SymDPO: Boosting In-Context Learning of Large Multimodal Models with Symbol Demonstration Direct Preference Optimization

As language models continue to scale, Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited emerging capabilities in In-Context Learning (ICL), enabling them to solve language tasks by prefixing a few in-context demonstrations (ICDs) as context. Inspired by these advancements, researchers have extended these techniques to develop Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) with ICL capabilities. However, existing LMMs face a critical issue: they often fail to effectively leverage the visual context in multimodal demonstrations and instead simply follow textual patterns. This indicates that LMMs do not achieve effective alignment between multimodal demonstrations and model outputs. To address this problem, we propose Symbol Demonstration Direct Preference Optimization (SymDPO). Specifically, SymDPO aims to break the traditional paradigm of constructing multimodal demonstrations by using random symbols to replace text answers within instances. This forces the model to carefully understand the demonstration images and establish a relationship between the images and the symbols to answer questions correctly. We validate the effectiveness of this method on multiple benchmarks, demonstrating that with SymDPO, LMMs can more effectively understand the multimodal context within examples and utilize this knowledge to answer questions better.

MaVEn: An Effective Multi-granularity Hybrid Visual Encoding Framework for Multimodal Large Language Model

This paper presents MaVEn, an innovative Multi-granularity Visual Encoding framework designed to enhance the capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in multi-image reasoning. Current MLLMs primarily focus on single-image visual understanding, limiting their ability to interpret and integrate information across multiple images. MaVEn addresses this limitation by combining discrete visual symbol sequences, which abstract coarse-grained semantic concepts, with traditional continuous representation sequences that model fine-grained features. This dual approach bridges the semantic gap between visual and textual data, thereby improving the model's ability to process and interpret information from multiple images effectively. Additionally, we design a dynamic reduction mechanism by for long-sequence continuous features to enhance multi-image processing efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that MaVEn significantly enhances MLLMs' understanding in complex multi-image scenarios, while also improving performance in single-image contexts.

MIBench: Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models over Multiple Images

Built on the power of LLMs, numerous multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have recently achieved remarkable performance on various vision-language tasks across multiple benchmarks. However, most existing MLLMs and benchmarks primarily focus on single-image input scenarios, leaving the performance of MLLMs when handling realistic multiple images remain underexplored. Although a few benchmarks consider multiple images, their evaluation dimensions and samples are very limited. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new benchmark MIBench, to comprehensively evaluate fine-grained abilities of MLLMs in multi-image scenarios. Specifically, MIBench categorizes the multi-image abilities into three scenarios: multi-image instruction (MII), multimodal knowledge-seeking (MKS) and multimodal in-context learning (MIC), and constructs 13 tasks with a total of 13K annotated samples. During data construction, for MII and MKS, we extract correct options from manual annotations and create challenging distractors to obtain multiple-choice questions. For MIC, to enable an in-depth evaluation, we set four sub-tasks and transform the original datasets into in-context learning formats. We evaluate several open-source MLLMs and close-source MLLMs on the proposed MIBench. The results reveal that although current models excel in single-image tasks, they exhibit significant shortcomings when faced with multi-image inputs, such as confused fine-grained perception, limited multi-image reasoning, and unstable in-context learning. The annotated data in MIBench is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/StarBottle/MIBench.

Enhancing In-Context Learning via Implicit Demonstration Augmentation

The emergence of in-context learning (ICL) enables large pre-trained language models (PLMs) to make predictions for unseen inputs without updating parameters. Despite its potential, ICL's effectiveness heavily relies on the quality, quantity, and permutation of demonstrations, commonly leading to suboptimal and unstable performance. In this paper, we tackle this challenge for the first time from the perspective of demonstration augmentation. Specifically, we start with enriching representations of demonstrations by leveraging their deep feature distribution. We then theoretically reveal that when the number of augmented copies approaches infinity, the augmentation is approximately equal to a novel logit calibration mechanism integrated with specific statistical properties. This insight results in a simple yet highly efficient method that significantly improves the average and worst-case accuracy across diverse PLMs and tasks. Moreover, our method effectively reduces performance variance among varying demonstrations, permutations, and templates, and displays the capability to address imbalanced class distributions.

Hal-Eval: A Universal and Fine-grained Hallucination Evaluation Framework for Large Vision Language Models

Large Vision Language Models exhibit remarkable capabilities but struggle with hallucinations inconsistencies between images and their descriptions. Previous hallucination evaluation studies on LVLMs have identified hallucinations in terms of objects, attributes, and relations but overlooked complex hallucinations that create an entire narrative around a fictional entity. In this paper, we introduce a refined taxonomy of hallucinations, featuring a new category: Event Hallucination. We then utilize advanced LLMs to generate and filter fine grained hallucinatory data consisting of various types of hallucinations, with a particular focus on event hallucinations, laying the groundwork for integrating discriminative and generative evaluation methods within our universal evaluation framework. The proposed benchmark distinctively assesses LVLMs ability to tackle a broad spectrum of hallucinations, making it a reliable and comprehensive tool for gauging LVLMs efficacy in handling hallucinations. We will release our code and data.

