Daily Papers

The Large Visual-Language Models (LVLMs) have significantly advanced image understanding. Their comprehension and reasoning capabilities enable promising applications in autonomous driving scenarios. However, existing research typically focuses on front-view perspectives and partial objects within scenes, struggling to achieve comprehensive scene understanding. Meanwhile, existing LVLMs suffer from the lack of mapping relationship between 2D and 3D and insufficient integration of 3D object localization and instruction understanding. To tackle these limitations, we first introduce NuInteract, a large-scale dataset with over 1.5M multi-view image language pairs spanning dense scene captions and diverse interactive tasks. Furthermore, we propose DriveMonkey, a simple yet effective framework that seamlessly integrates LVLMs with a spatial processor using a series of learnable queries. The spatial processor, designed as a plug-and-play component, can be initialized with pre-trained 3D detectors to improve 3D perception. Our experiments show that DriveMonkey outperforms general LVLMs, especially achieving a 9.86% notable improvement on the 3D visual grounding task. The dataset and code will be released at https://github.com/zc-zhao/DriveMonkey.

Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) models like CLIP have achieved remarkable success in computer vision and particularly demonstrated superior robustness to distribution shifts of 2D images. However, their robustness under 3D viewpoint variations is still limited, which can hinder the development for real-world applications. This paper successfully addresses this concern while keeping VLPs' original performance by breaking through two primary obstacles: 1) the scarcity of training data and 2) the suboptimal fine-tuning paradigms. To combat data scarcity, we build the Multi-View Caption (MVCap) dataset -- a comprehensive collection of over four million multi-view image-text pairs across more than 100K objects, providing more potential for VLP models to develop generalizable viewpoint-invariant representations. To address the limitations of existing paradigms in performance trade-offs and training efficiency, we design a novel fine-tuning framework named Omniview-Tuning (OVT). Specifically, OVT introduces a Cross-Viewpoint Alignment objective through a minimax-like optimization strategy, which effectively aligns representations of identical objects from diverse viewpoints without causing overfitting. Additionally, OVT fine-tunes VLP models in a parameter-efficient manner, leading to minimal computational cost. Extensive experiments on various VLP models with different architectures validate that OVT significantly improves the models' resilience to viewpoint shifts and keeps the original performance, establishing a pioneering standard for boosting the viewpoint invariance of VLP models.

Recently, large-scale Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has attracted unprecedented attention for its impressive zero-shot recognition ability and excellent transferability to downstream tasks. However, CLIP is quite data-hungry and requires 400M image-text pairs for pre-training, thereby restricting its adoption. This work proposes a novel training paradigm, Data efficient CLIP (DeCLIP), to alleviate this limitation. We demonstrate that by carefully utilizing the widespread supervision among the image-text pairs, our De-CLIP can learn generic visual features more efficiently. Instead of using the single image-text contrastive supervision, we fully exploit data potential through the use of (1) self-supervision within each modality; (2) multi-view supervision across modalities; (3) nearest-neighbor supervision from other similar pairs. Benefiting from intrinsic supervision, our DeCLIP-ResNet50 can achieve 60.4% zero-shot top1 accuracy on ImageNet, which is 0.8% above the CLIP-ResNet50 while using 7.1 x fewer data. Our DeCLIP-ResNet50 outperforms its counterpart in 8 out of 11 visual datasets when transferred to downstream tasks. Moreover, Scaling up the model and computing also works well in our framework.Our code, dataset and models are released at: https://github.com/Sense-GVT/DeCLIP

Large annotated datasets are essential for training robust Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) models for breast cancer detection or risk prediction. However, acquiring such datasets with fine-detailed annotation is both costly and time-consuming. Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as CLIP, which are pre-trained on large image-text pairs, offer a promising solution by enhancing robustness and data efficiency in medical imaging tasks. This paper introduces a novel Multi-View Mammography and Language Model for breast cancer classification and risk prediction, trained on a dataset of paired mammogram images and synthetic radiology reports. Our MV-MLM leverages multi-view supervision to learn rich representations from extensive radiology data by employing cross-modal self-supervision across image-text pairs. This includes multiple views and the corresponding pseudo-radiology reports. We propose a novel joint visual-textual learning strategy to enhance generalization and accuracy performance over different data types and tasks to distinguish breast tissues or cancer characteristics(calcification, mass) and utilize these patterns to understand mammography images and predict cancer risk. We evaluated our method on both private and publicly available datasets, demonstrating that the proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance in three classification tasks: (1) malignancy classification, (2) subtype classification, and (3) image-based cancer risk prediction. Furthermore, the model exhibits strong data efficiency, outperforming existing fully supervised or VLM baselines while trained on synthetic text reports and without the need for actual radiology reports.

Open-world instance-level scene understanding aims to locate and recognize unseen object categories that are not present in the annotated dataset. This task is challenging because the model needs to both localize novel 3D objects and infer their semantic categories. A key factor for the recent progress in 2D open-world perception is the availability of large-scale image-text pairs from the Internet, which cover a wide range of vocabulary concepts. However, this success is hard to replicate in 3D scenarios due to the scarcity of 3D-text pairs. To address this challenge, we propose to harness pre-trained vision-language (VL) foundation models that encode extensive knowledge from image-text pairs to generate captions for multi-view images of 3D scenes. This allows us to establish explicit associations between 3D shapes and semantic-rich captions. Moreover, to enhance the fine-grained visual-semantic representation learning from captions for object-level categorization, we design hierarchical point-caption association methods to learn semantic-aware embeddings that exploit the 3D geometry between 3D points and multi-view images. In addition, to tackle the localization challenge for novel classes in the open-world setting, we develop debiased instance localization, which involves training object grouping modules on unlabeled data using instance-level pseudo supervision. This significantly improves the generalization capabilities of instance grouping and thus the ability to accurately locate novel objects. We conduct extensive experiments on 3D semantic, instance, and panoptic segmentation tasks, covering indoor and outdoor scenes across three datasets. Our method outperforms baseline methods by a significant margin in semantic segmentation (e.g. 34.5%sim65.3%), instance segmentation (e.g. 21.8%sim54.0%) and panoptic segmentation (e.g. 14.7%sim43.3%). Code will be available.

Describing images with text is a fundamental problem in vision-language research. Current studies in this domain mostly focus on single image captioning. However, in various real applications (e.g., image editing, difference interpretation, and retrieval), generating relational captions for two images, can also be very useful. This important problem has not been explored mostly due to lack of datasets and effective models. To push forward the research in this direction, we first introduce a new language-guided image editing dataset that contains a large number of real image pairs with corresponding editing instructions. We then propose a new relational speaker model based on an encoder-decoder architecture with static relational attention and sequential multi-head attention. We also extend the model with dynamic relational attention, which calculates visual alignment while decoding. Our models are evaluated on our newly collected and two public datasets consisting of image pairs annotated with relationship sentences. Experimental results, based on both automatic and human evaluation, demonstrate that our model outperforms all baselines and existing methods on all the datasets.

