily life. Specifically, we annotate each instructional task with a guideline, representing a common pattern shared by all task-related videos. On this basis, we annotate systematic specific steps, including their associated guideline steps, specific step descriptions and timestamps. Our proposed benchmark consists of three sub-tasks to evaluate comprehension ability of models: (1) Step Captioning: models have to generate captions for specific steps from videos. (2) Guideline Summarization: models have to mine the common pattern in task-related videos and summarize a guideline from them. (3) Guideline-Guided Captioning: models have to generate captions for specific steps under the guide of guideline. We evaluate plenty of foundation models with GUIDE and perform in-depth analysis. Given the diversity and practicality of GUIDE, we believe that it can be used as a better benchmark for instructional video comprehension.

The ability to provide fine-grained control for generating and editing visual imagery has profound implications for computer vision and its applications. Previous works have explored extending controllability in two directions: instruction tuning with text-based prompts and multi-modal conditioning. However, these works make one or more unnatural assumptions on the number and/or type of modality inputs used to express controllability. We propose InstructAny2Pix, a flexible multi-modal instruction-following system that enables users to edit an input image using instructions involving audio, images, and text. InstructAny2Pix consists of three building blocks that facilitate this capability: a multi-modal encoder that encodes different modalities such as images and audio into a unified latent space, a diffusion model that learns to decode representations in this latent space into images, and a multi-modal LLM that can understand instructions involving multiple images and audio pieces and generate a conditional embedding of the desired output, which can be used by the diffusion decoder. Additionally, to facilitate training efficiency and improve generation quality, we include an additional refinement prior module that enhances the visual quality of LLM outputs. These designs are critical to the performance of our system. We demonstrate that our system can perform a series of novel instruction-guided editing tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/jacklishufan/InstructAny2Pix.git

Instruction tuning large language model (LLM) on image-text pairs has achieved unprecedented vision-language multimodal abilities. However, their vision-language alignments are only built on image-level, the lack of region-level alignment limits their advancements to fine-grained multimodal understanding. In this paper, we propose instruction tuning on region-of-interest. The key design is to reformulate the bounding box as the format of spatial instruction. The interleaved sequences of visual features extracted by the spatial instruction and the language embedding are input to LLM, and trained on the transformed region-text data in instruction tuning format. Our region-level vision-language model, termed as GPT4RoI, brings brand new conversational and interactive experience beyond image-level understanding. (1) Controllability: Users can interact with our model by both language and spatial instructions to flexibly adjust the detail level of the question. (2) Capacities: Our model supports not only single-region spatial instruction but also multi-region. This unlocks more region-level multimodal capacities such as detailed region caption and complex region reasoning. (3) Composition: Any off-the-shelf object detector can be a spatial instruction provider so as to mine informative object attributes from our model, like color, shape, material, action, relation to other objects, etc. The code, data, and demo can be found at https://github.com/jshilong/GPT4RoI.

Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) that enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to interpret images through visual instruction tuning have achieved significant success. However, existing visual instruction tuning methods only utilize image-language instruction data to align the language and image modalities, lacking a more fine-grained cross-modal alignment. In this paper, we propose Position-enhanced Visual Instruction Tuning (PVIT), which extends the functionality of MLLMs by integrating an additional region-level vision encoder. This integration promotes a more detailed comprehension of images for the MLLM. In addition, to efficiently achieve a fine-grained alignment between the vision modules and the LLM, we design multiple data generation strategies to construct an image-region-language instruction dataset. Finally, we present both quantitative experiments and qualitative analysis that demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model. Code and data will be released at https://github.com/THUNLP-MT/PVIT.

This tutorial note summarizes the presentation on ``Large Multimodal Models: Towards Building and Surpassing Multimodal GPT-4'', a part of CVPR 2023 tutorial on ``Recent Advances in Vision Foundation Models''. The tutorial consists of three parts. We first introduce the background on recent GPT-like large models for vision-and-language modeling to motivate the research in instruction-tuned large multimodal models (LMMs). As a pre-requisite, we describe the basics of instruction-tuning in large language models, which is further extended to the multimodal space. Lastly, we illustrate how to build the minimum prototype of multimodal GPT-4 like models with the open-source resource, and review the recently emerged topics.

This paper presents instruct-imagen, a model that tackles heterogeneous image generation tasks and generalizes across unseen tasks. We introduce *multi-modal instruction* for image generation, a task representation articulating a range of generation intents with precision. It uses natural language to amalgamate disparate modalities (e.g., text, edge, style, subject, etc.), such that abundant generation intents can be standardized in a uniform format. We then build instruct-imagen by fine-tuning a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model with a two-stage framework. First, we adapt the model using the retrieval-augmented training, to enhance model's capabilities to ground its generation on external multimodal context. Subsequently, we fine-tune the adapted model on diverse image generation tasks that requires vision-language understanding (e.g., subject-driven generation, etc.), each paired with a multi-modal instruction encapsulating the task's essence. Human evaluation on various image generation datasets reveals that instruct-imagen matches or surpasses prior task-specific models in-domain and demonstrates promising generalization to unseen and more complex tasks.

Visual instruction tuning has become the predominant technology in eliciting the multimodal task-solving capabilities of large vision-language models (LVLMs). Despite the success, as visual instructions require images as the input, it would leave the gap in inheriting the task-solving capabilities from the backbone LLMs, and make it costly to collect a large-scale dataset. To address it, we propose ViFT, a visual instruction-free fine-tuning framework for LVLMs. In ViFT, we only require the text-only instructions and image caption data during training, to separately learn the task-solving and visual perception abilities. During inference, we extract and combine the representations of the text and image inputs, for fusing the two abilities to fulfill multimodal tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that ViFT can achieve state-of-the-art performance on several visual reasoning and visual instruction following benchmarks, with rather less training data. Our code and data will be publicly released.

We are interested in the generation of navigation instructions, either in their own right or as training material for robotic navigation task. In this paper, we propose a new approach to navigation instruction generation by framing the problem as an image captioning task using semantic maps as visual input. Conventional approaches employ a sequence of panorama images to generate navigation instructions. Semantic maps abstract away from visual details and fuse the information in multiple panorama images into a single top-down representation, thereby reducing computational complexity to process the input. We present a benchmark dataset for instruction generation using semantic maps, propose an initial model and ask human subjects to manually assess the quality of generated instructions. Our initial investigations show promise in using semantic maps for instruction generation instead of a sequence of panorama images, but there is vast scope for improvement. We release the code for data preparation and model training at https://github.com/chengzu-li/VLGen.

Despite the promising progress in multi-modal tasks, current large multi-modal models (LMM) are prone to hallucinating inconsistent descriptions with respect to the associated image and human instructions. This paper addresses this issue by introducing the first large and diverse visual instruction tuning dataset, named Large-scale Robust Visual (LRV)-Instruction. Our dataset consists of 120k visual instructions generated by GPT4, covering 16 vision-and-language tasks with open-ended instructions and answers. Unlike existing studies that primarily focus on positive instruction samples, we design LRV-Instruction to include both positive and negative instructions for more robust visual instruction tuning. Our negative instructions are designed at two semantic levels: (i) Nonexistent Element Manipulation and (ii) Existent Element Manipulation. To efficiently measure the hallucination generated by LMMs, we propose GPT4-Assisted Visual Instruction Evaluation (GAVIE), a novel approach to evaluate visual instruction tuning without the need for human-annotated groundtruth answers and can adapt to diverse instruction formats. We conduct comprehensive experiments to investigate the hallucination of LMMs. Our results demonstrate that existing LMMs exhibit significant hallucination when presented with our negative instructions, particularly with Existent Element Manipulation instructions. Moreover, by finetuning MiniGPT4 on LRV-Instruction, we successfully mitigate hallucination while improving performance on public datasets using less training data compared to state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, we observed that a balanced ratio of positive and negative instances in the training data leads to a more robust model. Our project link is available at https://fuxiaoliu.github.io/LRV/.

We introduce a large-scale dataset for instruction-guided vector image editing, consisting of over 270,000 pairs of SVG images paired with natural language edit instructions. Our dataset enables training and evaluation of models that modify vector graphics based on textual commands. We describe the data collection process, including image pairing via CLIP similarity and instruction generation with vision-language models. Initial experiments with state-of-the-art large language models reveal that current methods struggle to produce accurate and valid edits, underscoring the challenge of this task. To foster research in natural language-driven vector graphic generation and editing, we make our resources created within this work publicly available.

General-purpose language models that can solve various language-domain tasks have emerged driven by the pre-training and instruction-tuning pipeline. However, building general-purpose vision-language models is challenging due to the increased task discrepancy introduced by the additional visual input. Although vision-language pre-training has been widely studied, vision-language instruction tuning remains relatively less explored. In this paper, we conduct a systematic and comprehensive study on vision-language instruction tuning based on the pre-trained BLIP-2 models. We gather a wide variety of 26 publicly available datasets, transform them into instruction tuning format and categorize them into two clusters for held-in instruction tuning and held-out zero-shot evaluation. Additionally, we introduce instruction-aware visual feature extraction, a crucial method that enables the model to extract informative features tailored to the given instruction. The resulting InstructBLIP models achieve state-of-the-art zero-shot performance across all 13 held-out datasets, substantially outperforming BLIP-2 and the larger Flamingo. Our models also lead to state-of-the-art performance when finetuned on individual downstream tasks (e.g., 90.7% accuracy on ScienceQA IMG). Furthermore, we qualitatively demonstrate the advantages of InstructBLIP over concurrent multimodal models. All InstructBLIP models have been open-sourced at https://github.com/salesforce/LAVIS/tree/main/projects/instructblip.

While language-guided image manipulation has made remarkable progress, the challenge of how to instruct the manipulation process faithfully reflecting human intentions persists. An accurate and comprehensive description of a manipulation task using natural language is laborious and sometimes even impossible, primarily due to the inherent uncertainty and ambiguity present in linguistic expressions. Is it feasible to accomplish image manipulation without resorting to external cross-modal language information? If this possibility exists, the inherent modality gap would be effortlessly eliminated. In this paper, we propose a novel manipulation methodology, dubbed ImageBrush, that learns visual instructions for more accurate image editing. Our key idea is to employ a pair of transformation images as visual instructions, which not only precisely captures human intention but also facilitates accessibility in real-world scenarios. Capturing visual instructions is particularly challenging because it involves extracting the underlying intentions solely from visual demonstrations and then applying this operation to a new image. To address this challenge, we formulate visual instruction learning as a diffusion-based inpainting problem, where the contextual information is fully exploited through an iterative process of generation. A visual prompting encoder is carefully devised to enhance the model's capacity in uncovering human intent behind the visual instructions. Extensive experiments show that our method generates engaging manipulation results conforming to the transformations entailed in demonstrations. Moreover, our model exhibits robust generalization capabilities on various downstream tasks such as pose transfer, image translation and video inpainting.

Image retrieval, i.e., finding desired images given a reference image, inherently encompasses rich, multi-faceted search intents that are difficult to capture solely using image-based measures. Recent work leverages text instructions to allow users to more freely express their search intents. However, existing work primarily focuses on image pairs that are visually similar and/or can be characterized by a small set of pre-defined relations. The core thesis of this paper is that text instructions can enable retrieving images with richer relations beyond visual similarity. To show this, we introduce MagicLens, a series of self-supervised image retrieval models that support open-ended instructions. MagicLens is built on a key novel insight: image pairs that naturally occur on the same web pages contain a wide range of implicit relations (e.g., inside view of), and we can bring those implicit relations explicit by synthesizing instructions via large multimodal models (LMMs) and large language models (LLMs). Trained on 36.7M (query image, instruction, target image) triplets with rich semantic relations mined from the web, MagicLens achieves comparable or better results on eight benchmarks of various image retrieval tasks than prior state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Remarkably, it outperforms previous SOTA but with a 50X smaller model size on multiple benchmarks. Additional human analyses on a 1.4M-image unseen corpus further demonstrate the diversity of search intents supported by MagicLens.

In this work, we propose Visual-Predictive Instruction Tuning (VPiT) - a simple and effective extension to visual instruction tuning that enables a pretrained LLM to quickly morph into an unified autoregressive model capable of generating both text and visual tokens. VPiT teaches an LLM to predict discrete text tokens and continuous visual tokens from any input sequence of image and text data curated in an instruction-following format. Our empirical investigation reveals several intriguing properties of VPiT: (1) visual generation ability emerges as a natural byproduct of improved visual understanding, and can be unlocked efficiently with a small amount of generation data; (2) while we find understanding and generation to be mutually beneficial, understanding data contributes to both capabilities more effectively than generation data. Building upon these findings, we train our MetaMorph model and achieve competitive performance on both visual understanding and generation. In visual generation, MetaMorph can leverage the world knowledge and reasoning abilities gained from LLM pretraining, and overcome common failure modes exhibited by other generation models. Our results suggest that LLMs may have strong "prior" vision capabilities that can be efficiently adapted to both visual understanding and generation with a relatively simple instruction tuning process.

In this paper, we focus on the task of instruction-based image editing. Previous works like InstructPix2Pix, InstructDiffusion, and SmartEdit have explored end-to-end editing. However, two limitations still remain: First, existing datasets suffer from low resolution, poor background consistency, and overly simplistic instructions. Second, current approaches mainly condition on the text while the rich image information is underexplored, therefore inferior in complex instruction following and maintaining background consistency. Targeting these issues, we first curated the AdvancedEdit dataset using a novel data construction pipeline, formulating a large-scale dataset with high visual quality, complex instructions, and good background consistency. Then, to further inject the rich image information, we introduce a two-stream bridging mechanism utilizing both the textual and visual features reasoned by the powerful Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLM) to guide the image editing process more precisely. Extensive results demonstrate that our approach, InsightEdit, achieves state-of-the-art performance, excelling in complex instruction following and maintaining high background consistency with the original image.

Captions that describe or explain charts help improve recall and comprehension of the depicted data and provide a more accessible medium for people with visual disabilities. However, current approaches for automatically generating such captions struggle to articulate the perceptual or cognitive features that are the hallmark of charts (e.g., complex trends and patterns). In response, we introduce VisText: a dataset of 12,441 pairs of charts and captions that describe the charts' construction, report key statistics, and identify perceptual and cognitive phenomena. In VisText, a chart is available as three representations: a rasterized image, a backing data table, and a scene graph -- a hierarchical representation of a chart's visual elements akin to a web page's Document Object Model (DOM). To evaluate the impact of VisText, we fine-tune state-of-the-art language models on our chart captioning task and apply prefix-tuning to produce captions that vary the semantic content they convey. Our models generate coherent, semantically rich captions and perform on par with state-of-the-art chart captioning models across machine translation and text generation metrics. Through qualitative analysis, we identify six broad categories of errors that our models make that can inform future work.

Charts provide visual representations of data and are widely used for analyzing information, addressing queries, and conveying insights to others. Various chart-related downstream tasks have emerged recently, such as question-answering and summarization. A common strategy to solve these tasks is to fine-tune various models originally trained on vision tasks language. However, such task-specific models are not capable of solving a wide range of chart-related tasks, constraining their real-world applicability. To overcome these challenges, we introduce ChartInstruct: a novel chart-specific vision-language Instruction-following dataset comprising 191K instructions generated with 71K charts. We then present two distinct systems for instruction tuning on such datasets: (1) an end-to-end model that connects a vision encoder for chart understanding with a LLM; and (2) a pipeline model that employs a two-step approach to extract chart data tables and input them into the LLM. In experiments on four downstream tasks, we first show the effectiveness of our model--achieving a new set of state-of-the-art results. Further evaluation shows that our instruction-tuning approach supports a wide array of real-world chart comprehension and reasoning scenarios, thereby expanding the scope and applicability of our models to new kinds of tasks.

Recent advances in generative diffusion models have enabled text-controlled synthesis of realistic and diverse images with impressive quality. Despite these remarkable advances, the application of text-to-image generative models in computer vision for standard visual recognition tasks remains limited. The current de facto approach for these tasks is to design model architectures and loss functions that are tailored to the task at hand. In this paper, we develop a unified language interface for computer vision tasks that abstracts away task-specific design choices and enables task execution by following natural language instructions. Our approach involves casting multiple computer vision tasks as text-to-image generation problems. Here, the text represents an instruction describing the task, and the resulting image is a visually-encoded task output. To train our model, we pool commonly-used computer vision datasets covering a range of tasks, including segmentation, object detection, depth estimation, and classification. We then use a large language model to paraphrase prompt templates that convey the specific tasks to be conducted on each image, and through this process, we create a multi-modal and multi-task training dataset comprising input and output images along with annotated instructions. Following the InstructPix2Pix architecture, we apply instruction-tuning to a text-to-image diffusion model using our constructed dataset, steering its functionality from a generative model to an instruction-guided multi-task vision learner. Experiments demonstrate that our model, dubbed InstructCV, performs competitively compared to other generalist and task-specific vision models. Moreover, it exhibits compelling generalization capabilities to unseen data, categories, and user instructions.

Instruction tuning is an essential supervised training phase for Large Language Models (LLMs), with the goal of enhancing LLMs' capacity to generalize instruction execution and adapt to user preferences. With the growing incorporation of multi-modal data into LLMs, there is an increasing interest in the performance of vision-language instruction tuning which presents more complex features in comparison to pure text instructions. In this paper, we systematically review the latest vision-language instruction tuning settings and datasets in multi-modal LLMs and summarize the characteristics that high-quality vision-language tuning data should have. We consider these characteristics as the foundational principles for constructing vision-language instruction data and propose a complete construction pipeline consisting of data collection, instruction generation, and quality control modules that incorporate meticulously designed instruction property evaluation indicators. We perform vision-language instruction tuning on three widely used multi-modal LLMs based on the instruction data we constructed and conduct extensive experiments on the corresponding metrics to demonstrate the rationality of the construction principles proposed in this paper. The code and dataset related to this paper have been open-sourced at https://github.com/palchenli/VL-Instruction-Tuning.

Despite the effectiveness of vision-language supervised fine-tuning in enhancing the performance of Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs). However, existing visual instruction tuning datasets include the following limitations: (1) Instruction annotation quality: despite existing VLLMs exhibiting strong performance, instructions generated by those advanced VLLMs may still suffer from inaccuracies, such as hallucinations. (2) Instructions and image diversity: the limited range of instruction types and the lack of diversity in image data may impact the model's ability to generate diversified and closer to real-world scenarios outputs. To address these challenges, we construct a high-quality, diverse visual instruction tuning dataset MMInstruct, which consists of 973K instructions from 24 domains. There are four instruction types: Judgement, Multiple-Choice, Long Visual Question Answering and Short Visual Question Answering. To construct MMInstruct, we propose an instruction generation data engine that leverages GPT-4V, GPT-3.5, and manual correction. Our instruction generation engine enables semi-automatic, low-cost, and multi-domain instruction generation at 1/6 the cost of manual construction. Through extensive experiment validation and ablation experiments, we demonstrate that MMInstruct could significantly improve the performance of VLLMs, e.g., the model fine-tuning on MMInstruct achieves new state-of-the-art performance on 10 out of 12 benchmarks. The code and data shall be available at https://github.com/yuecao0119/MMInstruct.