TiMix: Text-aware Image Mixing for Effective Vision-Language Pre-training

Self-supervised Multi-modal Contrastive Learning (SMCL) remarkably advances modern Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) models by aligning visual and linguistic modalities. Due to noises in web-harvested text-image pairs, however, scaling up training data volume in SMCL presents considerable obstacles in terms of computational cost and data inefficiency. To improve data efficiency in VLP, we propose Text-aware Image Mixing (TiMix), which integrates mix-based data augmentation techniques into SMCL, yielding significant performance improvements without significantly increasing computational overhead. We provide a theoretical analysis of TiMixfrom a mutual information (MI) perspective, showing that mixed data samples for cross-modal contrastive learning implicitly serve as a regularizer for the contrastive loss. The experimental results demonstrate that TiMix exhibits a comparable performance on downstream tasks, even with a reduced amount of training data and shorter training time, when benchmarked against existing methods. This work empirically and theoretically demonstrates the potential of data mixing for data-efficient and computationally viable VLP, benefiting broader VLP model adoption in practical scenarios.

Hallucination Augmented Contrastive Learning for Multimodal Large Language Model

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have been shown to efficiently integrate natural language with visual information to handle multi-modal tasks. However, MLLMs still face a fundamental limitation of hallucinations, where they tend to generate erroneous or fabricated information. In this paper, we address hallucinations in MLLMs from a novel perspective of representation learning. We first analyzed the representation distribution of textual and visual tokens in MLLM, revealing two important findings: 1) there is a significant gap between textual and visual representations, indicating unsatisfactory cross-modal representation alignment; 2) representations of texts that contain and do not contain hallucinations are entangled, making it challenging to distinguish them. These two observations inspire us with a simple yet effective method to mitigate hallucinations. Specifically, we introduce contrastive learning into MLLMs and use text with hallucination as hard negative examples, naturally bringing representations of non-hallucinative text and visual samples closer while pushing way representations of non-hallucinating and hallucinative text. We evaluate our method quantitatively and qualitatively, showing its effectiveness in reducing hallucination occurrences and improving performance across multiple benchmarks. On the MMhal-Bench benchmark, our method obtains a 34.66% /29.5% improvement over the baseline MiniGPT-4/LLaVA.

BUS:Efficient and Effective Vision-language Pre-training with Bottom-Up Patch Summarization

Vision Transformer (ViT) based Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) models have demonstrated impressive performance in various tasks. However, the lengthy visual token sequences fed into ViT can lead to training inefficiency and ineffectiveness. Existing efforts address the challenge by either bottom-level patch extraction in the ViT backbone or top-level patch abstraction outside, not balancing training efficiency and effectiveness well. Inspired by text summarization in natural language processing, we propose a Bottom-Up Patch Summarization approach named BUS, coordinating bottom-level extraction and top-level abstraction to learn a concise summary of lengthy visual token sequences efficiently. Specifically, We incorporate a Text-Semantics-Aware Patch Selector (TSPS) into the ViT backbone to perform a coarse-grained visual token extraction and then attach a flexible Transformer-based Patch Abstraction Decoder (PAD) upon the backbone for top-level visual abstraction. This bottom-up collaboration enables our BUS to yield high training efficiency while maintaining or even improving effectiveness. We evaluate our approach on various visual-language understanding and generation tasks and show competitive downstream task performance while boosting the training efficiency by 50\%. Additionally, our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on many downstream tasks by increasing input image resolution without increasing computational costs over baselines.

PandaLM: An Automatic Evaluation Benchmark for LLM Instruction Tuning Optimization

Instruction tuning large language models (LLMs) remains a challenging task, owing to the complexity of hyperparameter selection and the difficulty involved in evaluating the tuned models. To determine the optimal hyperparameters, an automatic, robust, and reliable evaluation benchmark is essential. However, establishing such a benchmark is not a trivial task due to the challenges associated with evaluation accuracy and privacy protection. In response to these challenges, we introduce a judge large language model, named PandaLM, which is trained to distinguish the superior model given several LLMs. PandaLM's focus extends beyond just the objective correctness of responses, which is the main focus of traditional evaluation datasets. It addresses vital subjective factors such as relative conciseness, clarity, adherence to instructions, comprehensiveness, and formality. To ensure the reliability of PandaLM, we collect a diverse human-annotated test dataset, where all contexts are generated by humans and labels are aligned with human preferences. Our results indicate that PandaLM-7B achieves 93.75% of GPT-3.5's evaluation ability and 88.28% of GPT-4's in terms of F1-score on our test dataset. PandaLM enables the evaluation of LLM to be fairer but with less cost, evidenced by significant improvements achieved by models tuned through PandaLM compared to their counterparts trained with default Alpaca's hyperparameters. In addition, PandaLM does not depend on API-based evaluations, thus avoiding potential data leakage. All resources of PandaLM are released at https://github.com/WeOpenML/PandaLM.

Vision Langauge Pre-training by Contrastive Learning with Cross-Modal Similarity Regulation

Cross-modal contrastive learning in vision language pretraining (VLP) faces the challenge of (partial) false negatives. In this paper, we study this problem from the perspective of Mutual Information (MI) optimization. It is common sense that InfoNCE loss used in contrastive learning will maximize the lower bound of MI between anchors and their positives, while we theoretically prove that MI involving negatives also matters when noises commonly exist. Guided by a more general lower bound form for optimization, we propose a contrastive learning strategy regulated by progressively refined cross-modal similarity, to more accurately optimize MI between an image/text anchor and its negative texts/images instead of improperly minimizing it. Our method performs competitively on four downstream cross-modal tasks and systematically balances the beneficial and harmful effects of (partial) false negative samples under theoretical guidance.