We present a model that generates natural language descriptions of images and their regions. Our approach leverages datasets of images and their sentence descriptions to learn about the inter-modal correspondences between language and visual data. Our alignment model is based on a novel combination of Convolutional Neural Networks over image regions, bidirectional Recurrent Neural Networks over sentences, and a structured objective that aligns the two modalities through a multimodal embedding. We then describe a Multimodal Recurrent Neural Network architecture that uses the inferred alignments to learn to generate novel descriptions of image regions. We demonstrate that our alignment model produces state of the art results in retrieval experiments on Flickr8K, Flickr30K and MSCOCO datasets. We then show that the generated descriptions significantly outperform retrieval baselines on both full images and on a new dataset of region-level annotations.

Joint vision-language models have shown great performance over a diverse set of tasks. However, little is known about their limitations, as the high dimensional space learned by these models makes it difficult to identify semantic errors. Recent work has addressed this problem by designing highly controlled probing task benchmarks. Our paper introduces a more scalable solution that relies on already annotated benchmarks. Our method consists of extracting a large set of diverse features from a vision-language benchmark and measuring their correlation with the output of the target model. We confirm previous findings that CLIP behaves like a bag of words model and performs better with nouns and verbs; we also uncover novel insights such as CLIP getting confused by concrete words. Our framework is available at https://github.com/MichiganNLP/Scalable-VLM-Probing and can be used with other multimodal models and benchmarks.

Image-language learning has made unprecedented progress in visual understanding. These developments have come at high costs, as contemporary vision-language models require large model scales and amounts of data. We here propose a much easier recipe for image-language learning, which produces effective models, outperforming bigger and more expensive ones, often trained on orders of magnitude larger datasets. Our key finding is the joint learning of a compact vision and language representation, which adaptively and iteratively fuses the multi-modal features. This results in a more effective image-language learning, greatly lowering the FLOPs by combining and reducing the number of tokens for both text and images, e.g. a 33\% reduction in FLOPs is achieved, compared to baseline fusion techniques used by popular image-language models, while improving performance. This also allows the model to scale without a large increase in FLOPs or memory. In addition, we propose adaptive pre-training data sampling which improves the data efficiency. The proposed approach achieves competitive performance compared to much larger models, and does so with significantly less data and FLOPs. With only 40M training examples and with 39 GFLOPs our lightweight model outperforms many times larger state-of-the-art models of 2-20x more FLOPs and using bigger datasets some of which with close to 1B training examples.

Existing multilingual vision-language (VL) benchmarks often only cover a handful of languages. Consequently, evaluations of large vision-language models (LVLMs) predominantly target high-resource languages, underscoring the need for evaluation data for low-resource languages. To address this limitation, we introduce MVL-SIB, a massively multilingual vision-language benchmark that evaluates both cross-modal and text-only topical matching across 205 languages -- over 100 more than the most multilingual existing VL benchmarks encompass. We then benchmark a range of of open-weight LVLMs together with GPT-4o(-mini) on MVL-SIB. Our results reveal that LVLMs struggle in cross-modal topic matching in lower-resource languages, performing no better than chance on languages like N'Koo. Our analysis further reveals that VL support in LVLMs declines disproportionately relative to textual support for lower-resource languages, as evidenced by comparison of cross-modal and text-only topical matching performance. We further observe that open-weight LVLMs do not benefit from representing a topic with more than one image, suggesting that these models are not yet fully effective at handling multi-image tasks. By correlating performance on MVL-SIB with other multilingual VL benchmarks, we highlight that MVL-SIB serves as a comprehensive probe of multilingual VL understanding in LVLMs.

Building joint representations across images and text is an essential step for tasks such as Visual Question Answering and Video Question Answering. In this work, we find that the representations must not only jointly capture features from both modalities but should also be diverse for better generalization performance. To this end, we propose joint vision-language representation learning by diversifying the tokenization learning process, enabling tokens that are sufficiently disentangled from each other to be learned from both modalities. We observe that our approach outperforms the baseline models in a majority of settings and is competitive with state-of-the-art methods.

This work explores text-to-image retrieval for queries that specify or describe a semantic category. While vision-and-language models (VLMs) like CLIP offer a straightforward open-vocabulary solution, they map text and images to distant regions in the representation space, limiting retrieval performance. To bridge this modality gap, we propose a two-step approach. First, we transform the text query into a visual query using a generative diffusion model. Then, we estimate image-to-image similarity with a vision model. Additionally, we introduce an aggregation network that combines multiple generated images into a single vector representation and fuses similarity scores across both query modalities. Our approach leverages advancements in vision encoders, VLMs, and text-to-image generation models. Extensive evaluations show that it consistently outperforms retrieval methods relying solely on text queries. Source code is available at: https://github.com/faixan-khan/cletir

Recent advances in zero-shot image recognition suggest that vision-language models learn generic visual representations with a high degree of semantic information that may be arbitrarily probed with natural language phrases. Understanding an image, however, is not just about understanding what content resides within an image, but importantly, where that content resides. In this work we examine how well vision-language models are able to understand where objects reside within an image and group together visually related parts of the imagery. We demonstrate how contemporary vision and language representation learning models based on contrastive losses and large web-based data capture limited object localization information. We propose a minimal set of modifications that results in models that uniquely learn both semantic and spatial information. We measure this performance in terms of zero-shot image recognition, unsupervised bottom-up and top-down semantic segmentations, as well as robustness analyses. We find that the resulting model achieves state-of-the-art results in terms of unsupervised segmentation, and demonstrate that the learned representations are uniquely robust to spurious correlations in datasets designed to probe the causal behavior of vision models.

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.

Multimodal reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs) struggles with incomplete knowledge and hallucination artifacts, challenges that textual Knowledge Graphs (KGs) only partially mitigate due to their modality isolation. While Multimodal Knowledge Graphs (MMKGs) promise enhanced cross-modal understanding, their practical construction is impeded by semantic narrowness of manual text annotations and inherent noise in visual-semantic entity linkages. In this paper, we propose Vision-align-to-Language integrated Knowledge Graph (VaLiK), a novel approach for constructing MMKGs that enhances LLMs reasoning through cross-modal information supplementation. Specifically, we cascade pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to align image features with text, transforming them into descriptions that encapsulate image-specific information. Furthermore, we developed a cross-modal similarity verification mechanism to quantify semantic consistency, effectively filtering out noise introduced during feature alignment. Even without manually annotated image captions, the refined descriptions alone suffice to construct the MMKG. Compared to conventional MMKGs construction paradigms, our approach achieves substantial storage efficiency gains while maintaining direct entity-to-image linkage capability. Experimental results on multimodal reasoning tasks demonstrate that LLMs augmented with VaLiK outperform previous state-of-the-art models. Our code is published at https://github.com/Wings-Of-Disaster/VaLiK.