Visual instruction tuning is the key to building multimodal large language models (MLLMs), which greatly improves the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in vision scenario. However, existing MLLMs mostly rely on a mixture of multiple highly diverse visual instruction datasets for training (even more than a million instructions), which may introduce data redundancy. To investigate this issue, we conduct a series of empirical studies, which reveal a significant redundancy within the visual instruction datasets, and show that greatly reducing the amount of several instruction dataset even do not affect the performance. Based on the findings, we propose a new data selection approach TIVE, to eliminate redundancy within visual instruction data. TIVE first estimates the task-level and instance-level value of the visual instructions based on computed gradients. Then, according to the estimated values, TIVE determines the task proportion within the visual instructions, and selects representative instances to compose a smaller visual instruction subset for training. Experiments on LLaVA-1.5 show that our approach using only about 7.5% data can achieve comparable performance as the full-data fine-tuned model across seven benchmarks, even surpassing it on four of the benchmarks. Our code and data will be publicly released.

Although most current large multimodal models (LMMs) can already understand photos of natural scenes and portraits, their understanding of abstract images, e.g., charts, maps, or layouts, and visual reasoning capabilities remains quite rudimentary. They often struggle with simple daily tasks, such as reading time from a clock, understanding a flowchart, or planning a route using a road map. In light of this, we design a multi-modal self-instruct, utilizing large language models and their code capabilities to synthesize massive abstract images and visual reasoning instructions across daily scenarios. Our strategy effortlessly creates a multimodal benchmark with 11,193 instructions for eight visual scenarios: charts, tables, simulated maps, dashboards, flowcharts, relation graphs, floor plans, and visual puzzles. This benchmark, constructed with simple lines and geometric elements, exposes the shortcomings of most advanced LMMs like Claude-3.5-Sonnet and GPT-4o in abstract image understanding, spatial relations reasoning, and visual element induction. Besides, to verify the quality of our synthetic data, we fine-tune an LMM using 62,476 synthetic chart, table and road map instructions. The results demonstrate improved chart understanding and map navigation performance, and also demonstrate potential benefits for other visual reasoning tasks. Our code is available at: https://github.com/zwq2018/Multi-modal-Self-instruct.

When we look around and perform complex tasks, how we see and selectively process what we see is crucial. However, the lack of this visual search mechanism in current multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) hinders their ability to focus on important visual details, especially when handling high-resolution and visually crowded images. To address this, we introduce V*, an LLM-guided visual search mechanism that employs the world knowledge in LLMs for efficient visual querying. When combined with an MLLM, this mechanism enhances collaborative reasoning, contextual understanding, and precise targeting of specific visual elements. This integration results in a new MLLM meta-architecture, named Show, sEArch, and TelL (SEAL). We further create V*Bench, a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate MLLMs in their ability to process high-resolution images and focus on visual details. Our study highlights the necessity of incorporating visual search capabilities into multimodal systems. The code is available https://github.com/penghao-wu/vstar.

Compared to image-text pair data, interleaved corpora enable Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to understand the world more naturally like humans. However, such existing datasets are crawled from webpage, facing challenges like low knowledge density, loose image-text relations, and poor logical coherence between images. On the other hand, the internet hosts vast instructional videos (e.g., online geometry courses) that are widely used by humans to learn foundational subjects, yet these valuable resources remain underexplored in VLM training. In this paper, we introduce a high-quality multimodal textbook corpus with richer foundational knowledge for VLM pretraining. It collects over 2.5 years of instructional videos, totaling 22,000 class hours. We first use an LLM-proposed taxonomy to systematically gather instructional videos. Then we progressively extract and refine visual (keyframes), audio (ASR), and textual knowledge (OCR) from the videos, and organize as an image-text interleaved corpus based on temporal order. Compared to its counterparts, our video-centric textbook offers more coherent context, richer knowledge, and better image-text alignment. Experiments demonstrate its superb pretraining performance, particularly in knowledge- and reasoning-intensive tasks like ScienceQA and MathVista. Moreover, VLMs pre-trained on our textbook exhibit outstanding interleaved context awareness, leveraging visual and textual cues in their few-shot context for task solving~Our code are available at \url{https://github.com/DAMO-NLP-SG/multimodal_textbook}.

Recently, researchers have attempted to investigate the capability of LLMs in handling videos and proposed several video LLM models. However, the ability of LLMs to handle video grounding (VG), which is an important time-related video task requiring the model to precisely locate the start and end timestamps of temporal moments in videos that match the given textual queries, still remains unclear and unexplored in literature. To fill the gap, in this paper, we propose the LLM4VG benchmark, which systematically evaluates the performance of different LLMs on video grounding tasks. Based on our proposed LLM4VG, we design extensive experiments to examine two groups of video LLM models on video grounding: (i) the video LLMs trained on the text-video pairs (denoted as VidLLM), and (ii) the LLMs combined with pretrained visual description models such as the video/image captioning model. We propose prompt methods to integrate the instruction of VG and description from different kinds of generators, including caption-based generators for direct visual description and VQA-based generators for information enhancement. We also provide comprehensive comparisons of various VidLLMs and explore the influence of different choices of visual models, LLMs, prompt designs, etc, as well. Our experimental evaluations lead to two conclusions: (i) the existing VidLLMs are still far away from achieving satisfactory video grounding performance, and more time-related video tasks should be included to further fine-tune these models, and (ii) the combination of LLMs and visual models shows preliminary abilities for video grounding with considerable potential for improvement by resorting to more reliable models and further guidance of prompt instructions.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) equip pre-trained large-language models (LLMs) with visual capabilities. While textual prompting in LLMs has been widely studied, visual prompting has emerged for more fine-grained and free-form visual instructions. This paper presents the first comprehensive survey on visual prompting methods in MLLMs, focusing on visual prompting, prompt generation, compositional reasoning, and prompt learning. We categorize existing visual prompts and discuss generative methods for automatic prompt annotations on the images. We also examine visual prompting methods that enable better alignment between visual encoders and backbone LLMs, concerning MLLM's visual grounding, object referring, and compositional reasoning abilities. In addition, we provide a summary of model training and in-context learning methods to improve MLLM's perception and understanding of visual prompts. This paper examines visual prompting methods developed in MLLMs and provides a vision of the future of these methods.

People say, "A picture is worth a thousand words". Then how can we get the rich information out of the image? We argue that by using visual clues to bridge large pretrained vision foundation models and language models, we can do so without any extra cross-modal training. Thanks to the strong zero-shot capability of foundation models, we start by constructing a rich semantic representation of the image (e.g., image tags, object attributes / locations, captions) as a structured textual prompt, called visual clues, using a vision foundation model. Based on visual clues, we use large language model to produce a series of comprehensive descriptions for the visual content, which is then verified by the vision model again to select the candidate that aligns best with the image. We evaluate the quality of generated descriptions by quantitative and qualitative measurement. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of such a structured semantic representation.

Visual language models (VLMs) rapidly progressed with the recent success of large language models. There have been growing efforts on visual instruction tuning to extend the LLM with visual inputs, but lacks an in-depth study of the visual language pre-training process, where the model learns to perform joint modeling on both modalities. In this work, we examine the design options for VLM pre-training by augmenting LLM towards VLM through step-by-step controllable comparisons. We introduce three main findings: (1) freezing LLMs during pre-training can achieve decent zero-shot performance, but lack in-context learning capability, which requires unfreezing the LLM; (2) interleaved pre-training data is beneficial whereas image-text pairs alone are not optimal; (3) re-blending text-only instruction data to image-text data during instruction fine-tuning not only remedies the degradation of text-only tasks, but also boosts VLM task accuracy. With an enhanced pre-training recipe we build VILA, a Visual Language model family that consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art models, e.g., LLaVA-1.5, across main benchmarks without bells and whistles. Multi-modal pre-training also helps unveil appealing properties of VILA, including multi-image reasoning, enhanced in-context learning, and better world knowledge.

Visual prompt engineering is a fundamental technology in the field of visual and image Artificial General Intelligence, serving as a key component for achieving zero-shot capabilities. As the development of large vision models progresses, the importance of prompt engineering becomes increasingly evident. Designing suitable prompts for specific visual tasks has emerged as a meaningful research direction. This review aims to summarize the methods employed in the computer vision domain for large vision models and visual prompt engineering, exploring the latest advancements in visual prompt engineering. We present influential large models in the visual domain and a range of prompt engineering methods employed on these models. It is our hope that this review provides a comprehensive and systematic description of prompt engineering methods based on large visual models, offering valuable insights for future researchers in their exploration of this field.

With the rise of multimodal applications, instruction data has become critical for training multimodal language models capable of understanding complex image-based queries. Existing practices rely on powerful but costly large language models (LLMs) or multimodal language models (MLMs) to produce instruction data. These are often prone to hallucinations, licensing issues and the generation process is often hard to scale and interpret. In this work, we present a programmatic approach that employs scene graphs as symbolic representations of images and human-written programs to systematically synthesize vision-centric instruction data. Our approach ensures the interpretability and controllability of the data generation process and scales efficiently while maintaining factual accuracy. By implementing a suite of 24 single-image, 14 multi-image instruction generators, and a scene graph generation pipeline, we build a scalable, cost-effective system: ProVision which produces diverse question-answer pairs concerning objects, attributes, relations, depth, etc., for any given image. Applied to Visual Genome and DataComp datasets, we generate over 10 million instruction data points, ProVision-10M, and leverage them in both pretraining and instruction tuning stages of MLMs. When adopted in the instruction tuning stage, our single-image instruction data yields up to a 7% improvement on the 2D split and 8% on the 3D split of CVBench, along with a 3% increase in performance on QBench2, RealWorldQA, and MMMU. Our multi-image instruction data leads to an 8% improvement on Mantis-Eval. Incorporation of our data in both pre-training and fine-tuning stages of xGen-MM-4B leads to an averaged improvement of 1.6% across 11 benchmarks.

Recent interest in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) for practical applications is moderated by the significant challenge of hallucination or the inconsistency between the factual information and the generated text. In this paper, we first perform an in-depth analysis of hallucinations and discover several novel insights about how and when LVLMs hallucinate. From our analysis, we show that: (1) The community's efforts have been primarily targeted towards reducing hallucinations related to visual recognition (VR) prompts (e.g., prompts that only require describing the image), thereby ignoring hallucinations for cognitive prompts (e.g., prompts that require additional skills like reasoning on contents of the image). (2) LVLMs lack visual perception, i.e., they can see but not necessarily understand or perceive the input image. We analyze responses to cognitive prompts and show that LVLMs hallucinate due to a perception gap: although LVLMs accurately recognize visual elements in the input image and possess sufficient cognitive skills, they struggle to respond accurately and hallucinate. To overcome this shortcoming, we propose Visual Description Grounded Decoding (VDGD), a simple, robust, and training-free method for alleviating hallucinations. Specifically, we first describe the image and add it as a prefix to the instruction. Next, during auto-regressive decoding, we sample from the plausible candidates according to their KL-Divergence (KLD) to the description, where lower KLD is given higher preference. Experimental results on several benchmarks and LVLMs show that VDGD improves significantly over other baselines in reducing hallucinations. We also propose VaLLu, a benchmark for the comprehensive evaluation of the cognitive capabilities of LVLMs.

Thanks to the emerging of foundation models, the large language and vision models are integrated to acquire the multimodal ability of visual captioning, dialogue, question answering, etc. Although existing multimodal models present impressive performance of visual understanding and reasoning, their limits are still largely under-explored due to the scarcity of high-quality instruction tuning data. To push the limits of multimodal capability, we Sale up Visual Instruction Tuning (SVIT) by constructing a dataset of 3.2 million visual instruction tuning data including 1.6M conversation question-answer (QA) pairs and 1.6M complex reasoning QA pairs and 106K detailed image descriptions. Besides the volume, the proposed dataset is also featured by the high quality and rich diversity, which is generated by prompting GPT-4 with the abundant manual annotations of images. We empirically verify that training multimodal models on SVIT can significantly improve the multimodal performance in terms of visual perception, reasoning and planing.

Instruction-based image editing improves the controllability and flexibility of image manipulation via natural commands without elaborate descriptions or regional masks. However, human instructions are sometimes too brief for current methods to capture and follow. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show promising capabilities in cross-modal understanding and visual-aware response generation via LMs. We investigate how MLLMs facilitate edit instructions and present MLLM-Guided Image Editing (MGIE). MGIE learns to derive expressive instructions and provides explicit guidance. The editing model jointly captures this visual imagination and performs manipulation through end-to-end training. We evaluate various aspects of Photoshop-style modification, global photo optimization, and local editing. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that expressive instructions are crucial to instruction-based image editing, and our MGIE can lead to a notable improvement in automatic metrics and human evaluation while maintaining competitive inference efficiency.

Image restoration is a fundamental problem that involves recovering a high-quality clean image from its degraded observation. All-In-One image restoration models can effectively restore images from various types and levels of degradation using degradation-specific information as prompts to guide the restoration model. In this work, we present the first approach that uses human-written instructions to guide the image restoration model. Given natural language prompts, our model can recover high-quality images from their degraded counterparts, considering multiple degradation types. Our method, InstructIR, achieves state-of-the-art results on several restoration tasks including image denoising, deraining, deblurring, dehazing, and (low-light) image enhancement. InstructIR improves +1dB over previous all-in-one restoration methods. Moreover, our dataset and results represent a novel benchmark for new research on text-guided image restoration and enhancement. Our code, datasets and models are available at: https://github.com/mv-lab/InstructIR

While existing large vision-language multimodal models focus on whole image understanding, there is a prominent gap in achieving region-specific comprehension. Current approaches that use textual coordinates or spatial encodings often fail to provide a user-friendly interface for visual prompting. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel multimodal model capable of decoding arbitrary visual prompts. This allows users to intuitively mark images and interact with the model using natural cues like a "red bounding box" or "pointed arrow". Our simple design directly overlays visual markers onto the RGB image, eliminating the need for complex region encodings, yet achieves state-of-the-art performance on region-understanding tasks like Visual7W, PointQA, and Visual Commonsense Reasoning benchmark. Furthermore, we present ViP-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark to assess the capability of models in understanding visual prompts across multiple dimensions, enabling future research in this domain. Code, data, and model are publicly available.

The interaction between humans and artificial intelligence (AI) is a crucial factor that reflects the effectiveness of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, current MLLMs primarily focus on image-level comprehension and limit interaction to textual instructions, thereby constraining their flexibility in usage and depth of response. In this paper, we introduce the Draw-and-Understand project: a new model, a multi-domain dataset, and a challenging benchmark for visual prompting. Specifically, we propose SPHINX-V, a new end-to-end trained Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) that connects a vision encoder, a visual prompt encoder and an LLM for various visual prompts (points, bounding boxes, and free-form shape) and language understanding. To advance visual prompting research for MLLMs, we introduce MDVP-Data and MDVP-Bench. MDVP-Data features a multi-domain dataset containing 1.6M unique image-visual prompt-text instruction-following samples, including natural images, document images, OCR images, mobile screenshots, web screenshots, and multi-panel images. Furthermore, we present MDVP-Bench, a comprehensive and challenging benchmark to assess a model's capability in understanding visual prompting instructions. Our experiments demonstrate SPHINX-V's impressive multimodal interaction capabilities through visual prompting, revealing significant improvements in detailed pixel-level description and question-answering abilities.

The integration of visual encoders and large language models (LLMs) has driven recent progress in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, the scarcity of high-quality instruction-tuning data for vision-language tasks remains a challenge. The current leading paradigm, such as LLaVA, relies on language-only GPT-4 to generate data, which requires pre-annotated image captions and detection bounding boxes, suffering from understanding image details. A practical solution to this problem would be to utilize the available multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to generate instruction data for vision-language tasks. However, it's worth noting that the currently accessible MLLMs are not as powerful as their LLM counterparts, as they tend to produce inadequate responses and generate false information. As a solution for addressing the current issue, this paper proposes the Visual Instruction Generation and Correction (VIGC) framework that enables multimodal large language models to generate instruction-tuning data and progressively enhance its quality on-the-fly. Specifically, Visual Instruction Generation (VIG) guides the vision-language model to generate diverse instruction-tuning data. To ensure generation quality, Visual Instruction Correction (VIC) adopts an iterative update mechanism to correct any inaccuracies in data produced by VIG, effectively reducing the risk of hallucination. Leveraging the diverse, high-quality data generated by VIGC, we finetune mainstream models and validate data quality based on various evaluations. Experimental results demonstrate that VIGC not only compensates for the shortcomings of language-only data generation methods, but also effectively enhances the benchmark performance. The models, datasets, and code are available at https://opendatalab.github.io/VIGC.

Vision-language models have made significant strides recently, demonstrating superior performance across a range of tasks, e.g. optical character recognition and complex diagram analysis. Building on this trend, we introduce a new vision-language model, POINTS1.5, designed to excel in various real-world applications. POINTS1.5 is an enhancement of POINTS1.0 and incorporates several key innovations: i) We replace the original CLIP vision encoder, which had a fixed image resolution, with a NaViT-style vision encoder that supports native dynamic high resolution. This allows POINTS1.5 to process images of any resolution without needing to split them into tiles. ii) We add bilingual support to POINTS1.5, significantly enhancing its capability in Chinese. Due to the scarcity of open-source Chinese datasets for vision-language models, we collect numerous images from the Internet and annotate them using a combination of manual and automatic methods. iii) We propose a set of rigorous filtering methods for visual instruction tuning datasets. We comprehensively evaluate all these filtering methods, and choose the most effective ones to obtain the final visual instruction tuning set. Thanks to these innovations, POINTS1.5 significantly outperforms POINTS1.0 and demonstrates strong performance across a range of real-world applications. Notably, POINTS1.5-7B is trained on fewer than 4 billion tokens and ranks first on the OpenCompass leaderboard among models with fewer than 10 billion parameters

We introduce Cambrian-1, a family of multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) designed with a vision-centric approach. While stronger language models can enhance multimodal capabilities, the design choices for vision components are often insufficiently explored and disconnected from visual representation learning research. This gap hinders accurate sensory grounding in real-world scenarios. Our study uses LLMs and visual instruction tuning as an interface to evaluate various visual representations, offering new insights into different models and architectures -- self-supervised, strongly supervised, or combinations thereof -- based on experiments with over 20 vision encoders. We critically examine existing MLLM benchmarks, addressing the difficulties involved in consolidating and interpreting results from various tasks, and introduce a new vision-centric benchmark, CV-Bench. To further improve visual grounding, we propose the Spatial Vision Aggregator (SVA), a dynamic and spatially-aware connector that integrates high-resolution vision features with LLMs while reducing the number of tokens. Additionally, we discuss the curation of high-quality visual instruction-tuning data from publicly available sources, emphasizing the importance of data source balancing and distribution ratio. Collectively, Cambrian-1 not only achieves state-of-the-art performance but also serves as a comprehensive, open cookbook for instruction-tuned MLLMs. We provide model weights, code, supporting tools, datasets, and detailed instruction-tuning and evaluation recipes. We hope our release will inspire and accelerate advancements in multimodal systems and visual representation learning.

