Align$^2$LLaVA: Cascaded Human and Large Language Model Preference Alignment for Multi-modal Instruction Curation

Recent advances in Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), such as LLaVA-series models, are driven by massive machine-generated instruction-following data tuning. Such automatic instruction collection pipelines, however, inadvertently introduce significant variability in data quality. This paper introduces a novel instruction curation algorithm, derived from two unique perspectives, human and LLM preference alignment, to compress this vast corpus of machine-generated multimodal instructions to a compact and high-quality form: (i) For human preference alignment, we have collected a machine-generated multimodal instruction dataset and established a comprehensive set of both subjective and objective criteria to guide the data quality assessment critically from human experts. By doing so, a reward model was trained on the annotated dataset to internalize the nuanced human understanding of instruction alignment. (ii) For LLM preference alignment, given the instruction selected by the reward model, we propose leveraging the inner LLM used in MLLM to align the writing style of visual instructions with that of the inner LLM itself, resulting in LLM-aligned instruction improvement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that we can maintain or even improve model performance by compressing synthetic multimodal instructions by up to 90%. Impressively, by aggressively reducing the total training sample size from 158k to 14k (9$\times$ smaller), our model consistently outperforms its full-size dataset counterpart across various MLLM benchmarks. Our project is available at https://github.com/DCDmllm/Align2LLaVA.

WorldGPT: Empowering LLM as Multimodal World Model

World models are progressively being employed across diverse fields, extending from basic environment simulation to complex scenario construction. However, existing models are mainly trained on domain-specific states and actions, and confined to single-modality state representations. In this paper, We introduce WorldGPT, a generalist world model built upon Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM). WorldGPT acquires an understanding of world dynamics through analyzing millions of videos across various domains. To further enhance WorldGPT's capability in specialized scenarios and long-term tasks, we have integrated it with a novel cognitive architecture that combines memory offloading, knowledge retrieval, and context reflection. As for evaluation, we build WorldNet, a multimodal state transition prediction benchmark encompassing varied real-life scenarios. Conducting evaluations on WorldNet directly demonstrates WorldGPT's capability to accurately model state transition patterns, affirming its effectiveness in understanding and predicting the dynamics of complex scenarios. We further explore WorldGPT's emerging potential in serving as a world simulator, helping multimodal agents generalize to unfamiliar domains through efficiently synthesising multimodal instruction instances which are proved to be as reliable as authentic data for fine-tuning purposes. The project is available on \url{https://github.com/DCDmllm/WorldGPT}.