Despite the longstanding adage "an image is worth a thousand words," creating accurate and hyper-detailed image descriptions for training Vision-Language models remains challenging. Current datasets typically have web-scraped descriptions that are short, low-granularity, and often contain details unrelated to the visual content. As a result, models trained on such data generate descriptions replete with missing information, visual inconsistencies, and hallucinations. To address these issues, we introduce ImageInWords (IIW), a carefully designed human-in-the-loop annotation framework for curating hyper-detailed image descriptions and a new dataset resulting from this process. We validate the framework through evaluations focused on the quality of the dataset and its utility for fine-tuning with considerations for readability, comprehensiveness, specificity, hallucinations, and human-likeness. Our dataset significantly improves across these dimensions compared to recently released datasets (+66%) and GPT-4V outputs (+48%). Furthermore, models fine-tuned with IIW data excel by +31% against prior work along the same human evaluation dimensions. Given our fine-tuned models, we also evaluate text-to-image generation and vision-language reasoning. Our model's descriptions can generate images closest to the original, as judged by both automated and human metrics. We also find our model produces more compositionally rich descriptions, outperforming the best baseline by up to 6% on ARO, SVO-Probes, and Winoground datasets.

In this paper, we introduce the task of automatically generating text to describe the differences between two similar images. We collect a new dataset by crowd-sourcing difference descriptions for pairs of image frames extracted from video-surveillance footage. Annotators were asked to succinctly describe all the differences in a short paragraph. As a result, our novel dataset provides an opportunity to explore models that align language and vision, and capture visual salience. The dataset may also be a useful benchmark for coherent multi-sentence generation. We perform a firstpass visual analysis that exposes clusters of differing pixels as a proxy for object-level differences. We propose a model that captures visual salience by using a latent variable to align clusters of differing pixels with output sentences. We find that, for both single-sentence generation and as well as multi-sentence generation, the proposed model outperforms the models that use attention alone.

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) is a complex task that aims to retrieve images based on a multimodal query. Typical training data consists of triplets containing a reference image, a textual description of desired modifications, and the target image, which are expensive and time-consuming to acquire. The scarcity of CIR datasets has led to zero-shot approaches utilizing synthetic triplets or leveraging vision-language models (VLMs) with ubiquitous web-crawled image-caption pairs. However, these methods have significant limitations: synthetic triplets suffer from limited scale, lack of diversity, and unnatural modification text, while image-caption pairs hinder joint embedding learning of the multimodal query due to the absence of triplet data. Moreover, existing approaches struggle with complex and nuanced modification texts that demand sophisticated fusion and understanding of vision and language modalities. We present CoLLM, a one-stop framework that effectively addresses these limitations. Our approach generates triplets on-the-fly from image-caption pairs, enabling supervised training without manual annotation. We leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate joint embeddings of reference images and modification texts, facilitating deeper multimodal fusion. Additionally, we introduce Multi-Text CIR (MTCIR), a large-scale dataset comprising 3.4M samples, and refine existing CIR benchmarks (CIRR and Fashion-IQ) to enhance evaluation reliability. Experimental results demonstrate that CoLLM achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple CIR benchmarks and settings. MTCIR yields competitive results, with up to 15% performance improvement. Our refined benchmarks provide more reliable evaluation metrics for CIR models, contributing to the advancement of this important field.

The capability to process multiple images is crucial for Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to develop a more thorough and nuanced understanding of a scene. Recent multi-image LVLMs have begun to address this need. However, their evaluation has not kept pace with their development. To fill this gap, we introduce the Multimodal Multi-image Understanding (MMIU) benchmark, a comprehensive evaluation suite designed to assess LVLMs across a wide range of multi-image tasks. MMIU encompasses 7 types of multi-image relationships, 52 tasks, 77K images, and 11K meticulously curated multiple-choice questions, making it the most extensive benchmark of its kind. Our evaluation of 24 popular LVLMs, including both open-source and proprietary models, reveals significant challenges in multi-image comprehension, particularly in tasks involving spatial understanding. Even the most advanced models, such as GPT-4o, achieve only 55.7% accuracy on MMIU. Through multi-faceted analytical experiments, we identify key performance gaps and limitations, providing valuable insights for future model and data improvements. We aim for MMIU to advance the frontier of LVLM research and development, moving us toward achieving sophisticated multimodal multi-image user interactions.

The advancement of large language models (LLMs) has significantly broadened the scope of applications in natural language processing, with multi-modal LLMs extending these capabilities to integrate and interpret visual data. However, existing benchmarks for visual language models (VLMs) predominantly focus on single-image inputs, neglecting the crucial aspect of multi-image understanding. In this paper, we introduce a Multi-Image Relational Benchmark MIRB, designed to evaluate VLMs' ability to compare, analyze, and reason across multiple images. Our benchmark encompasses four categories: perception, visual world knowledge, reasoning, and multi-hop reasoning. Through a comprehensive evaluation of a wide range of open-source and closed-source models, we demonstrate that while open-source VLMs were shown to approach the performance of GPT-4V in single-image tasks, a significant performance gap remains in multi-image reasoning tasks. Our findings also reveal that even the state-of-the-art GPT-4V model struggles with our benchmark, underscoring the need for further research and development in this area. We believe our contribution of MIRB could serve as a testbed for developing the next-generation multi-modal models.

Multi-modal language-vision models trained on hundreds of millions of image-text pairs (e.g. CLIP, DALL-E) gained a recent surge, showing remarkable capability to perform zero- or few-shot learning and transfer even in absence of per-sample labels on target image data. Despite this trend, to date there has been no publicly available datasets of sufficient scale for training such models from scratch. To address this issue, in a community effort we build and release for public LAION-400M, a dataset with CLIP-filtered 400 million image-text pairs, their CLIP embeddings and kNN indices that allow efficient similarity search.