Creating visually appealing advertising images is often a labor-intensive and time-consuming process. Is it possible to automatically generate such images using only basic product information--specifically, a product foreground image, taglines, and a target size? Existing methods mainly focus on parts of the problem and fail to provide a comprehensive solution. To address this gap, we propose a novel multistage framework called Product-Centric Advertising Image Design (PAID). It consists of four sequential stages to highlight product foregrounds and taglines while achieving overall image aesthetics: prompt generation, layout generation, background image generation, and graphics rendering. Different expert models are designed and trained for the first three stages: First, we use a visual language model (VLM) to generate background prompts that match the products. Next, a VLM-based layout generation model arranges the placement of product foregrounds, graphic elements (taglines and decorative underlays), and various nongraphic elements (objects from the background prompt). Following this, we train an SDXL-based image generation model that can simultaneously accept prompts, layouts, and foreground controls. To support the PAID framework, we create corresponding datasets with over 50,000 labeled images. Extensive experimental results and online A/B tests demonstrate that PAID can produce more visually appealing advertising images.

Avoiding synthesizing specific visual concepts is an essential challenge in responsible visual synthesis. However, the visual concept that needs to be avoided for responsible visual synthesis tends to be diverse, depending on the region, context, and usage scenarios. In this work, we formalize a new task, Open-vocabulary Responsible Visual Synthesis (ORES), where the synthesis model is able to avoid forbidden visual concepts while allowing users to input any desired content. To address this problem, we present a Two-stage Intervention (TIN) framework. By introducing 1) rewriting with learnable instruction through a large-scale language model (LLM) and 2) synthesizing with prompt intervention on a diffusion synthesis model, it can effectively synthesize images avoiding any concepts but following the user's query as much as possible. To evaluate on ORES, we provide a publicly available dataset, baseline models, and benchmark. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in reducing risks of image generation. Our work highlights the potential of LLMs in responsible visual synthesis. Our code and dataset is public available.

Large language models with instruction-following abilities have revolutionized the field of artificial intelligence. These models show exceptional generalizability to tackle various real-world tasks through their natural language interfaces. However, their performance heavily relies on high-quality exemplar data, which is often difficult to obtain. This challenge is further exacerbated when it comes to multimodal instruction following. We introduce TextBind, an almost annotation-free framework for empowering larger language models with the multi-turn interleaved multimodal instruction-following capabilities. Our approach requires only image-caption pairs and generates multi-turn multimodal instruction-response conversations from a language model. We release our dataset, model, and demo to foster future research in the area of multimodal instruction following.

Text logo design heavily relies on the creativity and expertise of professional designers, in which arranging element layouts is one of the most important procedures. However, few attention has been paid to this specific task which needs to take precise textural details and user constraints into consideration, but only on the broader tasks such as document/poster layout generation. In this paper, we propose a VLM-based framework that generates content-aware text logo layouts by integrating multi-modal inputs with user constraints, supporting a more flexible and stable layout design in real-world applications. We introduce two model techniques to reduce the computation for processing multiple glyph images simultaneously, while does not face performance degradation. To support instruction-tuning of out model, we construct two extensive text logo datasets, which are 5x more larger than the existing public dataset. Except for the geometric annotations (e.g. text masks and character recognition), we also compliment with comprehensive layout descriptions in natural language format, for more effective training to have reasoning ability when dealing with complex layouts and custom user constraints. Experimental studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model and datasets, when comparing with previous methods in various benchmarks to evaluate geometric aesthetics and human preferences. The code and datasets will be publicly available.

Visuals are valuable tools for teaching math word problems (MWPs), helping young learners interpret textual descriptions into mathematical expressions before solving them. However, creating such visuals is labor-intensive and there is a lack of automated methods to support this process. In this paper, we present Math2Visual, an automatic framework for generating pedagogically meaningful visuals from MWP text descriptions. Math2Visual leverages a pre-defined visual language and a design space grounded in interviews with math teachers, to illustrate the core mathematical relationships in MWPs. Using Math2Visual, we construct an annotated dataset of 1,903 visuals and evaluate Text-to-Image (TTI) models for their ability to generate visuals that align with our design. We further fine-tune several TTI models with our dataset, demonstrating improvements in educational visual generation. Our work establishes a new benchmark for automated generation of pedagogically meaningful visuals and offers insights into key challenges in producing multimodal educational content, such as the misrepresentation of mathematical relationships and the omission of essential visual elements.

In this paper, we propose the LoRA of Change (LoC) framework for image editing with visual instructions, i.e., before-after image pairs. Compared to the ambiguities, insufficient specificity, and diverse interpretations of natural language, visual instructions can accurately reflect users' intent. Building on the success of LoRA in text-based image editing and generation, we dynamically learn an instruction-specific LoRA to encode the "change" in a before-after image pair, enhancing the interpretability and reusability of our model. Furthermore, generalizable models for image editing with visual instructions typically require quad data, i.e., a before-after image pair, along with query and target images. Due to the scarcity of such quad data, existing models are limited to a narrow range of visual instructions. To overcome this limitation, we introduce the LoRA Reverse optimization technique, enabling large-scale training with paired data alone. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our model produces high-quality images that align with user intent and support a broad spectrum of real-world visual instructions.

Visual communication, dating back to prehistoric cave paintings, is the use of visual elements to convey ideas and information. In today's visually saturated world, effective design demands an understanding of graphic design principles, visual storytelling, human psychology, and the ability to distill complex information into clear visuals. This dissertation explores how recent advancements in vision-language models (VLMs) can be leveraged to automate the creation of effective visual communication designs. Although generative models have made great progress in generating images from text, they still struggle to simplify complex ideas into clear, abstract visuals and are constrained by pixel-based outputs, which lack flexibility for many design tasks. To address these challenges, we constrain the models' operational space and introduce task-specific regularizations. We explore various aspects of visual communication, namely, sketches and visual abstraction, typography, animation, and visual inspiration.

We study the problem of completing various visual document understanding (VDU) tasks, e.g., question answering and information extraction, on real-world documents through human-written instructions. To this end, we propose InstructDoc, the first large-scale collection of 30 publicly available VDU datasets, each with diverse instructions in a unified format, which covers a wide range of 12 tasks and includes open document types/formats. Furthermore, to enhance the generalization performance on VDU tasks, we design a new instruction-based document reading and understanding model, InstructDr, that connects document images, image encoders, and large language models (LLMs) through a trainable bridging module. Experiments demonstrate that InstructDr can effectively adapt to new VDU datasets, tasks, and domains via given instructions and outperforms existing multimodal LLMs and ChatGPT without specific training.

To improve Multimodal Large Language Models' (MLLMs) ability to process images and complex instructions, researchers predominantly curate large-scale visual instruction tuning datasets, which are either sourced from existing vision tasks or synthetically generated using LLMs and image descriptions. However, they often suffer from critical flaws, including misaligned instruction-image pairs and low-quality images. Such issues hinder training efficiency and limit performance improvements, as models waste resources on noisy or irrelevant data with minimal benefit to overall capability. To address this issue, we propose a Visual-Centric Selection approach via Agents Collaboration (ViSA), which centers on image quality assessment and image-instruction relevance evaluation. Specifically, our approach consists of 1) an image information quantification method via visual agents collaboration to select images with rich visual information, and 2) a visual-centric instruction quality assessment method to select high-quality instruction data related to high-quality images. Finally, we reorganize 80K instruction data from large open-source datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ViSA outperforms or is comparable to current state-of-the-art models on seven benchmarks, using only 2.5\% of the original data, highlighting the efficiency of our data selection approach. Moreover, we conduct ablation studies to validate the effectiveness of each component of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/HITsz-TMG/ViSA.

Following the recent popularity of Large Language Models (LLMs), several attempts have been made to extend them to the visual domain. From having a visual assistant that could guide us through unfamiliar environments to generative models that produce images using only a high-level text description, the vision-language model (VLM) applications will significantly impact our relationship with technology. However, there are many challenges that need to be addressed to improve the reliability of those models. While language is discrete, vision evolves in a much higher dimensional space in which concepts cannot always be easily discretized. To better understand the mechanics behind mapping vision to language, we present this introduction to VLMs which we hope will help anyone who would like to enter the field. First, we introduce what VLMs are, how they work, and how to train them. Then, we present and discuss approaches to evaluate VLMs. Although this work primarily focuses on mapping images to language, we also discuss extending VLMs to videos.

This paper presents a versatile image-to-image visual assistant, PixWizard, designed for image generation, manipulation, and translation based on free-from language instructions. To this end, we tackle a variety of vision tasks into a unified image-text-to-image generation framework and curate an Omni Pixel-to-Pixel Instruction-Tuning Dataset. By constructing detailed instruction templates in natural language, we comprehensively include a large set of diverse vision tasks such as text-to-image generation, image restoration, image grounding, dense image prediction, image editing, controllable generation, inpainting/outpainting, and more. Furthermore, we adopt Diffusion Transformers (DiT) as our foundation model and extend its capabilities with a flexible any resolution mechanism, enabling the model to dynamically process images based on the aspect ratio of the input, closely aligning with human perceptual processes. The model also incorporates structure-aware and semantic-aware guidance to facilitate effective fusion of information from the input image. Our experiments demonstrate that PixWizard not only shows impressive generative and understanding abilities for images with diverse resolutions but also exhibits promising generalization capabilities with unseen tasks and human instructions. The code and related resources are available at https://github.com/AFeng-x/PixWizard

Recent advances in vision-language models have shown notable generalization in broad tasks through visual instruction tuning. However, bridging the gap between the pre-trained vision encoder and the large language models (LLMs) becomes the whole network's bottleneck. To improve cross-modality alignment, existing works usually consider more visual instruction data covering a broader range of vision tasks to fine-tune the model for question-answering, which, however, is costly to obtain and has not thoroughly explored the rich contextual information contained in images. This paper first attempts to harness the overlooked context within visual instruction data, training the model to self-supervised "learning" how to ask high-quality questions. In this way, we introduce a novel framework named SQ-LLaVA: Self-Questioning for Large Vision-Language Assistant. SQ-LLaVA exhibits proficiency in generating flexible and meaningful image-related questions while analyzing the visual clue and prior language knowledge, signifying an advanced level of generalized visual understanding. Moreover, fine-tuning SQ-LLaVA on higher-quality instruction data shows a performance improvement compared with traditional visual-instruction tuning methods. This improvement highlights the efficacy of self-questioning techniques in achieving a deeper and more nuanced comprehension of visual content across various contexts.

A word-as-image is a semantic typography technique where a word illustration presents a visualization of the meaning of the word, while also preserving its readability. We present a method to create word-as-image illustrations automatically. This task is highly challenging as it requires semantic understanding of the word and a creative idea of where and how to depict these semantics in a visually pleasing and legible manner. We rely on the remarkable ability of recent large pretrained language-vision models to distill textual concepts visually. We target simple, concise, black-and-white designs that convey the semantics clearly. We deliberately do not change the color or texture of the letters and do not use embellishments. Our method optimizes the outline of each letter to convey the desired concept, guided by a pretrained Stable Diffusion model. We incorporate additional loss terms to ensure the legibility of the text and the preservation of the style of the font. We show high quality and engaging results on numerous examples and compare to alternative techniques.

Text-conditioned image editing has emerged as a powerful tool for editing images. However, in many situations, language can be ambiguous and ineffective in describing specific image edits. When faced with such challenges, visual prompts can be a more informative and intuitive way to convey ideas. We present a method for image editing via visual prompting. Given pairs of example that represent the "before" and "after" images of an edit, our goal is to learn a text-based editing direction that can be used to perform the same edit on new images. We leverage the rich, pretrained editing capabilities of text-to-image diffusion models by inverting visual prompts into editing instructions. Our results show that with just one example pair, we can achieve competitive results compared to state-of-the-art text-conditioned image editing frameworks.

Recently, researchers have proposed powerful systems for generating and manipulating images using natural language instructions. However, it is difficult to precisely specify many common classes of image transformations with text alone. For example, a user may wish to change the location and breed of a particular dog in an image with several similar dogs. This task is quite difficult with natural language alone, and would require a user to write a laboriously complex prompt that both disambiguates the target dog and describes the destination. We propose ClickDiffusion, a system for precise image manipulation and generation that combines natural language instructions with visual feedback provided by the user through a direct manipulation interface. We demonstrate that by serializing both an image and a multi-modal instruction into a textual representation it is possible to leverage LLMs to perform precise transformations of the layout and appearance of an image. Code available at https://github.com/poloclub/ClickDiffusion.

We propose InstructDET, a data-centric method for referring object detection (ROD) that localizes target objects based on user instructions. While deriving from referring expressions (REC), the instructions we leverage are greatly diversified to encompass common user intentions related to object detection. For one image, we produce tremendous instructions that refer to every single object and different combinations of multiple objects. Each instruction and its corresponding object bounding boxes (bbxs) constitute one training data pair. In order to encompass common detection expressions, we involve emerging vision-language model (VLM) and large language model (LLM) to generate instructions guided by text prompts and object bbxs, as the generalizations of foundation models are effective to produce human-like expressions (e.g., describing object property, category, and relationship). We name our constructed dataset as InDET. It contains images, bbxs and generalized instructions that are from foundation models. Our InDET is developed from existing REC datasets and object detection datasets, with the expanding potential that any image with object bbxs can be incorporated through using our InstructDET method. By using our InDET dataset, we show that a conventional ROD model surpasses existing methods on standard REC datasets and our InDET test set. Our data-centric method InstructDET, with automatic data expansion by leveraging foundation models, directs a promising field that ROD can be greatly diversified to execute common object detection instructions.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable visual understanding performance on both vision-language and vision-centric tasks. However, they often fall short in integrating advanced, task-specific capabilities for compositional reasoning, which hinders their progress toward truly competent general vision models. To address this, we present a unified visual reasoning mechanism that enables LMMs to solve complicated compositional problems by leveraging their intrinsic capabilities (e.g. grounding and visual understanding capabilities). Different from the previous shortcut learning mechanism, our approach introduces a human-like understanding-thinking-answering process, allowing the model to complete all steps in a single pass forwarding without the need for multiple inferences or external tools. This design bridges the gap between foundational visual capabilities and general question answering, encouraging LMMs to generate faithful and traceable responses for complex visual reasoning. Meanwhile, we curate 334K visual instruction samples covering both general scenes and text-rich scenes and involving multiple foundational visual capabilities. Our trained model, Griffon-R, has the ability of end-to-end automatic understanding, self-thinking, and reasoning answers. Comprehensive experiments show that Griffon-R not only achieves advancing performance on complex visual reasoning benchmarks including VSR and CLEVR, but also enhances multimodal capabilities across various benchmarks like MMBench and ScienceQA. Data, models, and codes will be release at https://github.com/jefferyZhan/Griffon/tree/master/Griffon-R soon.

We present OmniBooth, an image generation framework that enables spatial control with instance-level multi-modal customization. For all instances, the multimodal instruction can be described through text prompts or image references. Given a set of user-defined masks and associated text or image guidance, our objective is to generate an image, where multiple objects are positioned at specified coordinates and their attributes are precisely aligned with the corresponding guidance. This approach significantly expands the scope of text-to-image generation, and elevates it to a more versatile and practical dimension in controllability. In this paper, our core contribution lies in the proposed latent control signals, a high-dimensional spatial feature that provides a unified representation to integrate the spatial, textual, and image conditions seamlessly. The text condition extends ControlNet to provide instance-level open-vocabulary generation. The image condition further enables fine-grained control with personalized identity. In practice, our method empowers users with more flexibility in controllable generation, as users can choose multi-modal conditions from text or images as needed. Furthermore, thorough experiments demonstrate our enhanced performance in image synthesis fidelity and alignment across different tasks and datasets. Project page: https://len-li.github.io/omnibooth-web/

Solving complex visual tasks such as "Who invented the musical instrument on the right?" involves a composition of skills: understanding space, recognizing instruments, and also retrieving prior knowledge. Recent work shows promise by decomposing such tasks using a large language model (LLM) into an executable program that invokes specialized vision models. However, generated programs are error-prone: they omit necessary steps, include spurious ones, and are unable to recover when the specialized models give incorrect outputs. Moreover, they require loading multiple models, incurring high latency and computation costs. We propose Visual Program Distillation (VPD), an instruction tuning framework that produces a vision-language model (VLM) capable of solving complex visual tasks with a single forward pass. VPD distills the reasoning ability of LLMs by using them to sample multiple candidate programs, which are then executed and verified to identify a correct one. It translates each correct program into a language description of the reasoning steps, which are then distilled into a VLM. Extensive experiments show that VPD improves the VLM's ability to count, understand spatial relations, and reason compositionally. Our VPD-trained PaLI-X outperforms all prior VLMs, achieving state-of-the-art performance across complex vision tasks, including MMBench, OK-VQA, A-OKVQA, TallyQA, POPE, and Hateful Memes. An evaluation with human annotators also confirms that VPD improves model response factuality and consistency. Finally, experiments on content moderation demonstrate that VPD is also helpful for adaptation to real-world applications with limited data.

Recently, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have attracted increasing research attention due to their powerful visual understanding capabilities. While they have achieved impressive results on various vision tasks, their performance on chart-to-code generation remains suboptimal. This task requires MLLMs to generate executable code that can reproduce a given chart, demanding not only precise visual understanding but also accurate translation of visual elements into structured code. Directly prompting MLLMs to perform this complex task often yields unsatisfactory results. To address this challenge, we propose {ChartIR}, an iterative refinement method based on structured instruction. First, we distinguish two tasks: visual understanding and code translation. To accomplish the visual understanding component, we design two types of structured instructions: description and difference. The description instruction captures the visual elements of the reference chart, while the difference instruction characterizes the discrepancies between the reference chart and the generated chart. These instructions effectively transform visual features into language representations, thereby facilitating the subsequent code translation process. Second, we decompose the overall chart generation pipeline into two stages: initial code generation and iterative refinement, enabling progressive enhancement of the final output. Experimental results show that, compared to other method, our method achieves superior performance on both the open-source model Qwen2-VL and the closed-source model GPT-4o.

The rapid advancement of Large Vision-Language models (LVLMs) has demonstrated a spectrum of emergent capabilities. Nevertheless, current models only focus on the visual content of a single scenario, while their ability to associate instances across different scenes has not yet been explored, which is essential for understanding complex visual content, such as movies with multiple characters and intricate plots. Towards movie understanding, a critical initial step for LVLMs is to unleash the potential of character identities memory and recognition across multiple visual scenarios. To achieve the goal, we propose visual instruction tuning with ID reference and develop an ID-Aware Large Vision-Language Model, IDA-VLM. Furthermore, our research introduces a novel benchmark MM-ID, to examine LVLMs on instance IDs memory and recognition across four dimensions: matching, location, question-answering, and captioning. Our findings highlight the limitations of existing LVLMs in recognizing and associating instance identities with ID reference. This paper paves the way for future artificial intelligence systems to possess multi-identity visual inputs, thereby facilitating the comprehension of complex visual narratives like movies.

