Emergent Mind

Visual Instruction Tuning

(2304.08485)

Published Apr 17, 2023 in cs.CV , cs.AI , cs.CL , and cs.LG

Abstract

Instruction tuning LLMs using machine-generated instruction-following data has improved zero-shot capabilities on new tasks, but the idea is less explored in the multimodal field. In this paper, we present the first attempt to use language-only GPT-4 to generate multimodal language-image instruction-following data. By instruction tuning on such generated data, we introduce LLaVA: Large Language and Vision Assistant, an end-to-end trained large multimodal model that connects a vision encoder and LLM for general-purpose visual and language understanding.Our early experiments show that LLaVA demonstrates impressive multimodel chat abilities, sometimes exhibiting the behaviors of multimodal GPT-4 on unseen images/instructions, and yields a 85.1% relative score compared with GPT-4 on a synthetic multimodal instruction-following dataset. When fine-tuned on Science QA, the synergy of LLaVA and GPT-4 achieves a new state-of-the-art accuracy of 92.53%. We make GPT-4 generated visual instruction tuning data, our model and code base publicly available.

LLaVA connects movie scenes to textual knowledge from a pretrained language model.

Overview

The paper introduces LLaVA, a multimodal AI model combining vision encoders with LLMs to effectively follow and interpret visual instructions.
LLaVA demonstrates significant advancements in multimodal chat capabilities and achieves new state-of-the-art performance in the Science QA dataset.
The authors release open-source multimodal instruction data, codebase, and model checkpoints, facilitating further research and applications in general-purpose visual assistants.

Visual Instruction Tuning: A Formal Overview

The paper titled "Visual Instruction Tuning" authored by Liu et al. presents a methodology to enhance LLMs by connecting them with a vision encoder, culminating in an end-to-end large multimodal model named LLaVA. LLaVA stands for "Large Language and Vision Assistant," focusing on effectively interpreting and following multimodal instructions, bridging the domains of language processing and computer vision.

Abstract Summary

The authors introduce a novel approach to instruction tuning in the multimodal domain, specifically targeting visual and language understanding. They leverage machine-generated instruction-following data to enhance the zero-shot capabilities of LLMs for new tasks. LLaVA, an end-to-end trained model, incorporates a vision encoder with an LLM, resulting in superior multimodal chat abilities. Notably, LLaVA achieves an impressive 85.1% relative score compared to GPT-4 on a synthetic dataset. Furthermore, when fine-tuned on Science QA, it achieves a new state-of-the-art (SoTA) accuracy of 92.53%. The paper also outlines the release of GPT-4-generated visual instruction tuning data, the model, and associated code.

Core Motivation and Objectives

One of the primary goals in AI research is to develop general-purpose assistants capable of effectively following multimodal instructions. The current landscape of AI includes models with strong capabilities in open-world visual understanding. However, they often operate with a fixed interface, limiting interactivity and adaptability. On the other hand, LLMs like ChatGPT and GPT-4 serve as universal interfaces, representing various task instructions explicitly in language, guiding the model to the task of interest.

The paper aims to extend the instruction-tuning paradigm to the multimodal space, introducing visual instruction tuning to build a general-purpose visual assistant.

Key Contributions

The paper makes several significant contributions:

Multimodal Instruction-Following Data: The authors address the scarcity of vision-language instruction-following data by presenting a data reformation pipeline. This pipeline utilizes ChatGPT and GPT-4 to convert image-text pairs into appropriate instruction-following formats.
Large Multimodal Models: LLaVA is developed by connecting the visual encoder of CLIP with the language decoder Vicuna, fine-tuning it end-to-end on generated instructional vision-language data. This approach demonstrates the efficacy of using machine-generated data for multimodal model instruction-tuning.
Multimodal Instruction-Following Benchmark: LLaVA-Bench is introduced, consisting of two challenging benchmarks with diverse selections of paired images, instructions, and detailed annotations.
Open-Source Release: The authors release the generated multimodal instruction data, codebase, model checkpoints, and a visual chat demo.

Experimental Results

Multimodal Chatbot

The LLaVA model demonstrates significant multimodal chat capabilities, akin to those of GPT-4. The chatbot experiment reveals LLaVA's ability to understand and respond to visual inputs accurately. Quantitatively, LLaVA achieves an 85.1% relative score compared to text-only GPT-4, which uses text descriptions of visual inputs.

Science QA

For the Science QA dataset, LLaVA, when fine-tuned, achieves an accuracy of 90.92%, nearing the SoTA performance. Moreover, combining LLaVA's predictions with those from text-only GPT-4 yields a new SoTA accuracy of 92.53%. This ensemble approach highlights the complementary strengths of LLaVA and GPT-4.

Implications and Future Directions

Practical Implications

The development of LLaVA represents a significant advancement in building general-purpose visual assistants. It demonstrates how multimodal models can be fine-tuned to understand and respond to complex visual instructions. The open-source release of LLaVA paves the way for broader application and experimentation, potentially leading to more sophisticated AI-driven solutions in various domains such as healthcare, autonomous driving, and education.

Theoretical Implications

The approach of visual instruction tuning introduces a new dimension to multimodal learning, emphasizing the importance of aligning visual and language representations. The data augmentation techniques employed could be extended further to improve the robustness and generalization capabilities of multimodal models.

Future Developments

Future research could explore more sophisticated schemes to connect image and language representations. Additionally, focusing on minimizing biases and improving the interpretability of multimodal models will be imperative. Another promising direction involves scaling the pretraining datasets and model sizes, potentially leveraging larger LLaMA models for enhanced performance.

Conclusion

"Visual Instruction Tuning" by Liu et al. bridges a critical gap between visual and language understanding, leveraging machine-generated instruction-following data to create an effective multimodal assistant. Through comprehensive experiments and significant practical contributions, this paper lays the groundwork for future advancements in multimodal AI, fostering improved general-purpose assistance capabilities.