This work introduces composed image retrieval to remote sensing. It allows to query a large image archive by image examples alternated by a textual description, enriching the descriptive power over unimodal queries, either visual or textual. Various attributes can be modified by the textual part, such as shape, color, or context. A novel method fusing image-to-image and text-to-image similarity is introduced. We demonstrate that a vision-language model possesses sufficient descriptive power and no further learning step or training data are necessary. We present a new evaluation benchmark focused on color, context, density, existence, quantity, and shape modifications. Our work not only sets the state-of-the-art for this task, but also serves as a foundational step in addressing a gap in the field of remote sensing image retrieval. Code at: https://github.com/billpsomas/rscir

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.

We introduce the Qwen-VL series, a set of large-scale vision-language models designed to perceive and understand both text and images. Comprising Qwen-VL and Qwen-VL-Chat, these models exhibit remarkable performance in tasks like image captioning, question answering, visual localization, and flexible interaction. The evaluation covers a wide range of tasks including zero-shot captioning, visual or document visual question answering, and grounding. We demonstrate the Qwen-VL outperforms existing Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs). We present their architecture, training, capabilities, and performance, highlighting their contributions to advancing multimodal artificial intelligence. Code, demo and models are available at https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen-VL.

Contrastive learning typically matches pairs of related views among a number of unrelated negative views. Views can be generated (e.g. by augmentations) or be observed. We investigate matching when there are more than two related views which we call poly-view tasks, and derive new representation learning objectives using information maximization and sufficient statistics. We show that with unlimited computation, one should maximize the number of related views, and with a fixed compute budget, it is beneficial to decrease the number of unique samples whilst increasing the number of views of those samples. In particular, poly-view contrastive models trained for 128 epochs with batch size 256 outperform SimCLR trained for 1024 epochs at batch size 4096 on ImageNet1k, challenging the belief that contrastive models require large batch sizes and many training epochs.

This work addresses composed image retrieval in the context of domain conversion, where the content of a query image is retrieved in the domain specified by the query text. We show that a strong vision-language model provides sufficient descriptive power without additional training. The query image is mapped to the text input space using textual inversion. Unlike common practice that invert in the continuous space of text tokens, we use the discrete word space via a nearest-neighbor search in a text vocabulary. With this inversion, the image is softly mapped across the vocabulary and is made more robust using retrieval-based augmentation. Database images are retrieved by a weighted ensemble of text queries combining mapped words with the domain text. Our method outperforms prior art by a large margin on standard and newly introduced benchmarks. Code: https://github.com/NikosEfth/freedom

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly reshaped the trajectory of the AI revolution. Nevertheless, these LLMs exhibit a notable limitation, as they are primarily adept at processing textual information. To address this constraint, researchers have endeavored to integrate visual capabilities with LLMs, resulting in the emergence of Vision-Language Models (VLMs). These advanced models are instrumental in tackling more intricate tasks such as image captioning and visual question answering. In our comprehensive survey paper, we delve into the key advancements within the realm of VLMs. Our classification organizes VLMs into three distinct categories: models dedicated to vision-language understanding, models that process multimodal inputs to generate unimodal (textual) outputs and models that both accept and produce multimodal inputs and outputs.This classification is based on their respective capabilities and functionalities in processing and generating various modalities of data.We meticulously dissect each model, offering an extensive analysis of its foundational architecture, training data sources, as well as its strengths and limitations wherever possible, providing readers with a comprehensive understanding of its essential components. We also analyzed the performance of VLMs in various benchmark datasets. By doing so, we aim to offer a nuanced understanding of the diverse landscape of VLMs. Additionally, we underscore potential avenues for future research in this dynamic domain, anticipating further breakthroughs and advancements.

Pre-trained representations are becoming crucial for many NLP and perception tasks. While representation learning in NLP has transitioned to training on raw text without human annotations, visual and vision-language representations still rely heavily on curated training datasets that are expensive or require expert knowledge. For vision applications, representations are mostly learned using datasets with explicit class labels such as ImageNet or OpenImages. For vision-language, popular datasets like Conceptual Captions, MSCOCO, or CLIP all involve a non-trivial data collection (and cleaning) process. This costly curation process limits the size of datasets and hence hinders the scaling of trained models. In this paper, we leverage a noisy dataset of over one billion image alt-text pairs, obtained without expensive filtering or post-processing steps in the Conceptual Captions dataset. A simple dual-encoder architecture learns to align visual and language representations of the image and text pairs using a contrastive loss. We show that the scale of our corpus can make up for its noise and leads to state-of-the-art representations even with such a simple learning scheme. Our visual representation achieves strong performance when transferred to classification tasks such as ImageNet and VTAB. The aligned visual and language representations enables zero-shot image classification and also set new state-of-the-art results on Flickr30K and MSCOCO image-text retrieval benchmarks, even when compared with more sophisticated cross-attention models. The representations also enable cross-modality search with complex text and text + image queries.

Most visual recognition studies rely heavily on crowd-labelled data in deep neural networks (DNNs) training, and they usually train a DNN for each single visual recognition task, leading to a laborious and time-consuming visual recognition paradigm. To address the two challenges, Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have been intensively investigated recently, which learns rich vision-language correlation from web-scale image-text pairs that are almost infinitely available on the Internet and enables zero-shot predictions on various visual recognition tasks with a single VLM. This paper provides a systematic review of visual language models for various visual recognition tasks, including: (1) the background that introduces the development of visual recognition paradigms; (2) the foundations of VLM that summarize the widely-adopted network architectures, pre-training objectives, and downstream tasks; (3) the widely-adopted datasets in VLM pre-training and evaluations; (4) the review and categorization of existing VLM pre-training methods, VLM transfer learning methods, and VLM knowledge distillation methods; (5) the benchmarking, analysis and discussion of the reviewed methods; (6) several research challenges and potential research directions that could be pursued in the future VLM studies for visual recognition. A project associated with this survey has been created at https://github.com/jingyi0000/VLM_survey.

Given the remarkable success that large visual language models (LVLMs) have achieved in image perception tasks, the endeavor to make LVMLs perceive the world like humans is drawing increasing attention. Current multi-modal benchmarks mainly focus on the objective fact or certain topic related potential knowledge within a image, but overlook the associative relations between multiple images. Therefore, we define a multi-image relation association task, and meticulously curate MMRA benchmark, a Multi-granularity Multi-image Relational Association benchmark, consisted of 1026 samples. In order to systematically and comprehensively evaluate mainstream LVLMs, we establish an associational relation system among images that contain 11 subtasks (e.g, UsageSimilarity, SubEvent, etc.) at two granularity levels (i.e., "image" and "entity") according to the relations in ConceptNet. Our experiments demonstrate that, on our MMRA benchmark, current mainstream LVLMs all have their own advantages and disadvantages across different subtasks. It is worth noting that, at the entity level, the performance of all models is worse than that of them at the image level, indicating that the fine-grained multi-image perception task is still challenging for LVLMs. The tasks related to spatial perception are relatively difficult for LVLMs to handle. Furthermore, we find that LVMLs exhibit a good ability to perceive image details, and the key to enhancing their multi-image association capability is to strengthen the reasoning ability of their language model component. All our codes and data are released at htthttps://github.com/Wusiwei0410/MMRA.