Text-rich images, where text serves as the central visual element guiding the overall understanding, are prevalent in real-world applications, such as presentation slides, scanned documents, and webpage snapshots. Tasks involving multiple text-rich images are especially challenging, as they require not only understanding the content of individual images but reasoning about inter-relationships and logical flows across multiple visual inputs. Despite the importance of these scenarios, current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) struggle to handle such tasks due to two key challenges: (1) the scarcity of high-quality instruction tuning datasets for text-rich multi-image scenarios, and (2) the difficulty in balancing image resolution with visual feature sequence length. To address these challenges, we propose \OurMethod, a MLLM designed specifically for handling vision-language tasks involving multiple text-rich images. First, we curated about one million high-quality multimodal instruction-tuning data, tailored to text-rich, multi-image scenarios. Second, we developed an adaptive high-resolution multi-image encoding module to dynamically optimize the allocation of visual sequence length based on the original aspect ratios and resolutions of the input images. Experiments across a wide range of benchmarks demonstrate our model's superior capabilities in text-rich, multi-image evaluations and competitive performance in general domain evaluations.

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have made significant progress in downstream tasks that require quantitative concepts such as facial age estimation and image quality assessment, enabling VLMs to explore applications like image ranking and retrieval. However, existing studies typically focus on the reasoning based on a single image and heavily depend on text prompting, limiting their ability to learn comprehensive understanding from multiple images. To address this, we propose an effective yet efficient approach that reframes the CLIP model into a learning-to-rank task and introduces a lightweight adapter to augment CLIP for text-guided image ranking. Specifically, our approach incorporates learnable prompts to adapt to new instructions for ranking purposes and an auxiliary branch with ranking-aware attention, leveraging text-conditioned visual differences for additional supervision in image ranking. Our ranking-aware adapter consistently outperforms fine-tuned CLIPs on various tasks and achieves competitive results compared to state-of-the-art models designed for specific tasks like facial age estimation and image quality assessment. Overall, our approach primarily focuses on ranking images with a single instruction, which provides a natural and generalized way of learning from visual differences across images, bypassing the need for extensive text prompts tailored to individual tasks. Code is available: github.com/uynaes/RankingAwareCLIP.

With the rapid advancement of mathematical reasoning capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs), AI systems are increasingly being adopted in educational settings to support students' comprehension of problem-solving processes. However, a critical component remains underexplored in current LLM-generated explanations: visual explanation. In real-world instructional contexts, human tutors routinely employ visual aids - such as diagrams, markings, and highlights - to enhance conceptual clarity. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel task of visual solution explanation, which requires generating explanations that incorporate newly introduced visual elements essential for understanding (e.g., auxiliary lines, annotations, or geometric constructions). To evaluate model performance on this task, we propose MathExplain, a multimodal benchmark consisting of 997 math problems annotated with visual keypoints and corresponding explanatory text that references those elements. Our empirical results show that while some closed-source models demonstrate promising capabilities on visual solution-explaining, current open-source general-purpose models perform inconsistently, particularly in identifying relevant visual components and producing coherent keypoint-based explanations. We expect that visual solution-explaining and the MathExplain dataset will catalyze further research on multimodal LLMs in education and advance their deployment as effective, explanation-oriented AI tutors. Code and data will be released publicly.

It has recently been discovered that using a pre-trained vision-language model (VLM), e.g., CLIP, to align a whole query image with several finer text descriptions generated by a large language model can significantly enhance zero-shot performance. However, in this paper, we empirically find that the finer descriptions tend to align more effectively with local areas of the query image rather than the whole image, and then we theoretically validate this finding. Thus, we present a method called weighted visual-text cross alignment (WCA). This method begins with a localized visual prompting technique, designed to identify local visual areas within the query image. The local visual areas are then cross-aligned with the finer descriptions by creating a similarity matrix using the pre-trained VLM. To determine how well a query image aligns with each category, we develop a score function based on the weighted similarities in this matrix. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly improves zero-shot performance across various datasets, achieving results that are even comparable to few-shot learning methods.

Multi-modal models show appealing performance in visual recognition tasks recently, as free-form text-guided training evokes the ability to understand fine-grained visual content. However, current models are either inefficient or cannot be trivially upgraded to scene text recognition (STR) due to the composition difference between natural and text images. We propose a novel instruction-guided scene text recognition (IGTR) paradigm that formulates STR as an instruction learning problem and understands text images by predicting character attributes, e.g., character frequency, position, etc. IGTR first devises left langle condition,question,answerright rangle instruction triplets, providing rich and diverse descriptions of character attributes. To effectively learn these attributes through question-answering, IGTR develops lightweight instruction encoder, cross-modal feature fusion module and multi-task answer head, which guides nuanced text image understanding. Furthermore, IGTR realizes different recognition pipelines simply by using different instructions, enabling a character-understanding-based text reasoning paradigm that considerably differs from current methods. Experiments on English and Chinese benchmarks show that IGTR outperforms existing models by significant margins, while maintaining a small model size and efficient inference speed. Moreover, by adjusting the sampling of instructions, IGTR offers an elegant way to tackle the recognition of both rarely appearing and morphologically similar characters, which were previous challenges. Code at https://github.com/Topdu/OpenOCR{this http URL}.

Visual embedding models excel at zero-shot tasks like visual retrieval and classification. However, these models cannot be used for tasks that contain ambiguity or require user instruction. These tasks necessitate a multimodal embedding model, which outputs embeddings that combine visual and natural language input. Existing CLIP-based approaches embed images and text independently, and fuse the result. We find that this results in weak interactions between modalities, and poor user control over the representation. We introduce ABC, an open-source multimodal embedding model that uses a vision-language model backbone to deeply integrate image features with natural language instructions. ABC achieves bestfor-size performance on MSCOCO image-to-text retrieval and is the top performing model on classification and VQA tasks in the Massive Multimodal Embedding Benchmark. With a strongly unified vision-language representation, ABC can use natural language to solve subtle and potentially ambiguous visual retrieval problems. To evaluate this capability, we design CtrlBench, a benchmark that requires interleaving textual instructions with image content for correct retrieval. ABC advances the state of multimodal embeddings by offering high-quality representations and flexible natural language control. Our model and datasets are available at our project page.

Often, the needs and visual abilities differ between the annotator group and the end user group. Generating detailed diagram descriptions for blind and low-vision (BLV) users is one such challenging domain. Sighted annotators could describe visuals with ease, but existing studies have shown that direct generations by them are costly, bias-prone, and somewhat lacking by BLV standards. In this study, we ask sighted individuals to assess -- rather than produce -- diagram descriptions generated by vision-language models (VLM) that have been guided with latent supervision via a multi-pass inference. The sighted assessments prove effective and useful to professional educators who are themselves BLV and teach visually impaired learners. We release Sightation, a collection of diagram description datasets spanning 5k diagrams and 137k samples for completion, preference, retrieval, question answering, and reasoning training purposes and demonstrate their fine-tuning potential in various downstream tasks.

Diffusion models equipped with language models demonstrate excellent controllability in image generation tasks, allowing image processing to adhere to human instructions. However, the lack of diverse instruction-following data hampers the development of models that effectively recognize and execute user-customized instructions, particularly in low-level tasks. Moreover, the stochastic nature of the diffusion process leads to deficiencies in image generation or editing tasks that require the detailed preservation of the generated images. To address these limitations, we propose PromptFix, a comprehensive framework that enables diffusion models to follow human instructions to perform a wide variety of image-processing tasks. First, we construct a large-scale instruction-following dataset that covers comprehensive image-processing tasks, including low-level tasks, image editing, and object creation. Next, we propose a high-frequency guidance sampling method to explicitly control the denoising process and preserve high-frequency details in unprocessed areas. Finally, we design an auxiliary prompting adapter, utilizing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to enhance text prompts and improve the model's task generalization. Experimental results show that PromptFix outperforms previous methods in various image-processing tasks. Our proposed model also achieves comparable inference efficiency with these baseline models and exhibits superior zero-shot capabilities in blind restoration and combination tasks. The dataset and code are available at https://www.yongshengyu.com/PromptFix-Page.

Visual language is a system of communication that conveys information through symbols, shapes, and spatial arrangements. Diagrams are a typical example of a visual language depicting complex concepts and their relationships in the form of an image. The symbolic nature of diagrams presents significant challenges for building models capable of understanding them. Yet, recent studies seem to suggest that Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) can even tackle complex reasoning tasks involving diagrams. In this paper, we investigate this phenomenon by developing a comprehensive test suite to evaluate the diagram comprehension capability of LVLMs. Our test suite uses a variety of questions focused on concept entities and their relationships over a set of synthetic as well as real diagrams across several domains to evaluate the recognition and reasoning abilities of models. Our evaluation of three LVLMs (GPT-4V, GPT-4o, and Gemini) shows that while these models can accurately identify and reason about entities, their ability to understand relationships is notably limited. Further testing reveals that the decent performance on diagram understanding largely stems from leveraging their background knowledge as shortcuts to identify and reason about the relational information. Thus, we conclude that LVLMs have a limited capability for genuine diagram understanding, and their impressive performance in diagram reasoning is an illusion emanating from other confounding factors, such as the background knowledge in the models.

Comparing two images in terms of Commonalities and Differences (CaD) is a fundamental human capability that forms the basis of advanced visual reasoning and interpretation. It is essential for the generation of detailed and contextually relevant descriptions, performing comparative analysis, novelty detection, and making informed decisions based on visual data. However, surprisingly, little attention has been given to these fundamental concepts in the best current mimic of human visual intelligence - Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). We develop and contribute a new two-phase approach CaD-VI for collecting synthetic visual instructions, together with an instruction-following dataset CaD-Inst containing 349K image pairs with CaD instructions collected using CaD-VI. Our approach significantly improves the CaD spotting capabilities in LMMs, advancing the SOTA on a diverse set of related tasks by up to 17.5%. It is also complementary to existing difference-only instruction datasets, allowing automatic targeted refinement of those resources increasing their effectiveness for CaD tuning by up to 10%. Additionally, we propose an evaluation benchmark with 7.5K open-ended QAs to assess the CaD understanding abilities of LMMs.

We introduce Instruction Document Visual Question Answering (iDocVQA) dataset and Large Language Document (LLaDoc) model, for training Language-Vision (LV) models for document analysis and predictions on document images, respectively. Usually, deep neural networks for the DocVQA task are trained on datasets lacking instructions. We show that using instruction-following datasets improves performance. We compare performance across document-related datasets using the recent state-of-the-art (SotA) Large Language and Vision Assistant (LLaVA)1.5 as the base model. We also evaluate the performance of the derived models for object hallucination using the Polling-based Object Probing Evaluation (POPE) dataset. The results show that instruction-tuning performance ranges from 11X to 32X of zero-shot performance and from 0.1% to 4.2% over non-instruction (traditional task) finetuning. Despite the gains, these still fall short of human performance (94.36%), implying there's much room for improvement.

Recently, natural language has been the primary medium for human-robot interaction. However, its inherent lack of spatial precision introduces challenges for robotic task definition such as ambiguity and verbosity. Moreover, in some public settings where quiet is required, such as libraries or hospitals, verbal communication with robots is inappropriate. To address these limitations, we introduce the Robotic Visual Instruction (RoVI), a novel paradigm to guide robotic tasks through an object-centric, hand-drawn symbolic representation. RoVI effectively encodes spatial-temporal information into human-interpretable visual instructions through 2D sketches, utilizing arrows, circles, colors, and numbers to direct 3D robotic manipulation. To enable robots to understand RoVI better and generate precise actions based on RoVI, we present Visual Instruction Embodied Workflow (VIEW), a pipeline formulated for RoVI-conditioned policies. This approach leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to interpret RoVI inputs, decode spatial and temporal constraints from 2D pixel space via keypoint extraction, and then transform them into executable 3D action sequences. We additionally curate a specialized dataset of 15K instances to fine-tune small VLMs for edge deployment,enabling them to effectively learn RoVI capabilities. Our approach is rigorously validated across 11 novel tasks in both real and simulated environments, demonstrating significant generalization capability. Notably, VIEW achieves an 87.5% success rate in real-world scenarios involving unseen tasks that feature multi-step actions, with disturbances, and trajectory-following requirements. Project website: https://robotic-visual-instruction.github.io/

This paper introduces reconstructive visual instruction tuning (ROSS), a family of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) that exploit vision-centric supervision signals. In contrast to conventional visual instruction tuning approaches that exclusively supervise text outputs, ROSS prompts LMMs to supervise visual outputs via reconstructing input images. By doing so, it capitalizes on the inherent richness and detail present within input images themselves, which are often lost in pure text supervision. However, producing meaningful feedback from natural images is challenging due to the heavy spatial redundancy of visual signals. To address this issue, ROSS employs a denoising objective to reconstruct latent representations of input images, avoiding directly regressing exact raw RGB values. This intrinsic activation design inherently encourages LMMs to maintain image detail, thereby enhancing their fine-grained comprehension capabilities and reducing hallucinations. Empirically, ROSS consistently brings significant improvements across different visual encoders and language models. In comparison with extrinsic assistance state-of-the-art alternatives that aggregate multiple visual experts, ROSS delivers competitive performance with a single SigLIP visual encoder, demonstrating the efficacy of our vision-centric supervision tailored for visual outputs.

We propose a method for editing images from human instructions: given an input image and a written instruction that tells the model what to do, our model follows these instructions to edit the image. To obtain training data for this problem, we combine the knowledge of two large pretrained models -- a language model (GPT-3) and a text-to-image model (Stable Diffusion) -- to generate a large dataset of image editing examples. Our conditional diffusion model, InstructPix2Pix, is trained on our generated data, and generalizes to real images and user-written instructions at inference time. Since it performs edits in the forward pass and does not require per example fine-tuning or inversion, our model edits images quickly, in a matter of seconds. We show compelling editing results for a diverse collection of input images and written instructions.

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) involves retrieving a target image based on a composed query of an image paired with text that specifies modifications or changes to the visual reference. CIR is inherently an instruction-following task, as the model needs to interpret and apply modifications to the image. In practice, due to the scarcity of annotated data in downstream tasks, Zero-Shot CIR (ZS-CIR) is desirable. While existing ZS-CIR models based on CLIP have shown promising results, their capability in interpreting and following modification instructions remains limited. Some research attempts to address this by incorporating Large Language Models (LLMs). However, these approaches still face challenges in effectively integrating multimodal information and instruction understanding. To tackle above challenges, we propose a novel embedding method utilizing an instruction-tuned Multimodal LLM (MLLM) to generate composed representation, which significantly enhance the instruction following capability for a comprehensive integration between images and instructions. Nevertheless, directly applying MLLMs introduces a new challenge since MLLMs are primarily designed for text generation rather than embedding extraction as required in CIR. To address this, we introduce a two-stage training strategy to efficiently learn a joint multimodal embedding space and further refining the ability to follow modification instructions by tuning the model in a triplet dataset similar to the CIR format. Extensive experiments on four public datasets: FashionIQ, CIRR, GeneCIS, and CIRCO demonstrates the superior performance of our model, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines by a significant margin. Codes are available at the GitHub repository.

Despite vision-language models' (VLMs) remarkable capabilities as versatile visual assistants, two substantial challenges persist within the existing VLM frameworks: (1) lacking task diversity in pretraining and visual instruction tuning, and (2) annotation error and bias in GPT-4 synthesized instruction tuning data. Both challenges lead to issues such as poor generalizability, hallucination, and catastrophic forgetting. To address these challenges, we construct Vision-Flan, the most diverse publicly available visual instruction tuning dataset to date, comprising 187 diverse tasks and 1,664,261 instances sourced from academic datasets, and each task is accompanied by an expert-written instruction. In addition, we propose a two-stage instruction tuning framework, in which VLMs are firstly finetuned on Vision-Flan and further tuned on GPT-4 synthesized data. We find this two-stage tuning framework significantly outperforms the traditional single-stage visual instruction tuning framework and achieves the state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of multi-modal evaluation benchmarks. Finally, we conduct in-depth analyses to understand visual instruction tuning and our findings reveal that: (1) GPT-4 synthesized data does not substantially enhance VLMs' capabilities but rather modulates the model's responses to human-preferred formats; (2) A minimal quantity (e.g., 1,000) of GPT-4 synthesized data can effectively align VLM responses with human-preference; (3) Visual instruction tuning mainly helps large-language models (LLMs) to understand visual features.

Compared with Large Language Models (LLMs), Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) can also accept images as input, thus showcasing more interesting emergent capabilities and demonstrating impressive performance on various vision-language tasks. Motivated by text prompting in LLMs, visual prompting has been explored to enhance LVLMs' capabilities of perceiving visual information. However, previous visual prompting techniques solely process visual inputs without considering text queries, limiting the models' ability to follow text instructions to complete tasks. To fill this gap, in this work, we propose a new prompting technique named Attention Prompting on Image, which just simply overlays a text-query-guided attention heatmap on the original input image and effectively enhances LVLM on various tasks. Specifically, we generate an attention heatmap for the input image dependent on the text query with an auxiliary model like CLIP. Then the heatmap simply multiplies the pixel values of the original image to obtain the actual input image for the LVLM. Extensive experiments on various vison-language benchmarks verify the effectiveness of our technique. For example, Attention Prompting on Image improves LLaVA-1.5 by 3.8% and 2.9% on MM-Vet and LLaVA-Wild benchmarks, respectively.

Vision-Language Instruction Tuning (VLIT) is a critical training phase for Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). With the improving capabilities of open-source LVLMs, researchers have increasingly turned to generate VLIT data by using open-source LVLMs and achieved significant progress. However, such data generation approaches are bottlenecked by the following challenges: 1) Since multi-modal models tend to be influenced by prior language knowledge, directly using LVLMs to generate VLIT data would inevitably lead to low content relevance between generated data and images. 2) To improve the ability of the models to generate VLIT data, previous methods have incorporated an additional training phase to boost the generative capacity. This process hurts the generalization of the models to unseen inputs (i.e., "exposure bias" problem). In this paper, we propose a new Content Correlated VLIT data generation via Contrastive Learning (C3L). Specifically, we design a new content relevance module which enhances the content relevance between VLIT data and images by computing Image Instruction Correspondence Scores S(I2C). Moreover, a contrastive learning module is introduced to further boost the VLIT data generation capability of the LVLMs. A large number of automatic measures on four benchmarks show the effectiveness of our method.

A number of tasks have been proposed recently to facilitate easy access to charts such as chart QA and summarization. The dominant paradigm to solve these tasks has been to fine-tune a pretrained model on the task data. However, this approach is not only expensive but also not generalizable to unseen tasks. On the other hand, large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive generalization capabilities to unseen tasks with zero- or few-shot prompting. However, their application to chart-related tasks is not trivial as these tasks typically involve considering not only the underlying data but also the visual features in the chart image. We propose PromptChart, a multimodal few-shot prompting framework with LLMs for chart-related applications. By analyzing the tasks carefully, we have come up with a set of prompting guidelines for each task to elicit the best few-shot performance from LLMs. We further propose a strategy to inject visual information into the prompts. Our experiments on three different chart-related information consumption tasks show that with properly designed prompts LLMs can excel on the benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art.