Vision-and-language (VL) models with separate encoders for each modality (e.g., CLIP) have become the go-to models for zero-shot image classification and image-text retrieval. The bulk of the evaluation of these models is, however, performed with English text only: the costly creation of language-specific image-caption datasets has limited multilingual VL benchmarks to a handful of high-resource languages. In this work, we introduce Babel-ImageNet, a massively multilingual benchmark that offers (partial) translations of 1000 ImageNet labels to 92 languages, built without resorting to machine translation (MT) or requiring manual annotation. We instead automatically obtain reliable translations of ImageNext concepts by linking them -- via shared WordNet synsets -- to BabelNet, a massively multilingual lexico-semantic network. We evaluate 8 different publicly available multilingual CLIP models on zero-shot image classification (ZS-IC) for each of the 92 Babel-ImageNet languages, demonstrating a significant gap between English ImageNet performance and that of high-resource languages (e.g., German or Chinese), and an even bigger gap for low-resource languages (e.g., Sinhala or Lao). Crucially, we show that the models' ZS-IC performance on Babel-ImageNet highly correlates with their performance in image-text retrieval, validating that Babel-ImageNet is suitable for estimating the quality of the multilingual VL representation spaces for the vast majority of languages that lack gold image-text data. Finally, we show that the performance of multilingual CLIP for low-resource languages can be drastically improved via cheap, parameter-efficient language-specific training. We make our code and data publicly available: https://github.com/gregor-ge/Babel-ImageNet

This paper introduces VLAP, a novel approach that bridges pretrained vision models and large language models (LLMs) to make frozen LLMs understand the visual world. VLAP transforms the embedding space of pretrained vision models into the LLMs' word embedding space using a single linear layer for efficient and general-purpose visual and language understanding. Specifically, we harness well-established word embeddings to bridge two modality embedding spaces. The visual and text representations are simultaneously assigned to a set of word embeddings within pretrained LLMs by formulating the assigning procedure as an optimal transport problem. We predict the assignment of one modality from the representation of another modality data, enforcing consistent assignments for paired multimodal data. This allows vision and language representations to contain the same information, grounding the frozen LLMs' word embedding space in visual data. Moreover, a robust semantic taxonomy of LLMs can be preserved with visual data since the LLMs interpret and reason linguistic information from correlations between word embeddings. Experimental results show that VLAP achieves substantial improvements over the previous linear transformation-based approaches across a range of vision-language tasks, including image captioning, visual question answering, and cross-modal retrieval. We also demonstrate the learned visual representations hold a semantic taxonomy of LLMs, making visual semantic arithmetic possible.

Vision and Language (VL) models offer an effective method for aligning representation spaces of images and text, leading to numerous applications such as cross-modal retrieval, visual question answering, captioning, and more. However, the aligned image-text spaces learned by all the popular VL models are still suffering from the so-called `object bias' - their representations behave as `bags of nouns', mostly ignoring or downsizing the attributes, relations, and states of objects described/appearing in texts/images. Although some great attempts at fixing these `compositional reasoning' issues were proposed in the recent literature, the problem is still far from being solved. In this paper, we uncover two factors limiting the VL models' compositional reasoning performance. These two factors are properties of the paired VL dataset used for finetuning and pre-training the VL model: (i) the caption quality, or in other words `image-alignment', of the texts; and (ii) the `density' of the captions in the sense of mentioning all the details appearing on the image. We propose a fine-tuning approach for automatically treating these factors leveraging a standard VL dataset (CC3M). Applied to CLIP, we demonstrate its significant compositional reasoning performance increase of up to sim27% over the base model, up to sim20% over the strongest baseline, and by 6.7% on average.

Multi-view representation learning aims to derive robust representations that are both view-consistent and view-specific from diverse data sources. This paper presents an in-depth analysis of existing approaches in this domain, highlighting a commonly overlooked aspect: the redundancy between view-consistent and view-specific representations. To this end, we propose an innovative framework for multi-view representation learning, which incorporates a technique we term 'distilled disentangling'. Our method introduces the concept of masked cross-view prediction, enabling the extraction of compact, high-quality view-consistent representations from various sources without incurring extra computational overhead. Additionally, we develop a distilled disentangling module that efficiently filters out consistency-related information from multi-view representations, resulting in purer view-specific representations. This approach significantly reduces redundancy between view-consistent and view-specific representations, enhancing the overall efficiency of the learning process. Our empirical evaluations reveal that higher mask ratios substantially improve the quality of view-consistent representations. Moreover, we find that reducing the dimensionality of view-consistent representations relative to that of view-specific representations further refines the quality of the combined representations. Our code is accessible at: https://github.com/Guanzhou-Ke/MRDD.

Vision-language datasets are vital for both text-to-image (T2I) and image-to-text (I2T) research. However, current datasets lack descriptions with fine-grained detail that would allow for richer associations to be learned by models. To fill the gap, we introduce Descriptions of Connected and Contrasting Images (DOCCI), a dataset with long, human-annotated English descriptions for 15k images that were taken, curated and donated by a single researcher intent on capturing key challenges such as spatial relations, counting, text rendering, world knowledge, and more. We instruct human annotators to create comprehensive descriptions for each image; these average 136 words in length and are crafted to clearly distinguish each image from those that are related or similar. Each description is highly compositional and typically encompasses multiple challenges. Through both quantitative and qualitative analyses, we demonstrate that DOCCI serves as an effective training resource for image-to-text generation -- a PaLI 5B model finetuned on DOCCI shows equal or superior results compared to highly-performant larger models like LLaVA-1.5 7B and InstructBLIP 7B. Furthermore, we show that DOCCI is a useful testbed for text-to-image generation, highlighting the limitations of current text-to-image models in capturing long descriptions and fine details.

Multimodal Vision-Language Models (VLMs) enable powerful applications from their fused understanding of images and language, but many perform poorly on UI tasks due to the lack of UI training data. In this paper, we adapt a recipe for generating paired text-image training data for VLMs to the UI domain by combining existing pixel-based methods with a Large Language Model (LLM). Unlike prior art, our method requires no human-provided annotations, and it can be applied to any dataset of UI screenshots. We generate a dataset of 335K conversational examples paired with UIs that cover Q&A, UI descriptions, and planning, and use it to fine-tune a conversational VLM for UI tasks. To assess the performance of our model, we benchmark it on UI element detection tasks, evaluate response quality, and showcase its applicability to multi-step UI navigation and planning.

Image representations are often evaluated through disjointed, task-specific protocols, leading to a fragmented understanding of model capabilities. For instance, it is unclear whether an image embedding model adept at clustering images is equally good at retrieving relevant images given a piece of text. We introduce the Massive Image Embedding Benchmark (MIEB) to evaluate the performance of image and image-text embedding models across the broadest spectrum to date. MIEB spans 38 languages across 130 individual tasks, which we group into 8 high-level categories. We benchmark 50 models across our benchmark, finding that no single method dominates across all task categories. We reveal hidden capabilities in advanced vision models such as their accurate visual representation of texts, and their yet limited capabilities in interleaved encodings and matching images and texts in the presence of confounders. We also show that the performance of vision encoders on MIEB correlates highly with their performance when used in multimodal large language models. Our code, dataset, and leaderboard are publicly available at https://github.com/embeddings-benchmark/mteb.

Cross-modal retrieval methods build a common representation space for samples from multiple modalities, typically from the vision and the language domains. For images and their captions, the multiplicity of the correspondences makes the task particularly challenging. Given an image (respectively a caption), there are multiple captions (respectively images) that equally make sense. In this paper, we argue that deterministic functions are not sufficiently powerful to capture such one-to-many correspondences. Instead, we propose to use Probabilistic Cross-Modal Embedding (PCME), where samples from the different modalities are represented as probabilistic distributions in the common embedding space. Since common benchmarks such as COCO suffer from non-exhaustive annotations for cross-modal matches, we propose to additionally evaluate retrieval on the CUB dataset, a smaller yet clean database where all possible image-caption pairs are annotated. We extensively ablate PCME and demonstrate that it not only improves the retrieval performance over its deterministic counterpart but also provides uncertainty estimates that render the embeddings more interpretable. Code is available at https://github.com/naver-ai/pcme

Curation methods for massive vision-language datasets trade off between dataset size and quality. However, even the highest quality of available curated captions are far too short to capture the rich visual detail in an image. To show the value of dense and highly-aligned image-text pairs, we collect the Densely Captioned Images (DCI) dataset, containing 8012 natural images human-annotated with mask-aligned descriptions averaging above 1000 words each. With precise and reliable captions associated with specific parts of an image, we can evaluate vision-language models' (VLMs) understanding of image content with a novel task that matches each caption with its corresponding subcrop. As current models are often limited to 77 text tokens, we also introduce a summarized version (sDCI) in which each caption length is limited. We show that modern techniques that make progress on standard benchmarks do not correspond with significant improvement on our sDCI based benchmark. Lastly, we finetune CLIP using sDCI and show significant improvements over the baseline despite a small training set. By releasing the first human annotated dense image captioning dataset, we hope to enable the development of new benchmarks or fine-tuning recipes for the next generation of VLMs to come.

Recent development in vision-language approaches has instigated a paradigm shift in learning visual recognition models from language supervision. These approaches align objects with language queries (e.g. "a photo of a cat") and improve the models' adaptability to identify novel objects and domains. Recently, several studies have attempted to query these models with complex language expressions that include specifications of fine-grained semantic details, such as attributes, shapes, textures, and relations. However, simply incorporating language descriptions as queries does not guarantee accurate interpretation by the models. In fact, our experiments show that GLIP, the state-of-the-art vision-language model for object detection, often disregards contextual information in the language descriptions and instead relies heavily on detecting objects solely by their names. To tackle the challenges, we propose a new description-conditioned (DesCo) paradigm of learning object recognition models with rich language descriptions consisting of two major innovations: 1) we employ a large language model as a commonsense knowledge engine to generate rich language descriptions of objects based on object names and the raw image-text caption; 2) we design context-sensitive queries to improve the model's ability in deciphering intricate nuances embedded within descriptions and enforce the model to focus on context rather than object names alone. On two novel object detection benchmarks, LVIS and OminiLabel, under the zero-shot detection setting, our approach achieves 34.8 APr minival (+9.1) and 29.3 AP (+3.6), respectively, surpassing the prior state-of-the-art models, GLIP and FIBER, by a large margin.

Evaluating whether vision-language models (VLMs) reason consistently across representations is challenging because modality comparisons are typically confounded by task differences and asymmetric information. We introduce SEAM, a benchmark that pairs semantically equivalent inputs across four domains that have existing standardized textual and visual notations. By employing distinct notation systems across modalities, in contrast to OCR-based image-text pairing, SEAM provides a rigorous comparative assessment of the textual-symbolic and visual-spatial reasoning capabilities of VLMs. Across 21 contemporary models, we observe systematic modality imbalance: vision frequently lags language in overall performance, despite the problems containing semantically equivalent information, and cross-modal agreement is relatively low. Our error analysis reveals two main drivers: textual perception failures from tokenization in domain notation and visual perception failures that induce hallucinations. We also show that our results are largely robust to visual transformations. SEAM establishes a controlled, semantically equivalent setting for measuring and improving modality-agnostic reasoning.

Groundbreaking language-vision architectures like CLIP and DALL-E proved the utility of training on large amounts of noisy image-text data, without relying on expensive accurate labels used in standard vision unimodal supervised learning. The resulting models showed capabilities of strong text-guided image generation and transfer to downstream tasks, while performing remarkably at zero-shot classification with noteworthy out-of-distribution robustness. Since then, large-scale language-vision models like ALIGN, BASIC, GLIDE, Flamingo and Imagen made further improvements. Studying the training and capabilities of such models requires datasets containing billions of image-text pairs. Until now, no datasets of this size have been made openly available for the broader research community. To address this problem and democratize research on large-scale multi-modal models, we present LAION-5B - a dataset consisting of 5.85 billion CLIP-filtered image-text pairs, of which 2.32B contain English language. We show successful replication and fine-tuning of foundational models like CLIP, GLIDE and Stable Diffusion using the dataset, and discuss further experiments enabled with an openly available dataset of this scale. Additionally we provide several nearest neighbor indices, an improved web-interface for dataset exploration and subset generation, and detection scores for watermark, NSFW, and toxic content detection. Announcement page https://laion.ai/laion-5b-a-new-era-of-open-large-scale-multi-modal-datasets/

Existing image-text modality alignment in Vision Language Models (VLMs) treats each text token equally in an autoregressive manner. Despite being simple and effective, this method results in sub-optimal cross-modal alignment by over-emphasizing the text tokens that are less correlated with or even contradictory with the input images. In this paper, we advocate for assigning distinct contributions for each text token based on its visual correlation. Specifically, we present by contrasting image inputs, the difference in prediction logits on each text token provides strong guidance of visual correlation. We therefore introduce Contrastive ALignment (CAL), a simple yet effective re-weighting strategy that prioritizes training visually correlated tokens. Our experimental results demonstrate that CAL consistently improves different types of VLMs across different resolutions and model sizes on various benchmark datasets. Importantly, our method incurs minimal additional computational overhead, rendering it highly efficient compared to alternative data scaling strategies. Codes are available at https://github.com/foundation-multimodal-models/CAL.