In recent years, instruction-based image editing methods have garnered significant attention in image editing. However, despite encompassing a wide range of editing priors, these methods are helpless when handling editing tasks that are challenging to accurately describe through language. We propose InstructBrush, an inversion method for instruction-based image editing methods to bridge this gap. It extracts editing effects from exemplar image pairs as editing instructions, which are further applied for image editing. Two key techniques are introduced into InstructBrush, Attention-based Instruction Optimization and Transformation-oriented Instruction Initialization, to address the limitations of the previous method in terms of inversion effects and instruction generalization. To explore the ability of instruction inversion methods to guide image editing in open scenarios, we establish a TransformationOriented Paired Benchmark (TOP-Bench), which contains a rich set of scenes and editing types. The creation of this benchmark paves the way for further exploration of instruction inversion. Quantitatively and qualitatively, our approach achieves superior performance in editing and is more semantically consistent with the target editing effects.

Infographics are documents designed to effectively communicate information using a combination of textual, graphical and visual elements. In this work, we explore the automatic understanding of infographic images by using Visual Question Answering technique.To this end, we present InfographicVQA, a new dataset that comprises a diverse collection of infographics along with natural language questions and answers annotations. The collected questions require methods to jointly reason over the document layout, textual content, graphical elements, and data visualizations. We curate the dataset with emphasis on questions that require elementary reasoning and basic arithmetic skills. Finally, we evaluate two strong baselines based on state of the art multi-modal VQA models, and establish baseline performance for the new task. The dataset, code and leaderboard will be made available at http://docvqa.org

Comprehending natural language instructions is a charming property for 3D indoor scene synthesis systems. Existing methods directly model object joint distributions and express object relations implicitly within a scene, thereby hindering the controllability of generation. We introduce InstructScene, a novel generative framework that integrates a semantic graph prior and a layout decoder to improve controllability and fidelity for 3D scene synthesis. The proposed semantic graph prior jointly learns scene appearances and layout distributions, exhibiting versatility across various downstream tasks in a zero-shot manner. To facilitate the benchmarking for text-driven 3D scene synthesis, we curate a high-quality dataset of scene-instruction pairs with large language and multimodal models. Extensive experimental results reveal that the proposed method surpasses existing state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin. Thorough ablation studies confirm the efficacy of crucial design components. Project page: https://chenguolin.github.io/projects/InstructScene.

Book covers communicate information to potential readers, but can that same information be learned by computers? We propose using a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to predict the genre of a book based on the visual clues provided by its cover. The purpose of this research is to investigate whether relationships between books and their covers can be learned. However, determining the genre of a book is a difficult task because covers can be ambiguous and genres can be overarching. Despite this, we show that a CNN can extract features and learn underlying design rules set by the designer to define a genre. Using machine learning, we can bring the large amount of resources available to the book cover design process. In addition, we present a new challenging dataset that can be used for many pattern recognition tasks.

Instruction-following Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs) have achieved significant progress recently on a variety of tasks. These approaches merge strong pre-trained vision models and large language models (LLMs). Since these components are trained separately, the learned representations need to be aligned with joint training on additional image-language pairs. This procedure is not perfect and can cause the model to hallucinate - provide answers that do not accurately reflect the image, even when the core LLM is highly factual and the vision backbone has sufficiently complete representations. In this work, we frame the hallucination problem as an alignment issue, tackle it with preference tuning. Specifically, we propose POVID to generate feedback data with AI models. We use ground-truth instructions as the preferred response and a two-stage approach to generate dispreferred data. First, we prompt GPT-4V to inject plausible hallucinations into the correct answer. Second, we distort the image to trigger the inherent hallucination behavior of the VLLM. This is an automated approach, which does not rely on human data generation or require a perfect expert, which makes it easily scalable. Finally, both of these generation strategies are integrated into an RLHF pipeline via Direct Preference Optimization. In experiments across broad benchmarks, we show that we can not only reduce hallucinations, but improve model performance across standard benchmarks, outperforming prior approaches. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/YiyangZhou/POVID.

The development of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has seen significant advancements. However, the quantity and quality of multimodal instruction data have emerged as significant bottlenecks in their progress. Manually creating multimodal instruction data is both time-consuming and inefficient, posing challenges in producing instructions of high complexity. Moreover, distilling instruction data from black-box commercial models (e.g., GPT-4o, GPT-4V) often results in simplistic instruction data, which constrains performance to that of these models. The challenge of curating diverse and complex instruction data remains substantial. We propose MMEvol, a novel multimodal instruction data evolution framework that combines fine-grained perception evolution, cognitive reasoning evolution, and interaction evolution. This iterative approach breaks through data quality bottlenecks to generate a complex and diverse image-text instruction dataset, thereby empowering MLLMs with enhanced capabilities. Beginning with an initial set of instructions, SEED-163K, we utilize MMEvol to systematically broadens the diversity of instruction types, integrates reasoning steps to enhance cognitive capabilities, and extracts detailed information from images to improve visual understanding and robustness. To comprehensively evaluate the effectiveness of our data, we train LLaVA-NeXT using the evolved data and conduct experiments across 13 vision-language tasks. Compared to the baseline trained with seed data, our approach achieves an average accuracy improvement of 3.1 points and reaches state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on 9 of these tasks.

Instruction tuning has significantly advanced large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, enabling them to align with human instructions across diverse tasks. However, progress in open vision-language models (VLMs) has been limited due to the scarcity of high-quality instruction datasets. To tackle this challenge and promote research in the vision-language field, we introduce the Multi-Modal, Multilingual Instruction Tuning (M^3IT) dataset, designed to optimize VLM alignment with human instructions. Our M^3IT dataset comprises 40 carefully curated datasets, including 2.4 million instances and 400 manually written task instructions, reformatted into a vision-to-text structure. Key tasks are translated into 80 languages with an advanced translation system, ensuring broader accessibility. M^3IT surpasses previous datasets regarding task coverage, instruction number and instance scale. Moreover, we develop Ying-VLM, a VLM model trained on our M^3IT dataset, showcasing its potential to answer complex questions requiring world knowledge, generalize to unseen video tasks, and comprehend unseen instructions in Chinese. To encourage further research, we have open-sourced both the dataset and trained models.

This paper explores the usage of multimodal image-to-text models to enhance text-based item retrieval. We propose utilizing pre-trained image captioning and tagging models, such as instructBLIP and CLIP, to generate text-based product descriptions which are combined with existing text descriptions. Our work is particularly impactful for smaller eCommerce businesses who are unable to maintain the high-quality text descriptions necessary to effectively perform item retrieval for search and recommendation use cases. We evaluate the searchability of ground-truth text, image-generated text, and combinations of both texts on several subsets of Amazon's publicly available ESCI dataset. The results demonstrate the dual capability of our proposed models to enhance the retrieval of existing text and generate highly-searchable standalone descriptions.

Recent advancements in Large Vision-Language Models are accelerating the development of Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents that utilize human-like vision perception capabilities to enhance productivity on digital devices. Compared to approaches predicated on GUI metadata, which are platform-dependent and vulnerable to implementation variations, vision-based approaches offer broader applicability. In this vision-based paradigm, the GUI instruction grounding, which maps user instruction to the location of corresponding element on the given screenshot, remains a critical challenge, particularly due to limited public training dataset and resource-intensive manual instruction data annotation. In this paper, we delve into unexplored challenges in this task including element-to-screen ratio, unbalanced element type, and implicit instruction. To address these challenges, we introduce a large-scale data synthesis pipeline UI-E2I-Synth for generating varying complex instruction datasets using GPT-4o instead of human annotators. Furthermore, we propose a new GUI instruction grounding benchmark UI-I2E-Bench, which is designed to address the limitations of existing benchmarks by incorporating diverse annotation aspects. Our model, trained on the synthesized data, achieves superior performance in GUI instruction grounding, demonstrating the advancements of proposed data synthesis pipeline. The proposed benchmark, accompanied by extensive analyses, provides practical insights for future research in GUI grounding. We will release corresponding artifacts at https://colmon46.github.io/i2e-bench-leaderboard/ .

Multimodal Large Language Models have advanced AI in applications like text-to-video generation and visual question answering. These models rely on visual encoders to convert non-text data into vectors, but current encoders either lack semantic alignment or overlook non-salient objects. We propose the Guiding Visual Encoder to Perceive Overlooked Information (GiVE) approach. GiVE enhances visual representation with an Attention-Guided Adapter (AG-Adapter) module and an Object-focused Visual Semantic Learning module. These incorporate three novel loss terms: Object-focused Image-Text Contrast (OITC) loss, Object-focused Image-Image Contrast (OIIC) loss, and Object-focused Image Discrimination (OID) loss, improving object consideration, retrieval accuracy, and comprehensiveness. Our contributions include dynamic visual focus adjustment, novel loss functions to enhance object retrieval, and the Multi-Object Instruction (MOInst) dataset. Experiments show our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Embodied agents have achieved prominent performance in following human instructions to complete tasks. However, the potential of providing instructions informed by texts and images to assist humans in completing tasks remains underexplored. To uncover this capability, we present the multimodal procedural planning (MPP) task, in which models are given a high-level goal and generate plans of paired text-image steps, providing more complementary and informative guidance than unimodal plans. The key challenges of MPP are to ensure the informativeness, temporal coherence,and accuracy of plans across modalities. To tackle this, we propose Text-Image Prompting (TIP), a dual-modality prompting method that jointly leverages zero-shot reasoning ability in large language models (LLMs) and compelling text-to-image generation ability from diffusion-based models. TIP improves the interaction in the dual modalities using Text-to-Image Bridge and Image-to-Text Bridge, allowing LLMs to guide the textual-grounded image plan generation and leveraging the descriptions of image plans to ground the textual plan reversely. To address the lack of relevant datasets, we collect WIKIPLAN and RECIPEPLAN as a testbed for MPP. Our results show compelling human preferences and automatic scores against unimodal and multimodal baselines on WIKIPLAN and RECIPEPLAN in terms of informativeness, temporal coherence, and plan accuracy. Our code and data: https://github.com/YujieLu10/MPP.

The remarkable success of Large Language Models (LLMs) and instruction tuning drives the evolution of Vision Language Models (VLMs) towards a versatile general-purpose model. Yet, it remains unexplored whether current VLMs genuinely possess quality object-level image understanding capabilities determined from 'what objects are in the image?' or 'which object corresponds to a specified bounding box?'. Our findings reveal that the image understanding capabilities of current VLMs are strongly correlated with their zero-shot performance on Vision Language (VL) tasks. This suggests that prioritizing basic image understanding is crucial for VLMs to excel at VL tasks. To enhance object-level image understanding, we propose Crayon Large Language and Vision mOdel (CoLLaVO), which incorporates instruction tuning with crayon prompt as a new visual prompt tuning scheme based on panoptic color maps. Furthermore, we present a learning strategy of Dual QLoRA to preserve object-level image understanding without forgetting it during visual instruction tuning, thereby achieving a significant leap in zero-shot numerous VL benchmarks.

Image descriptions can help visually impaired people to quickly understand the image content. While we made significant progress in automatically describing images and optical character recognition, current approaches are unable to include written text in their descriptions, although text is omnipresent in human environments and frequently critical to understand our surroundings. To study how to comprehend text in the context of an image we collect a novel dataset, TextCaps, with 145k captions for 28k images. Our dataset challenges a model to recognize text, relate it to its visual context, and decide what part of the text to copy or paraphrase, requiring spatial, semantic, and visual reasoning between multiple text tokens and visual entities, such as objects. We study baselines and adapt existing approaches to this new task, which we refer to as image captioning with reading comprehension. Our analysis with automatic and human studies shows that our new TextCaps dataset provides many new technical challenges over previous datasets.

The emergence of multimodal large models (MLMs) has significantly advanced the field of visual understanding, offering remarkable capabilities in the realm of visual question answering (VQA). Yet, the true challenge lies in the domain of knowledge-intensive VQA tasks, which necessitate not just recognition of visual elements, but also a deep comprehension of the visual information in conjunction with a vast repository of learned knowledge. To uncover such capabilities of MLMs, particularly the newly introduced GPT-4V and Gemini, we provide an in-depth evaluation from three perspectives: 1) Commonsense Knowledge, which assesses how well models can understand visual cues and connect to general knowledge; 2) Fine-grained World Knowledge, which tests the model's skill in reasoning out specific knowledge from images, showcasing their proficiency across various specialized fields; 3) Comprehensive Knowledge with Decision-making Rationales, which examines model's capability to provide logical explanations for its inference, facilitating a deeper analysis from the interpretability perspective. Additionally, we utilize a visual knowledge-enhanced training strategy and multimodal retrieval-augmented generation approach to enhance MLMs, highlighting the future need for advancements in this research direction. Extensive experiments indicate that: a) GPT-4V demonstrates enhanced explanation generation when using composite images as few-shots; b) GPT-4V and other MLMs produce severe hallucinations when dealing with world knowledge; c) Visual knowledge enhanced training and prompting technicals present potential to improve performance. Codes: https://github.com/HITsz-TMG/Cognitive-Visual-Language-Mapper

Humans can learn to operate the user interface (UI) of an application by reading an instruction manual or how-to guide. Along with text, these resources include visual content such as UI screenshots and images of application icons referenced in the text. We explore how to leverage this data to learn generic visio-linguistic representations of UI screens and their components. These representations are useful in many real applications, such as accessibility, voice navigation, and task automation. Prior UI representation models rely on UI metadata (UI trees and accessibility labels), which is often missing, incompletely defined, or not accessible. We avoid such a dependency, and propose Lexi, a pre-trained vision and language model designed to handle the unique features of UI screens, including their text richness and context sensitivity. To train Lexi we curate the UICaption dataset consisting of 114k UI images paired with descriptions of their functionality. We evaluate Lexi on four tasks: UI action entailment, instruction-based UI image retrieval, grounding referring expressions, and UI entity recognition.

Following a navigation instruction such as 'Walk down the stairs and stop at the brown sofa' requires embodied AI agents to ground scene elements referenced via language (e.g. 'stairs') to visual content in the environment (pixels corresponding to 'stairs'). We ask the following question -- can we leverage abundant 'disembodied' web-scraped vision-and-language corpora (e.g. Conceptual Captions) to learn visual groundings (what do 'stairs' look like?) that improve performance on a relatively data-starved embodied perception task (Vision-and-Language Navigation)? Specifically, we develop VLN-BERT, a visiolinguistic transformer-based model for scoring the compatibility between an instruction ('...stop at the brown sofa') and a sequence of panoramic RGB images captured by the agent. We demonstrate that pretraining VLN-BERT on image-text pairs from the web before fine-tuning on embodied path-instruction data significantly improves performance on VLN -- outperforming the prior state-of-the-art in the fully-observed setting by 4 absolute percentage points on success rate. Ablations of our pretraining curriculum show each stage to be impactful -- with their combination resulting in further positive synergistic effects.

Personalizing text-to-image models using a limited set of images for a specific object has been explored in subject-specific image generation. However, existing methods often face challenges in aligning with text prompts due to overfitting to the limited training images. In this work, we introduce InstructBooth, a novel method designed to enhance image-text alignment in personalized text-to-image models without sacrificing the personalization ability. Our approach first personalizes text-to-image models with a small number of subject-specific images using a unique identifier. After personalization, we fine-tune personalized text-to-image models using reinforcement learning to maximize a reward that quantifies image-text alignment. Additionally, we propose complementary techniques to increase the synergy between these two processes. Our method demonstrates superior image-text alignment compared to existing baselines, while maintaining high personalization ability. In human evaluations, InstructBooth outperforms them when considering all comprehensive factors. Our project page is at https://sites.google.com/view/instructbooth.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance in text understanding and have become an essential tool for building smart assistants. Originally focusing on text, they have been enhanced with multimodal capabilities in recent works that successfully built visual instruction following assistants. As far as the graph modality goes, however, no such assistants have yet been developed. Graph structures are complex in that they represent relation between different features and are permutation invariant. Moreover, representing them in purely textual form does not always lead to good LLM performance even for finetuned models. As a result, there is a need to develop a new method to integrate graphs in LLMs for general graph understanding. This work explores the integration of the graph modality in LLM for general graph instruction following tasks. It aims at producing a deep learning model that enhances an underlying LLM with graph embeddings and trains it to understand them and to produce, given an instruction, an answer grounded in the graph representation. The approach performs significantly better than a graph to text approach and remains consistent even for larger graphs.

Despite progress in video large language models (Video-LLMs), research on instructional video understanding, crucial for enhancing access to instructional content, remains insufficient. To address this, we introduce InstructionBench, an Instructional video understanding Benchmark, which challenges models' advanced temporal reasoning within instructional videos characterized by their strict step-by-step flow. Employing GPT-4, we formulate Q\&A pairs in open-ended and multiple-choice formats to assess both Coarse-Grained event-level and Fine-Grained object-level reasoning. Our filtering strategies exclude questions answerable purely by common-sense knowledge, focusing on visual perception and analysis when evaluating Video-LLM models. The benchmark finally contains 5k questions across over 700 videos. We evaluate the latest Video-LLMs on our InstructionBench, finding that closed-source models outperform open-source ones. However, even the best model, GPT-4o, achieves only 53.42\% accuracy, indicating significant gaps in temporal reasoning. To advance the field, we also develop a comprehensive instructional video dataset with over 19k Q\&A pairs from nearly 2.5k videos, using an automated data generation framework, thereby enriching the community's research resources.

Visual contents, such as illustrations and images, play a big role in product manual understanding. Existing Product Manual Question Answering (PMQA) datasets tend to ignore visual contents and only retain textual parts. In this work, to emphasize the importance of multimodal contents, we propose a Multimodal Product Manual Question Answering (MPMQA) task. For each question, MPMQA requires the model not only to process multimodal contents but also to provide multimodal answers. To support MPMQA, a large-scale dataset PM209 is constructed with human annotations, which contains 209 product manuals from 27 well-known consumer electronic brands. Human annotations include 6 types of semantic regions for manual contents and 22,021 pairs of question and answer. Especially, each answer consists of a textual sentence and related visual regions from manuals. Taking into account the length of product manuals and the fact that a question is always related to a small number of pages, MPMQA can be naturally split into two subtasks: retrieving most related pages and then generating multimodal answers. We further propose a unified model that can perform these two subtasks all together and achieve comparable performance with multiple task-specific models. The PM209 dataset is available at https://github.com/AIM3-RUC/MPMQA.

This is the technique report for the winning solution of the CVPR2024 GenAI Media Generation Challenge Workshop's Instruction-guided Image Editing track. Instruction-guided image editing has been largely studied in recent years. The most advanced methods, such as SmartEdit and MGIE, usually combine large language models with diffusion models through joint training, where the former provides text understanding ability, and the latter provides image generation ability. However, in our experiments, we find that simply connecting large language models and image generation models through intermediary guidance such as masks instead of joint fine-tuning leads to a better editing performance and success rate. We use a 4-step process IIIE (Inpainting-based Instruction-guided Image Editing): editing category classification, main editing object identification, editing mask acquisition, and image inpainting. Results show that through proper combinations of language models and image inpainting models, our pipeline can reach a high success rate with satisfying visual quality.

Despite significant advancements in vision-language models (VLMs), there lacks effective approaches to enhance response quality by scaling inference-time computation. This capability is known to be a core step towards the self-improving models in recent large language model studies. In this paper, we present Vision Value Model (VisVM) that can guide VLM inference-time search to generate responses with better visual comprehension. Specifically, VisVM not only evaluates the generated sentence quality in the current search step, but also anticipates the quality of subsequent sentences that may result from the current step, thus providing a long-term value. In this way, VisVM steers VLMs away from generating sentences prone to hallucinations or insufficient detail, thereby producing higher quality responses. Experimental results demonstrate that VisVM-guided search significantly enhances VLMs' ability to generate descriptive captions with richer visual details and fewer hallucinations, compared with greedy decoding and search methods with other visual reward signals. Furthermore, we find that self-training the model with the VisVM-guided captions improve VLM's performance across a wide range of multimodal benchmarks, indicating the potential for developing self-improving VLMs. Our value model and code are available at https://github.com/si0wang/VisVM.

How to efficiently transform large language models (LLMs) into instruction followers is recently a popular research direction, while training LLM for multi-modal reasoning remains less explored. Although the recent LLaMA-Adapter demonstrates the potential to handle visual inputs with LLMs, it still cannot generalize well to open-ended visual instructions and lags behind GPT-4. In this paper, we present LLaMA-Adapter V2, a parameter-efficient visual instruction model. Specifically, we first augment LLaMA-Adapter by unlocking more learnable parameters (e.g., norm, bias and scale), which distribute the instruction-following ability across the entire LLaMA model besides adapters. Secondly, we propose an early fusion strategy to feed visual tokens only into the early LLM layers, contributing to better visual knowledge incorporation. Thirdly, a joint training paradigm of image-text pairs and instruction-following data is introduced by optimizing disjoint groups of learnable parameters. This strategy effectively alleviates the interference between the two tasks of image-text alignment and instruction following and achieves strong multi-modal reasoning with only a small-scale image-text and instruction dataset. During inference, we incorporate additional expert models (e.g. captioning/OCR systems) into LLaMA-Adapter to further enhance its image understanding capability without incurring training costs. Compared to the original LLaMA-Adapter, our LLaMA-Adapter V2 can perform open-ended multi-modal instructions by merely introducing 14M parameters over LLaMA. The newly designed framework also exhibits stronger language-only instruction-following capabilities and even excels in chat interactions. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/ZrrSkywalker/LLaMA-Adapter.

In recent years, notable advancements have been made in the domain of visual document understanding, with the prevailing architecture comprising a cascade of vision and language models. The text component can either be extracted explicitly with the use of external OCR models in OCR-based approaches, or alternatively, the vision model can be endowed with reading capabilities in OCR-free approaches. Typically, the queries to the model are input exclusively to the language component, necessitating the visual features to encompass the entire document. In this paper, we present VisFocus, an OCR-free method designed to better exploit the vision encoder's capacity by coupling it directly with the language prompt. To do so, we replace the down-sampling layers with layers that receive the input prompt and allow highlighting relevant parts of the document, while disregarding others. We pair the architecture enhancements with a novel pre-training task, using language masking on a snippet of the document text fed to the visual encoder in place of the prompt, to empower the model with focusing capabilities. Consequently, VisFocus learns to allocate its attention to text patches pertinent to the provided prompt. Our experiments demonstrate that this prompt-guided visual encoding approach significantly improves performance, achieving state-of-the-art results on various benchmarks.

Recent studies on machine reading comprehension have focused on text-level understanding but have not yet reached the level of human understanding of the visual layout and content of real-world documents. In this study, we introduce a new visual machine reading comprehension dataset, named VisualMRC, wherein given a question and a document image, a machine reads and comprehends texts in the image to answer the question in natural language. Compared with existing visual question answering (VQA) datasets that contain texts in images, VisualMRC focuses more on developing natural language understanding and generation abilities. It contains 30,000+ pairs of a question and an abstractive answer for 10,000+ document images sourced from multiple domains of webpages. We also introduce a new model that extends existing sequence-to-sequence models, pre-trained with large-scale text corpora, to take into account the visual layout and content of documents. Experiments with VisualMRC show that this model outperformed the base sequence-to-sequence models and a state-of-the-art VQA model. However, its performance is still below that of humans on most automatic evaluation metrics. The dataset will facilitate research aimed at connecting vision and language understanding.

We present a vision and language model named MultiModal-GPT to conduct multi-round dialogue with humans. MultiModal-GPT can follow various instructions from humans, such as generating a detailed caption, counting the number of interested objects, and answering general questions from users. MultiModal-GPT is parameter-efficiently fine-tuned from OpenFlamingo, with Low-rank Adapter (LoRA) added both in the cross-attention part and the self-attention part of the language model. We first construct instruction templates with vision and language data for multi-modality instruction tuning to make the model understand and follow human instructions. We find the quality of training data is vital for the dialogue performance, where few data containing short answers can lead the model to respond shortly to any instructions. To further enhance the ability to chat with humans of the MultiModal-GPT, we utilize language-only instruction-following data to train the MultiModal-GPT jointly. The joint training of language-only and visual-language instructions with the same instruction template effectively improves dialogue performance. Various demos show the ability of continuous dialogue of MultiModal-GPT with humans. Code and demo are at https://github.com/open-mmlab/Multimodal-GPT

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly improved code generation, yet most models remain text-only, neglecting crucial visual aids like diagrams and flowcharts used in real-world software development. To bridge this gap, we introduce MM-Coder, a Multilingual Multimodal software developer. MM-Coder integrates visual design inputs-Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams and flowcharts (termed Visual Workflow)-with textual instructions to enhance code generation accuracy and architectural alignment. To enable this, we developed MMc-Instruct, a diverse multimodal instruction-tuning dataset including visual-workflow-based code generation, allowing MM-Coder to synthesize textual and graphical information like human developers, distinct from prior work on narrow tasks. Furthermore, we introduce MMEval, a new benchmark for evaluating multimodal code generation, addressing existing text-only limitations. Our evaluations using MMEval highlight significant remaining challenges for models in precise visual information capture, instruction following, and advanced programming knowledge. Our work aims to revolutionize industrial programming by enabling LLMs to interpret and implement complex specifications conveyed through both text and visual designs.

Text-guided image manipulation has experienced notable advancement in recent years. In order to mitigate linguistic ambiguity, few-shot learning with visual examples has been applied for instructions that are underrepresented in the training set, or difficult to describe purely in language. However, learning from visual prompts requires strong reasoning capability, which diffusion models are struggling with. To address this issue, we introduce a novel multi-modal autoregressive model, dubbed InstaManip, that can instantly learn a new image manipulation operation from textual and visual guidance via in-context learning, and apply it to new query images. Specifically, we propose an innovative group self-attention mechanism to break down the in-context learning process into two separate stages -- learning and applying, which simplifies the complex problem into two easier tasks. We also introduce a relation regularization method to further disentangle image transformation features from irrelevant contents in exemplar images. Extensive experiments suggest that our method surpasses previous few-shot image manipulation models by a notable margin (geq19% in human evaluation). We also find our model can be further boosted by increasing the number or diversity of exemplar images.

Recent advancements in language models have showcased human-comparable performance in academic entrance exams. However, existing studies often overlook questions that require the integration of visual comprehension, thus compromising the full spectrum and complexity inherent in real-world scenarios. To address this gap, we present a comprehensive framework to evaluate language models on entrance exams, which incorporates both textual and visual elements. We evaluate the two most recent editions of Exame Nacional do Ensino M\'edio (ENEM), the main standardized entrance examination adopted by Brazilian universities. Our study not only reaffirms the capabilities of GPT-4 as the state of the art for handling complex multidisciplinary questions, but also pioneers in offering a realistic assessment of multimodal language models on Portuguese examinations. One of the highlights is that text captions transcribing visual content outperform the direct use of images, suggesting that the vision model has room for improvement. Yet, despite improvements afforded by images or captions, mathematical questions remain a challenge for these state-of-the-art models. The code and data used on experiments are available at https://github.com/piresramon/gpt-4-enem.

Large-scale datasets are essential to modern day deep learning. Advocates argue that understanding these methods requires dataset transparency (e.g. "dataset curation, motivation, composition, collection process, etc..."). However, almost no one has suggested the release of the detailed definitions and visual category examples provided to annotators - information critical to understanding the structure of the annotations present in each dataset. These labels are at the heart of public datasets, yet few datasets include the instructions that were used to generate them. We introduce a new task, Labeling Instruction Generation, to address missing publicly available labeling instructions. In Labeling Instruction Generation, we take a reasonably annotated dataset and: 1) generate a set of examples that are visually representative of each category in the dataset; 2) provide a text label that corresponds to each of the examples. We introduce a framework that requires no model training to solve this task and includes a newly created rapid retrieval system that leverages a large, pre-trained vision and language model. This framework acts as a proxy to human annotators that can help to both generate a final labeling instruction set and evaluate its quality. Our framework generates multiple diverse visual and text representations of dataset categories. The optimized instruction set outperforms our strongest baseline across 5 folds by 7.06 mAP for NuImages and 12.9 mAP for COCO.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT4 have displayed exceptional multi-modal capabilities in following open-ended instructions given images. However, the performance of these models heavily relies on design choices such as network structures, training data, and training strategies, and these choices have not been extensively discussed in the literature, making it difficult to quantify progress in this field. To address this issue, this paper presents a systematic and comprehensive study, quantitatively and qualitatively, on training such models. We implement over 20 variants with controlled settings. Concretely, for network structures, we compare different LLM backbones and model designs. For training data, we investigate the impact of data and sampling strategies. For instructions, we explore the influence of diversified prompts on the instruction-following ability of the trained models. For benchmarks, we contribute the first, to our best knowledge, comprehensive evaluation set including both image and video tasks through crowd-sourcing. Based on our findings, we present Lynx, which performs the most accurate multi-modal understanding while keeping the best multi-modal generation ability compared to existing open-sourced GPT4-style models.

We study the task of extending the large language model (LLM) into a vision-language instruction-following model. This task is crucial but challenging since the LLM is trained on text modality only, making it hard to effectively digest the visual modality. To address this, existing methods typically train a visual adapter to align the representation between a pre-trained vision transformer (ViT) and the LLM by a generative image captioning loss. However, we find that the generative objective can only produce weak alignment for vision and language, making the aligned vision-language model very hungry for the instruction fine-tuning data. In this paper, we propose CG-VLM that applies both Contrastive and Generative alignment objectives to effectively align the representation of ViT and LLM. Different from image level and sentence level alignment in common contrastive learning settings, CG-VLM aligns the image-patch level features and text-token level embeddings, which, however, is very hard to achieve as no explicit grounding patch-token relation provided in standard image captioning datasets. To address this issue, we propose to maximize the averaged similarity between pooled image-patch features and text-token embeddings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed CG-VLM produces strong vision-language alignment and is an efficient instruction learner. For example, using only 10% instruction tuning data, we reach 95% performance of state-of-the-art method LLaVA [29] on the zero-shot ScienceQA-Image benchmark.

Layout generation is the keystone in achieving automated graphic design, requiring arranging the position and size of various multi-modal design elements in a visually pleasing and constraint-following manner. Previous approaches are either inefficient for large-scale applications or lack flexibility for varying design requirements. Our research introduces a unified framework for automated graphic layout generation, leveraging the multi-modal large language model (MLLM) to accommodate diverse design tasks. In contrast, our data-driven method employs structured text (JSON format) and visual instruction tuning to generate layouts under specific visual and textual constraints, including user-defined natural language specifications. We conducted extensive experiments and achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on public multi-modal layout generation benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method. Moreover, recognizing existing datasets' limitations in capturing the complexity of real-world graphic designs, we propose two new datasets for much more challenging tasks (user-constrained generation and complicated poster), further validating our model's utility in real-life settings. Marking by its superior accessibility and adaptability, this approach further automates large-scale graphic design tasks. The code and datasets will be publicly available on https://github.com/posterllava/PosterLLaVA.

Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on instruction-following tasks by integrating pretrained visual encoders with large language models (LLMs). However, existing approaches often struggle to ground fine-grained visual concepts in complex scenes. In this paper, we propose MoDA (Modulation Adapter), a lightweight yet effective module designed to refine pre-aligned visual features through instruction-guided modulation. Our approach follows the standard LLaVA training protocol, consisting of a two-stage process: (1) aligning image features to the LLMs input space via a frozen vision encoder and adapter layers, and (2) refining those features using the MoDA adapter during the instructional tuning stage. MoDA employs a Transformer-based cross-attention mechanism to generate a modulation mask over the aligned visual tokens, thereby emphasizing semantically relevant embedding dimensions based on the language instruction. The modulated features are then passed to the LLM for autoregressive language generation. Our experimental evaluation shows that MoDA improves visual grounding and generates more contextually appropriate responses, demonstrating its effectiveness as a general-purpose enhancement for image-based MLLMs.

Inspired by the superior language abilities of large language models (LLM), large vision-language models (LVLM) have been recently explored by integrating powerful LLMs for improving the performance on complex multimodal tasks. Despite the promising progress on LVLMs, we find that LVLMs suffer from the hallucination problem, i.e. they tend to generate objects that are inconsistent with the target images in the descriptions. To investigate it, this work presents the first systematic study on object hallucination of LVLMs. We conduct the evaluation experiments on several representative LVLMs, and show that they mostly suffer from severe object hallucination issue. We further discuss that the visual instructions may influence the hallucination, and find that: objects that frequently occur in the visual instructions or co-occur with the image objects, are obviously prone to be hallucinated by LVLMs. Besides, we find that existing evaluation methods might be affected by the input instructions and generation styles of LVLMs. Thus, we further design an improved evaluation method for object hallucination by proposing a polling-based query method called POPE. Experiment results demonstrate that our POPE can evaluate the object hallucination in a more stable and flexible way. Our codes and data are publicly available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/POPE.

Visual instruction tuning has made considerable strides in enhancing the capabilities of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). However, existing open LMMs largely focus on single-image tasks, their applications to multi-image scenarios remains less explored. Additionally, prior LMM research separately tackles different scenarios, leaving it impossible to generalize cross scenarios with new emerging capabilities. To this end, we introduce LLaVA-NeXT-Interleave, which simultaneously tackles Multi-image, Multi-frame (video), Multi-view (3D), and Multi-patch (single-image) scenarios in LMMs. To enable these capabilities, we regard the interleaved data format as a general template and compile the M4-Instruct dataset with 1,177.6k samples, spanning 4 primary domains with 14 tasks and 41 datasets. We also curate the LLaVA-Interleave Bench to comprehensively evaluate the multi-image performance of LMMs. Through extensive experiments, LLaVA-NeXT-Interleave achieves leading results in multi-image, video, and 3D benchmarks, while maintaining the performance of single-image tasks. Besides, our model also exhibits several emerging capabilities, e.g., transferring tasks across different settings and modalities. Code is available at https://github.com/LLaVA-VL/LLaVA-NeXT

Visual text evokes an image in a person's mind, while non-visual text fails to do so. A method to automatically detect visualness in text will unlock the ability to augment text with relevant images, as neural text-to-image generation and retrieval models operate on the implicit assumption that the input text is visual in nature. We curate a dataset of 3,620 English sentences and their visualness scores provided by multiple human annotators. Additionally, we use documents that contain text and visual assets to create a distantly supervised corpus of document text and associated images. We also propose a fine-tuning strategy that adapts large vision-language models like CLIP that assume a one-to-one correspondence between text and image to the task of scoring text visualness from text input alone. Our strategy involves modifying the model's contrastive learning objective to map text identified as non-visual to a common NULL image while matching visual text to their corresponding images in the document. We evaluate the proposed approach on its ability to (i) classify visual and non-visual text accurately, and (ii) attend over words that are identified as visual in psycholinguistic studies. Empirical evaluation indicates that our approach performs better than several heuristics and baseline models for the proposed task. Furthermore, to highlight the importance of modeling the visualness of text, we conduct qualitative analyses of text-to-image generation systems like DALL-E.

Automatic generation of graphical layouts is crucial for many real-world applications, including designing posters, flyers, advertisements, and graphical user interfaces. Given the incredible ability of Large language models (LLMs) in both natural language understanding and generation, we believe that we could customize an LLM to help people create compelling graphical layouts starting with only text instructions from the user. We call our method TextLap (text-based layout planning). It uses a curated instruction-based layout planning dataset (InsLap) to customize LLMs as a graphic designer. We demonstrate the effectiveness of TextLap and show that it outperforms strong baselines, including GPT-4 based methods, for image generation and graphical design benchmarks.

Visual navigation is an essential skill for home-assistance robots, providing the object-searching ability to accomplish long-horizon daily tasks. Many recent approaches use Large Language Models (LLMs) for commonsense inference to improve exploration efficiency. However, the planning process of LLMs is limited within texts and it is difficult to represent the spatial occupancy and geometry layout only by texts. Both are important for making rational navigation decisions. In this work, we seek to unleash the spatial perception and planning ability of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), and explore whether the VLM, with only on-board camera captured RGB/RGB-D stream inputs, can efficiently finish the visual navigation tasks in a mapless manner. We achieve this by developing the imagination-powered navigation framework ImagineNav, which imagines the future observation images at valuable robot views and translates the complex navigation planning process into a rather simple best-view image selection problem for VLM. To generate appropriate candidate robot views for imagination, we introduce the Where2Imagine module, which is distilled to align with human navigation habits. Finally, to reach the VLM preferred views, an off-the-shelf point-goal navigation policy is utilized. Empirical experiments on the challenging open-vocabulary object navigation benchmarks demonstrates the superiority of our proposed system.