Large datasets of paired images and text have become increasingly popular for learning generic representations for vision and vision-and-language tasks. Such datasets have been built by querying search engines or collecting HTML alt-text -- since web data is noisy, they require complex filtering pipelines to maintain quality. We explore alternate data sources to collect high quality data with minimal filtering. We introduce RedCaps -- a large-scale dataset of 12M image-text pairs collected from Reddit. Images and captions from Reddit depict and describe a wide variety of objects and scenes. We collect data from a manually curated set of subreddits, which give coarse image labels and allow us to steer the dataset composition without labeling individual instances. We show that captioning models trained on RedCaps produce rich and varied captions preferred by humans, and learn visual representations that transfer to many downstream tasks.

Language provides a natural interface to specify and evaluate performance on visual tasks. To realize this possibility, vision language models (VLMs) must successfully integrate visual and linguistic information. Our work compares VLMs to a direct readout of their visual encoders to understand their ability to integrate across these modalities. Across a series of vision-centric benchmarks (e.g., depth estimation, correspondence), we find that VLMs perform substantially worse than their visual encoders, dropping to near-chance performance. We investigate these results through a series of analyses across the entire VLM: namely 1) the degradation of vision representations, 2) brittleness to task prompt, and 3) the language model's role in solving the task. We find that the bottleneck in performing these vision-centric tasks lies in this third category; VLMs are not effectively using visual information easily accessible throughout the entire model, and they inherit the language priors present in the LLM. Our work helps diagnose the failure modes of open-source VLMs, and presents a series of evaluations useful for future investigations into visual understanding within VLMs.

We present ImageBind, an approach to learn a joint embedding across six different modalities - images, text, audio, depth, thermal, and IMU data. We show that all combinations of paired data are not necessary to train such a joint embedding, and only image-paired data is sufficient to bind the modalities together. ImageBind can leverage recent large scale vision-language models, and extends their zero-shot capabilities to new modalities just by using their natural pairing with images. It enables novel emergent applications 'out-of-the-box' including cross-modal retrieval, composing modalities with arithmetic, cross-modal detection and generation. The emergent capabilities improve with the strength of the image encoder and we set a new state-of-the-art on emergent zero-shot recognition tasks across modalities, outperforming specialist supervised models. Finally, we show strong few-shot recognition results outperforming prior work, and that ImageBind serves as a new way to evaluate vision models for visual and non-visual tasks.

Is vision good enough for language? Recent advancements in multimodal models primarily stem from the powerful reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, the visual component typically depends only on the instance-level contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP). Our research reveals that the visual capabilities in recent multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) still exhibit systematic shortcomings. To understand the roots of these errors, we explore the gap between the visual embedding space of CLIP and vision-only self-supervised learning. We identify ''CLIP-blind pairs'' - images that CLIP perceives as similar despite their clear visual differences. With these pairs, we construct the Multimodal Visual Patterns (MMVP) benchmark. MMVP exposes areas where state-of-the-art systems, including GPT-4V, struggle with straightforward questions across nine basic visual patterns, often providing incorrect answers and hallucinated explanations. We further evaluate various CLIP-based vision-and-language models and found a notable correlation between visual patterns that challenge CLIP models and those problematic for multimodal LLMs. As an initial effort to address these issues, we propose a Mixture of Features (MoF) approach, demonstrating that integrating vision self-supervised learning features with MLLMs can significantly enhance their visual grounding capabilities. Together, our research suggests visual representation learning remains an open challenge, and accurate visual grounding is crucial for future successful multimodal systems.

Vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP have shown promising performance on a variety of recognition tasks using the standard zero-shot classification procedure -- computing similarity between the query image and the embedded words for each category. By only using the category name, they neglect to make use of the rich context of additional information that language affords. The procedure gives no intermediate understanding of why a category is chosen, and furthermore provides no mechanism for adjusting the criteria used towards this decision. We present an alternative framework for classification with VLMs, which we call classification by description. We ask VLMs to check for descriptive features rather than broad categories: to find a tiger, look for its stripes; its claws; and more. By basing decisions on these descriptors, we can provide additional cues that encourage using the features we want to be used. In the process, we can get a clear idea of what features the model uses to construct its decision; it gains some level of inherent explainability. We query large language models (e.g., GPT-3) for these descriptors to obtain them in a scalable way. Extensive experiments show our framework has numerous advantages past interpretability. We show improvements in accuracy on ImageNet across distribution shifts; demonstrate the ability to adapt VLMs to recognize concepts unseen during training; and illustrate how descriptors can be edited to effectively mitigate bias compared to the baseline.

Product retrieval is of great importance in the ecommerce domain. This paper introduces our 1st-place solution in eBay eProduct Visual Search Challenge (FGVC9), which is featured for an ensemble of about 20 models from vision models and vision-language models. While model ensemble is common, we show that combining the vision models and vision-language models brings particular benefits from their complementarity and is a key factor to our superiority. Specifically, for the vision models, we use a two-stage training pipeline which first learns from the coarse labels provided in the training set and then conducts fine-grained self-supervised training, yielding a coarse-to-fine metric learning manner. For the vision-language models, we use the textual description of the training image as the supervision signals for fine-tuning the image-encoder (feature extractor). With these designs, our solution achieves 0.7623 MAR@10, ranking the first place among all the competitors. The code is available at: https://github.com/WangWenhao0716/V2L{V^2L}.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable capabilities in comprehending complex visual content. However, the mechanisms underlying how VLMs process visual information remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we conduct a thorough empirical analysis, focusing on attention modules across layers. We reveal several key insights about how these models process visual data: (i) the internal representation of the query tokens (e.g., representations of "describe the image"), is utilized by VLMs to store global image information; we demonstrate that these models generate surprisingly descriptive responses solely from these tokens, without direct access to image tokens. (ii) Cross-modal information flow is predominantly influenced by the middle layers (approximately 25% of all layers), while early and late layers contribute only marginally.(iii) Fine-grained visual attributes and object details are directly extracted from image tokens in a spatially localized manner, i.e., the generated tokens associated with a specific object or attribute attend strongly to their corresponding regions in the image. We propose novel quantitative evaluation to validate our observations, leveraging real-world complex visual scenes. Finally, we demonstrate the potential of our findings in facilitating efficient visual processing in state-of-the-art VLMs.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are expected to be capable of reasoning with commonsense knowledge as human beings. One example is that humans can reason where and when an image is taken based on their knowledge. This makes us wonder if, based on visual cues, Vision-Language Models that are pre-trained with large-scale image-text resources can achieve and even outperform human's capability in reasoning times and location. To address this question, we propose a two-stage \recognition\space and \reasoning\space probing task, applied to discriminative and generative VLMs to uncover whether VLMs can recognize times and location-relevant features and further reason about it. To facilitate the investigation, we introduce WikiTiLo, a well-curated image dataset compromising images with rich socio-cultural cues. In the extensive experimental studies, we find that although VLMs can effectively retain relevant features in visual encoders, they still fail to make perfect reasoning. We will release our dataset and codes to facilitate future studies.