While an important problem in the vision community is to design algorithms that can automatically caption images, few publicly-available datasets for algorithm development directly address the interests of real users. Observing that people who are blind have relied on (human-based) image captioning services to learn about images they take for nearly a decade, we introduce the first image captioning dataset to represent this real use case. This new dataset, which we call VizWiz-Captions, consists of over 39,000 images originating from people who are blind that are each paired with five captions. We analyze this dataset to (1) characterize the typical captions, (2) characterize the diversity of content found in the images, and (3) compare its content to that found in eight popular vision datasets. We also analyze modern image captioning algorithms to identify what makes this new dataset challenging for the vision community. We publicly-share the dataset with captioning challenge instructions at https://vizwiz.org

The potential of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often remains underutilized in handling complex text-based problems, particularly when these problems could benefit from visual representation. Resonating with humans' ability to solve complex text-based problems by (1) creating a visual diagram from the problem and (2) deducing what steps they need to take to solve it, we propose Self-Imagine. We leverage a single Vision-Language Model (VLM) to generate a structured representation of the question using HTML, then render the HTML as an image, and finally use the same VLM to answer the question using both the question and the image. Our approach does not require any additional training data or training. We evaluate our approach on three mathematics tasks and nine general-purpose reasoning tasks using state-of-the-art (LLAVA-1.5 and GEMINI PRO) VLMs. Our approach boosts the performance of LLAVA-1.5 and GEMINI PRO on all math tasks (on average GSM8K: +3.1%; ASDIV: +3.2%; SVAMP: +6.9%) and the majority of the general-purpose reasoning tasks by 3.2% to 6.0% on average.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and their multimodal extensions (MLLMs) have substantially enhanced machine reasoning across diverse tasks. However, these models predominantly rely on pure text as the medium for both expressing and structuring reasoning, even when visual information is present. In this work, we argue that language may not always be the most natural or effective modality for reasoning, particularly in tasks involving spatial and geometrical information. Motivated by this, we propose a new paradigm, Visual Planning, which enables planning through purely visual representations, independent of text. In this paradigm, planning is executed via sequences of images that encode step-by-step inference in the visual domain, akin to how humans sketch or visualize future actions. We introduce a novel reinforcement learning framework, Visual Planning via Reinforcement Learning (VPRL), empowered by GRPO for post-training large vision models, leading to substantial improvements in planning in a selection of representative visual navigation tasks, FrozenLake, Maze, and MiniBehavior. Our visual planning paradigm outperforms all other planning variants that conduct reasoning in the text-only space. Our results establish Visual Planning as a viable and promising alternative to language-based reasoning, opening new avenues for tasks that benefit from intuitive, image-based inference.

Many high-level skills that are required for computer vision tasks, such as parsing questions, comparing and contrasting semantics, and writing descriptions, are also required in other domains such as natural language processing. In this paper, we ask whether it is possible to learn those skills from text data and then transfer them to vision tasks without ever training on visual training data. Key to our approach is exploiting the joint embedding space of contrastively trained vision and language encoders. In practice, there can be systematic differences between embedding spaces for different modalities in contrastive models, and we analyze how these differences affect our approach and study strategies to mitigate this concern. We produce models using only text training data on four representative tasks: image captioning, visual entailment, visual question answering and visual news captioning, and evaluate them on standard benchmarks using images. We find these models perform close to models trained on images, while surpassing prior work for captioning and visual entailment in this text-only setting by over 9 points, and outperforming all prior work on visual news by over 30 points. We also showcase a variety of stylistic image captioning models that are trained using no image data and no human-curated language data, but instead using readily-available text data from books, the web, or language models.

Visual-language models (VLM) have emerged as a powerful tool for learning a unified embedding space for vision and language. Inspired by large language models, which have demonstrated strong reasoning and multi-task capabilities, visual large language models (VLLMs) are gaining increasing attention for building general-purpose VLMs. Despite the significant progress made in VLLMs, the related literature remains limited, particularly from a comprehensive application perspective, encompassing generalized and specialized applications across vision (image, video, depth), action, and language modalities. In this survey, we focus on the diverse applications of VLLMs, examining their using scenarios, identifying ethics consideration and challenges, and discussing future directions for their development. By synthesizing these contents, we aim to provide a comprehensive guide that will pave the way for future innovations and broader applications of VLLMs. The paper list repository is available: https://github.com/JackYFL/awesome-VLLMs.

Vision language models (VLMs) have experienced rapid advancements through the integration of large language models (LLMs) with image-text pairs, yet they struggle with detailed regional visual understanding due to limited spatial awareness of the vision encoder, and the use of coarse-grained training data that lacks detailed, region-specific captions. To address this, we introduce RegionGPT (short as RGPT), a novel framework designed for complex region-level captioning and understanding. RGPT enhances the spatial awareness of regional representation with simple yet effective modifications to existing visual encoders in VLMs. We further improve performance on tasks requiring a specific output scope by integrating task-guided instruction prompts during both training and inference phases, while maintaining the model's versatility for general-purpose tasks. Additionally, we develop an automated region caption data generation pipeline, enriching the training set with detailed region-level captions. We demonstrate that a universal RGPT model can be effectively applied and significantly enhancing performance across a range of region-level tasks, including but not limited to complex region descriptions, reasoning, object classification, and referring expressions comprehension.

Large-scale Vision-Language Models, such as CLIP, learn powerful image-text representations that have found numerous applications, from zero-shot classification to text-to-image generation. Despite that, their capabilities for solving novel discriminative tasks via prompting fall behind those of large language models, such as GPT-3. Here we explore the idea of visual prompt engineering for solving computer vision tasks beyond classification by editing in image space instead of text. In particular, we discover an emergent ability of CLIP, where, by simply drawing a red circle around an object, we can direct the model's attention to that region, while also maintaining global information. We show the power of this simple approach by achieving state-of-the-art in zero-shot referring expressions comprehension and strong performance in keypoint localization tasks. Finally, we draw attention to some potential ethical concerns of large language-vision models.

Large language models are known to suffer from the hallucination problem in that they are prone to output statements that are false or inconsistent, indicating a lack of knowledge. A proposed solution to this is to provide the model with additional data modalities that complements the knowledge obtained through text. We investigate the use of visual data to complement the knowledge of large language models by proposing a method for evaluating visual knowledge transfer to text for uni- or multimodal language models. The method is based on two steps, 1) a novel task querying for knowledge of memory colors, i.e. typical colors of well-known objects, and 2) filtering of model training data to clearly separate knowledge contributions. Additionally, we introduce a model architecture that involves a visual imagination step and evaluate it with our proposed method. We find that our method can successfully be used to measure visual knowledge transfer capabilities in models and that our novel model architecture shows promising results for leveraging multimodal knowledge in a unimodal setting.

In this paper, we propose a multi-modal search engine for interior design that combines visual and textual queries. The goal of our engine is to retrieve interior objects, e.g. furniture or wall clocks, that share visual and aesthetic similarities with the query. Our search engine allows the user to take a photo of a room and retrieve with a high recall a list of items identical or visually similar to those present in the photo. Additionally, it allows to return other items that aesthetically and stylistically fit well together. To achieve this goal, our system blends the results obtained using textual and visual modalities. Thanks to this blending strategy, we increase the average style similarity score of the retrieved items by 11%. Our work is implemented as a Web-based application and it is planned to be opened to the public.

Contextual cues related to a person's pose and interactions with objects and other people in the scene can provide valuable information for gaze following. While existing methods have focused on dedicated cue extraction methods, in this work we investigate the zero-shot capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for extracting a wide array of contextual cues to improve gaze following performance. We first evaluate various VLMs, prompting strategies, and in-context learning (ICL) techniques for zero-shot cue recognition performance. We then use these insights to extract contextual cues for gaze following, and investigate their impact when incorporated into a state of the art model for the task. Our analysis indicates that BLIP-2 is the overall top performing VLM and that ICL can improve performance. We also observe that VLMs are sensitive to the choice of the text prompt although ensembling over multiple text prompts can provide more robust performance. Additionally, we discover that using the entire image along with an ellipse drawn around the target person is the most effective strategy for visual prompting. For gaze following, incorporating the extracted cues results in better generalization performance, especially when considering a larger set of cues, highlighting the potential of this approach.

Recently, Vision Language Models (VLMs) have increasingly emphasized document visual grounding to achieve better human-computer interaction, accessibility, and detailed understanding. However, its application to visualizations such as charts remains under-explored due to the inherent complexity of interleaved visual-numerical relationships in chart images. Existing chart understanding methods primarily focus on answering questions without explicitly identifying the visual elements that support their predictions. To bridge this gap, we introduce RefChartQA, a novel benchmark that integrates Chart Question Answering (ChartQA) with visual grounding, enabling models to refer elements at multiple granularities within chart images. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation by instruction-tuning 5 state-of-the-art VLMs across different categories. Our experiments demonstrate that incorporating spatial awareness via grounding improves response accuracy by over 15%, reducing hallucinations, and improving model reliability. Additionally, we identify key factors influencing text-spatial alignment, such as architectural improvements in TinyChart, which leverages a token-merging module for enhanced feature fusion. Our dataset is open-sourced for community development and further advancements. All models and code will be publicly available at https://github.com/moured/RefChartQA.

Visually linking matching cues is a crucial ability in daily life, such as identifying the same person in multiple photos based on their cues, even without knowing who they are. Despite the extensive knowledge that vision-language models (VLMs) possess, it remains largely unexplored whether they are capable of performing this fundamental task. To address this, we introduce VLM^2-Bench, a benchmark designed to assess whether VLMs can Visually Link Matching cues, with 9 subtasks and over 3,000 test cases. Comprehensive evaluation across eight open-source VLMs and GPT-4o, along with further analysis of various language-side and vision-side prompting methods, leads to a total of eight key findings. We identify critical challenges in models' ability to link visual cues, highlighting a significant performance gap where even GPT-4o lags 34.80% behind humans. Based on these insights, we advocate for (i) enhancing core visual capabilities to improve adaptability and reduce reliance on prior knowledge, (ii) establishing clearer principles for integrating language-based reasoning in vision-centric tasks to prevent unnecessary biases, and (iii) shifting vision-text training paradigms toward fostering models' ability to independently structure and infer relationships among visual cues.

Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) enables the agent to navigate to a remote location following the natural language instruction in 3D environments. To represent the previously visited environment, most approaches for VLN implement memory using recurrent states, topological maps, or top-down semantic maps. In contrast to these approaches, we build the top-down egocentric and dynamically growing Grid Memory Map (i.e., GridMM) to structure the visited environment. From a global perspective, historical observations are projected into a unified grid map in a top-down view, which can better represent the spatial relations of the environment. From a local perspective, we further propose an instruction relevance aggregation method to capture fine-grained visual clues in each grid region. Extensive experiments are conducted on both the REVERIE, R2R, SOON datasets in the discrete environments, and the R2R-CE dataset in the continuous environments, showing the superiority of our proposed method.

This paper introduces a novel dataset construction pipeline that samples pairs of frames from videos and uses multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to generate editing instructions for training instruction-based image manipulation models. Video frames inherently preserve the identity of subjects and scenes, ensuring consistent content preservation during editing. Additionally, video data captures diverse, natural dynamics-such as non-rigid subject motion and complex camera movements-that are difficult to model otherwise, making it an ideal source for scalable dataset construction. Using this approach, we create a new dataset to train InstructMove, a model capable of instruction-based complex manipulations that are difficult to achieve with synthetically generated datasets. Our model demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in tasks such as adjusting subject poses, rearranging elements, and altering camera perspectives.

Recent research on Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) indicates that agents suffer from poor generalization in unseen environments due to the lack of realistic training environments and high-quality path-instruction pairs. Most existing methods for constructing realistic navigation scenes have high costs, and the extension of instructions mainly relies on predefined templates or rules, lacking adaptability. To alleviate the issue, we propose InstruGen, a VLN path-instruction pairs generation paradigm. Specifically, we use YouTube house tour videos as realistic navigation scenes and leverage the powerful visual understanding and generation abilities of large multimodal models (LMMs) to automatically generate diverse and high-quality VLN path-instruction pairs. Our method generates navigation instructions with different granularities and achieves fine-grained alignment between instructions and visual observations, which was difficult to achieve with previous methods. Additionally, we design a multi-stage verification mechanism to reduce hallucinations and inconsistency of LMMs. Experimental results demonstrate that agents trained with path-instruction pairs generated by InstruGen achieves state-of-the-art performance on the R2R and RxR benchmarks, particularly in unseen environments. Code is available at https://github.com/yanyu0526/InstruGen.

This paper introduces a method for realistic kinetic typography that generates user-preferred animatable 'text content'. We draw on recent advances in guided video diffusion models to achieve visually-pleasing text appearances. To do this, we first construct a kinetic typography dataset, comprising about 600K videos. Our dataset is made from a variety of combinations in 584 templates designed by professional motion graphics designers and involves changing each letter's position, glyph, and size (i.e., flying, glitches, chromatic aberration, reflecting effects, etc.). Next, we propose a video diffusion model for kinetic typography. For this, there are three requirements: aesthetic appearances, motion effects, and readable letters. This paper identifies the requirements. For this, we present static and dynamic captions used as spatial and temporal guidance of a video diffusion model, respectively. The static caption describes the overall appearance of the video, such as colors, texture and glyph which represent a shape of each letter. The dynamic caption accounts for the movements of letters and backgrounds. We add one more guidance with zero convolution to determine which text content should be visible in the video. We apply the zero convolution to the text content, and impose it on the diffusion model. Lastly, our glyph loss, only minimizing a difference between the predicted word and its ground-truth, is proposed to make the prediction letters readable. Experiments show that our model generates kinetic typography videos with legible and artistic letter motions based on text prompts.

Recently, 3D understanding has become popular to facilitate autonomous agents to perform further decisionmaking. However, existing 3D datasets and methods are often limited to specific tasks. On the other hand, recent progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal Language Models (MLMs) have demonstrated exceptional general language and imagery tasking performance. Therefore, it is interesting to unlock MLM's potential to be 3D generalist for wider tasks. However, current MLMs' research has been less focused on 3D tasks due to a lack of large-scale 3D instruction-following datasets. In this work, we introduce a comprehensive 3D instructionfollowing dataset called M3DBench, which possesses the following characteristics: 1) It supports general multimodal instructions interleaved with text, images, 3D objects, and other visual prompts. 2) It unifies diverse 3D tasks at both region and scene levels, covering a variety of fundamental abilities in real-world 3D environments. 3) It is a large-scale 3D instruction-following dataset with over 320k instruction-response pairs. Furthermore, we establish a new benchmark for assessing the performance of large models in understanding multi-modal 3D prompts. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our dataset and baseline, supporting general 3D-centric tasks, which can inspire future research.

The increasing demand for intelligent systems capable of interpreting and reasoning about visual content requires the development of Large Multi-Modal Models (LMMs) that are not only accurate but also have explicit reasoning capabilities. This paper presents a novel approach to imbue an LMM with the ability to conduct explicit reasoning based on visual content and textual instructions. We introduce a system that can ask a question to acquire necessary knowledge, thereby enhancing the robustness and explicability of the reasoning process. Our method comprises the development of a novel dataset generated by a Large Language Model (LLM), designed to promote chain-of-thought reasoning combined with a question-asking mechanism. We designed an LMM, which has high capabilities on region awareness to address the intricate requirements of image-text alignment. The model undergoes a three-stage training phase, starting with large-scale image-text alignment using a large-scale datasets, followed by instruction tuning, and fine-tuning with a focus on chain-of-thought reasoning. The results demonstrate a stride toward a more robust, accurate, and interpretable LMM, capable of reasoning explicitly and seeking information proactively when confronted with ambiguous visual input.

Following the impressive development of LLMs, vision-language alignment in LLMs is actively being researched to enable multimodal reasoning and visual IO. This direction of research is particularly relevant to medical imaging because medical image analysis and generation consist of reasoning based on a combination of visual features and prior knowledge. Many recent works have focused on training adapter networks that serve as an information bridge between image processing networks and LLMs; but presumably, in order to achieve maximum reasoning potential of LLMs on visual information as well, visual and language features should be allowed to interact more freely. This is especially important in the medical domain because understanding and generating medical images such as chest X-rays (CXR) require not only accurate visual and language-based reasoning but also a more intimate mapping between the two modalities. Thus, taking inspiration from previous work on the transformer and VQ-GAN combination for bidirectional image and text generation, we build upon this approach and develop a method for instruction-tuning an LLM pre-trained only on text to gain vision-language capabilities for medical images. Specifically, we leverage a pretrained LLM's existing question-answering and instruction-following abilities to teach it to understand visual inputs by instructing it to answer questions about image inputs and, symmetrically, output both text and image responses appropriate to a given query by tuning the LLM with diverse tasks that encompass image-based text-generation and text-based image-generation. We show that our model, LLM-CXR, trained in this approach shows better image-text alignment in both CXR understanding and generation tasks while being smaller in size compared to previously developed models that perform a narrower range of tasks. The code is at https://github.com/hyn2028/llm-cxr.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have made significant breakthroughs with the advancement of instruction tuning. However, while existing models can understand images and videos at a holistic level, they still struggle with instance-level understanding that requires a more nuanced comprehension and alignment. Instance-level understanding is crucial, as it focuses on the specific elements that we are most interested in. Excitingly, existing works find that the state-of-the-art LMMs exhibit strong instance understanding capabilities when provided with explicit visual cues. Motivated by this, we introduce an automated annotation pipeline assisted by GPT-4o to extract instance-level information from images and videos through explicit visual prompting for instance guidance. Building upon this pipeline, we proposed Inst-IT, a solution to enhance LMMs in Instance understanding via explicit visual prompt Instruction Tuning. Inst-IT consists of a benchmark to diagnose multimodal instance-level understanding, a large-scale instruction-tuning dataset, and a continuous instruction-tuning training paradigm to effectively enhance spatial-temporal instance understanding capabilities of existing LMMs. Experimental results show that, with the boost of Inst-IT, our models not only achieve outstanding performance on Inst-IT Bench but also demonstrate significant improvements across various generic image and video understanding benchmarks. This highlights that our dataset not only boosts instance-level understanding but also strengthens the overall capabilities of generic image and video comprehension.

Text-based VQA aims at answering questions by reading the text present in the images. It requires a large amount of scene-text relationship understanding compared to the VQA task. Recent studies have shown that the question-answer pairs in the dataset are more focused on the text present in the image but less importance is given to visual features and some questions do not require understanding the image. The models trained on this dataset predict biased answers due to the lack of understanding of visual context. For example, in questions like "What is written on the signboard?", the answer predicted by the model is always "STOP" which makes the model to ignore the image. To address these issues, we propose a method to learn visual features (making V matter in TextVQA) along with the OCR features and question features using VQA dataset as external knowledge for Text-based VQA. Specifically, we combine the TextVQA dataset and VQA dataset and train the model on this combined dataset. Such a simple, yet effective approach increases the understanding and correlation between the image features and text present in the image, which helps in the better answering of questions. We further test the model on different datasets and compare their qualitative and quantitative results.

Comprehending natural language instructions is a charming property for both 2D and 3D layout synthesis systems. Existing methods implicitly model object joint distributions and express object relations, hindering generation's controllability. We introduce InstructLayout, a novel generative framework that integrates a semantic graph prior and a layout decoder to improve controllability and fidelity for 2D and 3D layout synthesis. The proposed semantic graph prior learns layout appearances and object distributions simultaneously, demonstrating versatility across various downstream tasks in a zero-shot manner. To facilitate the benchmarking for text-driven 2D and 3D scene synthesis, we respectively curate two high-quality datasets of layout-instruction pairs from public Internet resources with large language and multimodal models. Extensive experimental results reveal that the proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin in both 2D and 3D layout synthesis tasks. Thorough ablation studies confirm the efficacy of crucial design components.

Vision-language models (VLMs) excel at multimodal understanding, yet their text-only decoding forces them to verbalize visual reasoning, limiting performance on tasks that demand visual imagination. Recent attempts train VLMs to render explicit images, but the heavy image-generation pre-training often hinders the reasoning ability. Inspired by the way humans reason with mental imagery-the internal construction and manipulation of visual cues-we investigate whether VLMs can reason through interleaved multimodal trajectories without producing explicit images. To this end, we present a Machine Mental Imagery framework, dubbed as Mirage, which augments VLM decoding with latent visual tokens alongside ordinary text. Concretely, whenever the model chooses to ``think visually'', it recasts its hidden states as next tokens, thereby continuing a multimodal trajectory without generating pixel-level images. Begin by supervising the latent tokens through distillation from ground-truth image embeddings, we then switch to text-only supervision to make the latent trajectory align tightly with the task objective. A subsequent reinforcement learning stage further enhances the multimodal reasoning capability. Experiments on diverse benchmarks demonstrate that Mirage unlocks stronger multimodal reasoning without explicit image generation.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate robust zero-shot capabilities across diverse vision-language tasks after training on mega-scale datasets. However, dense prediction tasks, such as semantic segmentation and keypoint detection, pose significant challenges for MLLMs when represented solely as text outputs. Simultaneously, current MLLMs utilizing latent embeddings for visual task decoding generally demonstrate limited adaptability to both multi-task learning and multi-granularity scenarios. In this work, we present REF-VLM, an end-to-end framework for unified training of various visual decoding tasks. To address complex visual decoding scenarios, we introduce the Triplet-Based Referring Paradigm (TRP), which explicitly decouples three critical dimensions in visual decoding tasks through a triplet structure: concepts, decoding types, and targets. TRP employs symbolic delimiters to enforce structured representation learning, enhancing the parsability and interpretability of model outputs. Additionally, we construct Visual-Task Instruction Following Dataset (VTInstruct), a large-scale multi-task dataset containing over 100 million multimodal dialogue samples across 25 task types. Beyond text inputs and outputs, VT-Instruct incorporates various visual prompts such as point, box, scribble, and mask, and generates outputs composed of text and visual units like box, keypoint, depth and mask. The combination of different visual prompts and visual units generates a wide variety of task types, expanding the applicability of REF-VLM significantly. Both qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our REF-VLM outperforms other MLLMs across a variety of standard benchmarks. The code, dataset, and demo available at https://github.com/MacavityT/REF-VLM.

In question-answering scenarios, humans can assess whether the available information is sufficient and seek additional information if necessary, rather than providing a forced answer. In contrast, Vision Language Models (VLMs) typically generate direct, one-shot responses without evaluating the sufficiency of the information. To investigate this gap, we identify a critical and challenging task in the Visual Question Answering (VQA) scenario: can VLMs indicate how to adjust an image when the visual information is insufficient to answer a question? This capability is especially valuable for assisting visually impaired individuals who often need guidance to capture images correctly. To evaluate this capability of current VLMs, we introduce a human-labeled dataset as a benchmark for this task. Additionally, we present an automated framework that generates synthetic training data by simulating ``where to know'' scenarios. Our empirical results show significant performance improvements in mainstream VLMs when fine-tuned with this synthetic data. This study demonstrates the potential to narrow the gap between information assessment and acquisition in VLMs, bringing their performance closer to humans.

Instruction tuning, a new learning paradigm that fine-tunes pre-trained language models on tasks specified through instructions, has shown promising zero-shot performance on various natural language processing tasks. However, it has yet to be explored for vision and multimodal tasks. In this work, we introduce MUL-TIINSTRUCT, the first multimodal instruction tuning benchmark dataset that consists of 62 diverse multimodal tasks in a unified seq-to-seq format covering 10 broad categories. The tasks are derived from 21 existing open-source datasets and each task is equipped with 5 expert-written instructions. We take OFA as the base pre-trained model for multimodal instruction tuning, and to further improve its zero-shot performance, we explore multiple transfer learning strategies to leverage the large-scale NATURAL INSTRUCTIONS dataset. Experimental results demonstrate strong zero-shot performance on various unseen multimodal tasks and the benefit of transfer learning from a text-only instruction dataset. We also design a new evaluation metric - Sensitivity, to evaluate how sensitive the model is to the variety of instructions. Our results indicate that fine-tuning the model on a diverse set of tasks and instructions leads to a reduced sensitivity to variations in instructions for each task.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great effectiveness for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) using tasks that are challenging yet easily verifiable, such as math reasoning or code generation. However, extending this success to visual perception in vision-language models (VLMs) has been impeded by the scarcity of vision-centric tasks that are simultaneously challenging and unambiguously verifiable. To this end, we introduce ViCrit (Visual Caption Hallucination Critic), an RL proxy task that trains VLMs to localize a subtle, synthetic visual hallucination injected into paragraphs of human-written image captions. Starting from a 200-word captions, we inject a single, subtle visual description error-altering a few words on objects, attributes, counts, or spatial relations-and task the model to pinpoint the corrupted span given the image and the modified caption. This formulation preserves the full perceptual difficulty while providing a binary, exact-match reward that is easy to compute and unambiguous. Models trained with the ViCrit Task exhibit substantial gains across a variety of VL benchmarks. Crucially, the improvements transfer beyond natural-image training data to abstract image reasoning and visual math, showing promises of learning to perceive rather than barely memorizing seen objects. To facilitate evaluation, we further introduce ViCrit-Bench, a category-balanced diagnostic benchmark that systematically probes perception errors across diverse image domains and error types. Together, our results demonstrate that fine-grained hallucination criticism is an effective and generalizable objective for enhancing visual perception in VLMs.

The field of vision-language models (VLMs), which take images and texts as inputs and output texts, is rapidly evolving and has yet to reach consensus on several key aspects of the development pipeline, including data, architecture, and training methods. This paper can be seen as a tutorial for building a VLM. We begin by providing a comprehensive overview of the current state-of-the-art approaches, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each, addressing the major challenges in the field, and suggesting promising research directions for underexplored areas. We then walk through the practical steps to build Idefics3-8B, a powerful VLM that significantly outperforms its predecessor Idefics2-8B, while being trained efficiently, exclusively on open datasets, and using a straightforward pipeline. These steps include the creation of Docmatix, a dataset for improving document understanding capabilities, which is 240 times larger than previously available datasets. We release the model along with the datasets created for its training.

Prompt engineering is a technique that involves augmenting a large pre-trained model with task-specific hints, known as prompts, to adapt the model to new tasks. Prompts can be created manually as natural language instructions or generated automatically as either natural language instructions or vector representations. Prompt engineering enables the ability to perform predictions based solely on prompts without updating model parameters, and the easier application of large pre-trained models in real-world tasks. In past years, Prompt engineering has been well-studied in natural language processing. Recently, it has also been intensively studied in vision-language modeling. However, there is currently a lack of a systematic overview of prompt engineering on pre-trained vision-language models. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive survey of cutting-edge research in prompt engineering on three types of vision-language models: multimodal-to-text generation models (e.g. Flamingo), image-text matching models (e.g. CLIP), and text-to-image generation models (e.g. Stable Diffusion). For each type of model, a brief model summary, prompting methods, prompting-based applications, and the corresponding responsibility and integrity issues are summarized and discussed. Furthermore, the commonalities and differences between prompting on vision-language models, language models, and vision models are also discussed. The challenges, future directions, and research opportunities are summarized to foster future research on this topic.

High-quality instruction-tuning data is critical to improving LLM capabilities. Existing data collection methods are limited by unrealistic manual labeling costs or by the hallucination of relying solely on LLM generation. To address the problems, this paper presents a scalable method to automatically collect high-quality instructional adaptation data by training language models to automatically design tasks based on human-written texts. Intuitively, human-written text helps to help the model attenuate illusions during the generation of tasks. Unlike instruction back-translation-based methods that directly take the given text as a response, we require the model to generate the instruction, input, and output simultaneously to filter the noise. The results of the automated and manual evaluation experiments demonstrate the quality of our dataset.

In the field of document understanding, significant advances have been made in the fine-tuning of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with instruction-following data. Nevertheless, the potential of text-grounding capability within text-rich scenarios remains underexplored. In this paper, we present a text-grounding document understanding model, termed TGDoc, which addresses this deficiency by enhancing MLLMs with the ability to discern the spatial positioning of text within images. Empirical evidence suggests that text-grounding improves the model's interpretation of textual content, thereby elevating its proficiency in comprehending text-rich images. Specifically, we compile a dataset containing 99K PowerPoint presentations sourced from the internet. We formulate instruction tuning tasks including text detection, recognition, and spotting to facilitate the cohesive alignment between the visual encoder and large language model. Moreover, we curate a collection of text-rich images and prompt the text-only GPT-4 to generate 12K high-quality conversations, featuring textual locations within text-rich scenarios. By integrating text location data into the instructions, TGDoc is adept at discerning text locations during the visual question process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple text-rich benchmarks, validating the effectiveness of our method.

Blind and low vision (BLV) creators use images to communicate with sighted audiences. However, creating or retrieving images is challenging for BLV creators as it is difficult to use authoring tools or assess image search results. Thus, creators limit the types of images they create or recruit sighted collaborators. While text-to-image generation models let creators generate high-fidelity images based on a text description (i.e. prompt), it is difficult to assess the content and quality of generated images. We present GenAssist, a system to make text-to-image generation accessible. Using our interface, creators can verify whether generated image candidates followed the prompt, access additional details in the image not specified in the prompt, and skim a summary of similarities and differences between image candidates. To power the interface, GenAssist uses a large language model to generate visual questions, vision-language models to extract answers, and a large language model to summarize the results. Our study with 12 BLV creators demonstrated that GenAssist enables and simplifies the process of image selection and generation, making visual authoring more accessible to all.

Current text-to-image generation models often struggle to follow textual instructions, especially the ones requiring spatial reasoning. On the other hand, Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, have shown remarkable precision in generating code snippets for sketching out text inputs graphically, e.g., via TikZ. In this work, we introduce Control-GPT to guide the diffusion-based text-to-image pipelines with programmatic sketches generated by GPT-4, enhancing their abilities for instruction following. Control-GPT works by querying GPT-4 to write TikZ code, and the generated sketches are used as references alongside the text instructions for diffusion models (e.g., ControlNet) to generate photo-realistic images. One major challenge to training our pipeline is the lack of a dataset containing aligned text, images, and sketches. We address the issue by converting instance masks in existing datasets into polygons to mimic the sketches used at test time. As a result, Control-GPT greatly boosts the controllability of image generation. It establishes a new state-of-art on the spatial arrangement and object positioning generation and enhances users' control of object positions, sizes, etc., nearly doubling the accuracy of prior models. Our work, as a first attempt, shows the potential for employing LLMs to enhance the performance in computer vision tasks.

The unprecedented advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have profoundly impacted natural language processing but have yet to fully embrace the realm of scalable vector graphics (SVG) generation. While LLMs encode partial knowledge of SVG data from web pages during training, recent findings suggest that semantically ambiguous and tokenized representations within LLMs may result in hallucinations in vector primitive predictions. Additionally, LLM training typically lacks modeling and understanding of the rendering sequence of vector paths, which can lead to occlusion between output vector primitives. In this paper, we present LLM4SVG, an initial yet substantial step toward bridging this gap by enabling LLMs to better understand and generate vector graphics. LLM4SVG facilitates a deeper understanding of SVG components through learnable semantic tokens, which precisely encode these tokens and their corresponding properties to generate semantically aligned SVG outputs. Using a series of learnable semantic tokens, a structured dataset for instruction following is developed to support comprehension and generation across two primary tasks. Our method introduces a modular architecture to existing large language models, integrating semantic tags, vector instruction encoders, fine-tuned commands, and powerful LLMs to tightly combine geometric, appearance, and language information. To overcome the scarcity of SVG-text instruction data, we developed an automated data generation pipeline that collected our SVGX-SFT Dataset, consisting of high-quality human-designed SVGs and 580k SVG instruction following data specifically crafted for LLM training, which facilitated the adoption of the supervised fine-tuning strategy popular in LLM development.

Despite the critical need to align search targets with users' intention, retrievers often only prioritize query information without delving into the users' intended search context. Enhancing the capability of retrievers to understand intentions and preferences of users, akin to language model instructions, has the potential to yield more aligned search targets. Prior studies restrict the application of instructions in information retrieval to a task description format, neglecting the broader context of diverse and evolving search scenarios. Furthermore, the prevailing benchmarks utilized for evaluation lack explicit tailoring to assess instruction-following ability, thereby hindering progress in this field. In response to these limitations, we propose a novel benchmark,INSTRUCTIR, specifically designed to evaluate instruction-following ability in information retrieval tasks. Our approach focuses on user-aligned instructions tailored to each query instance, reflecting the diverse characteristics inherent in real-world search scenarios. Through experimental analysis, we observe that retrievers fine-tuned to follow task-style instructions, such as INSTRUCTOR, can underperform compared to their non-instruction-tuned counterparts. This underscores potential overfitting issues inherent in constructing retrievers trained on existing instruction-aware retrieval datasets.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive zero-shot abilities on a variety of open-ended tasks, while recent research has also explored the use of LLMs for multi-modal generation. In this study, we introduce mPLUG-Owl, a novel training paradigm that equips LLMs with multi-modal abilities through modularized learning of foundation LLM, a visual knowledge module, and a visual abstractor module. This approach can support multiple modalities and facilitate diverse unimodal and multimodal abilities through modality collaboration. The training paradigm of mPLUG-Owl involves a two-stage method for aligning image and text, which learns visual knowledge with the assistance of LLM while maintaining and even improving the generation abilities of LLM. In the first stage, the visual knowledge module and abstractor module are trained with a frozen LLM module to align the image and text. In the second stage, language-only and multi-modal supervised datasets are used to jointly fine-tune a low-rank adaption (LoRA) module on LLM and the abstractor module by freezing the visual knowledge module. We carefully build a visually-related instruction evaluation set OwlEval. Experimental results show that our model outperforms existing multi-modal models, demonstrating mPLUG-Owl's impressive instruction and visual understanding ability, multi-turn conversation ability, and knowledge reasoning ability. Besides, we observe some unexpected and exciting abilities such as multi-image correlation and scene text understanding, which makes it possible to leverage it for harder real scenarios, such as vision-only document comprehension. Our code, pre-trained model, instruction-tuned models, and evaluation set are available at https://github.com/X-PLUG/mPLUG-Owl. The online demo is available at https://www.modelscope.cn/studios/damo/mPLUG-Owl.

Visual Language Models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across tasks, including visual question answering and image captioning. However, most models rely on text-based instructions, limiting their effectiveness in human-machine interactions. Moreover, the quality of language models depends on reasoning and prompting techniques, such as COT, which remain underexplored when using speech instructions. To address these challenges, we propose SilVar, a novel end-to-end multimodal model that uses speech instructions for reasoning in visual question answering. In addition, we investigate reasoning techniques with levels including conversational, simple, and complex speech instruction. SilVar is built upon CLIP, Whisper, and LLaMA 3.1-8B, enabling intuitive interactions by allowing users to provide verbal or text instructions. To this end, we introduce a dataset designed to challenge models with speech-based reasoning tasks for object localization. This dataset enhances the model ability to process and explain visual scenes from spoken input, moving beyond object recognition to reasoning-based interactions. The experiments show that SilVar achieves SOTA performance on the MMMU and ScienceQA benchmarks despite the challenge of speech-based instructions. We believe SilVar will inspire next-generation multimodal reasoning models, toward expert artificial general intelligence. Our code and dataset are available here.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have transformed tasks requiring visual and reasoning abilities, such as image retrieval and Visual Question Answering (VQA). Despite their success, VLMs face significant challenges with tasks involving geometric reasoning, algebraic problem-solving, and counting. These limitations stem from difficulties effectively integrating multiple modalities and accurately interpreting geometry-related tasks. Various works claim that introducing a captioning pipeline before VQA tasks enhances performance. We incorporated this pipeline for tasks involving geometry, algebra, and counting. We found that captioning results are not generalizable, specifically with larger VLMs primarily trained on downstream QnA tasks showing random performance on math-related challenges. However, we present a promising alternative: task-based prompting, enriching the prompt with task-specific guidance. This approach shows promise and proves more effective than direct captioning methods for math-heavy problems.

Text-rich visual understanding-the ability to process environments where dense textual content is integrated with visuals-is crucial for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to interact effectively with structured environments. To enhance this capability, we propose synthesizing general multimodal instructions from webpage UIs using text-based large language models (LLMs). Despite lacking direct visual input, text-based LLMs are able to process structured text representations from webpage accessibility trees. These instructions are then paired with UI screenshots to train multimodal models. We introduce MultiUI, a dataset containing 7.3 million samples from 1 million websites, covering diverse multimodal tasks and UI layouts. Models trained on MultiUI not only excel in web UI tasks-achieving up to a 48\% improvement on VisualWebBench and a 19.1\% boost in action accuracy on a web agent dataset Mind2Web-but also generalize surprisingly well to non-web UI tasks and even to non-UI domains, such as document understanding, OCR, and chart interpretation. These results highlight the broad applicability of web UI data for advancing text-rich visual understanding across various scenarios.

Graphics design is important for various applications, including movie production and game design. To create a high-quality scene, designers usually need to spend hours in software like Blender, in which they might need to interleave and repeat operations, such as connecting material nodes, hundreds of times. Moreover, slightly different design goals may require completely different sequences, making automation difficult. In this paper, we propose a system that leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs), like GPT-4V, to intelligently search the design action space to arrive at an answer that can satisfy a user's intent. Specifically, we design a vision-based edit generator and state evaluator to work together to find the correct sequence of actions to achieve the goal. Inspired by the role of visual imagination in the human design process, we supplement the visual reasoning capabilities of VLMs with "imagined" reference images from image-generation models, providing visual grounding of abstract language descriptions. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence suggesting our system can produce simple but tedious Blender editing sequences for tasks such as editing procedural materials from text and/or reference images, as well as adjusting lighting configurations for product renderings in complex scenes.

Diffusion models have significantly improved text-to-image generation, producing high-quality, realistic images from textual descriptions. Beyond generation, object-level image editing remains a challenging problem, requiring precise modifications while preserving visual coherence. Existing text-based instructional editing methods struggle with localized shape and layout transformations, often introducing unintended global changes. Image interaction-based approaches offer better accuracy but require manual human effort to provide precise guidance. To reduce this manual effort while maintaining a high image editing accuracy, in this paper, we propose POEM, a framework for Precise Object-level Editing using Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). POEM leverages MLLMs to analyze instructional prompts and generate precise object masks before and after transformation, enabling fine-grained control without extensive user input. This structured reasoning stage guides the diffusion-based editing process, ensuring accurate object localization and transformation. To evaluate our approach, we introduce VOCEdits, a benchmark dataset based on PASCAL VOC 2012, augmented with instructional edit prompts, ground-truth transformations, and precise object masks. Experimental results show that POEM outperforms existing text-based image editing approaches in precision and reliability while reducing manual effort compared to interaction-based methods.