This paper presents Tag2Text, a vision language pre-training (VLP) framework, which introduces image tagging into vision-language models to guide the learning of visual-linguistic features. In contrast to prior works which utilize object tags either manually labeled or automatically detected with a limited detector, our approach utilizes tags parsed from its paired text to learn an image tagger and meanwhile provides guidance to vision-language models. Given that, Tag2Text can utilize large-scale annotation-free image tags in accordance with image-text pairs, and provides more diverse tag categories beyond objects. As a result, Tag2Text achieves a superior image tag recognition ability by exploiting fine-grained text information. Moreover, by leveraging tagging guidance, Tag2Text effectively enhances the performance of vision-language models on both generation-based and alignment-based tasks. Across a wide range of downstream benchmarks, Tag2Text achieves state-of-the-art or competitive results with similar model sizes and data scales, demonstrating the efficacy of the proposed tagging guidance.

We present ViLBERT (short for Vision-and-Language BERT), a model for learning task-agnostic joint representations of image content and natural language. We extend the popular BERT architecture to a multi-modal two-stream model, pro-cessing both visual and textual inputs in separate streams that interact through co-attentional transformer layers. We pretrain our model through two proxy tasks on the large, automatically collected Conceptual Captions dataset and then transfer it to multiple established vision-and-language tasks -- visual question answering, visual commonsense reasoning, referring expressions, and caption-based image retrieval -- by making only minor additions to the base architecture. We observe significant improvements across tasks compared to existing task-specific models -- achieving state-of-the-art on all four tasks. Our work represents a shift away from learning groundings between vision and language only as part of task training and towards treating visual grounding as a pretrainable and transferable capability.

Humans view the world through many sensory channels, e.g., the long-wavelength light channel, viewed by the left eye, or the high-frequency vibrations channel, heard by the right ear. Each view is noisy and incomplete, but important factors, such as physics, geometry, and semantics, tend to be shared between all views (e.g., a "dog" can be seen, heard, and felt). We investigate the classic hypothesis that a powerful representation is one that models view-invariant factors. We study this hypothesis under the framework of multiview contrastive learning, where we learn a representation that aims to maximize mutual information between different views of the same scene but is otherwise compact. Our approach scales to any number of views, and is view-agnostic. We analyze key properties of the approach that make it work, finding that the contrastive loss outperforms a popular alternative based on cross-view prediction, and that the more views we learn from, the better the resulting representation captures underlying scene semantics. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on image and video unsupervised learning benchmarks. Code is released at: http://github.com/HobbitLong/CMC/.

The ability to integrate context, including perceptual and temporal cues, plays a pivotal role in grounding the meaning of a linguistic utterance. In order to measure to what extent current vision-and-language models master this ability, we devise a new multimodal challenge, Image Retrieval from Contextual Descriptions (ImageCoDe). In particular, models are tasked with retrieving the correct image from a set of 10 minimally contrastive candidates based on a contextual description. As such, each description contains only the details that help distinguish between images. Because of this, descriptions tend to be complex in terms of syntax and discourse and require drawing pragmatic inferences. Images are sourced from both static pictures and video frames. We benchmark several state-of-the-art models, including both cross-encoders such as ViLBERT and bi-encoders such as CLIP, on ImageCoDe. Our results reveal that these models dramatically lag behind human performance: the best variant achieves an accuracy of 20.9 on video frames and 59.4 on static pictures, compared with 90.8 in humans. Furthermore, we experiment with new model variants that are better equipped to incorporate visual and temporal context into their representations, which achieve modest gains. Our hope is that ImageCoDE will foster progress in grounded language understanding by encouraging models to focus on fine-grained visual differences.

Vision-language models (VLMs) pre-trained on natural image and language data, such as CLIP, have exhibited significant potential in few-shot image recognition tasks, leading to development of various efficient transfer learning methods. These methods exploit inherent pre-learned knowledge in VLMs and have achieved strong performance on standard image datasets. However, their effectiveness is often limited when confronted with cross-domain tasks where imaging domains differ from natural images. To address this limitation, we propose Consistency-guided Multi-view Collaborative Optimization (CoMuCo), a novel fine-tuning strategy for VLMs. This strategy employs two functionally complementary expert modules to extract multi-view features, while incorporating prior knowledge-based consistency constraints and information geometry-based consensus mechanisms to enhance the robustness of feature learning. Additionally, a new cross-domain few-shot benchmark is established to help comprehensively evaluate methods on imaging domains distinct from natural images. Extensive empirical evaluations on both existing and newly proposed benchmarks suggest CoMuCo consistently outperforms current methods in few-shot tasks. The code and benchmark will be released.

With the proliferation of images in online content, language-guided image retrieval (LGIR) has emerged as a research hotspot over the past decade, encompassing a variety of subtasks with diverse input forms. While the development of large multimodal models (LMMs) has significantly facilitated these tasks, existing approaches often address them in isolation, requiring the construction of separate systems for each task. This not only increases system complexity and maintenance costs, but also exacerbates challenges stemming from language ambiguity and complex image content, making it difficult for retrieval systems to provide accurate and reliable results. To this end, we propose ImageScope, a training-free, three-stage framework that leverages collective reasoning to unify LGIR tasks. The key insight behind the unification lies in the compositional nature of language, which transforms diverse LGIR tasks into a generalized text-to-image retrieval process, along with the reasoning of LMMs serving as a universal verification to refine the results. To be specific, in the first stage, we improve the robustness of the framework by synthesizing search intents across varying levels of semantic granularity using chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. In the second and third stages, we then reflect on retrieval results by verifying predicate propositions locally, and performing pairwise evaluations globally. Experiments conducted on six LGIR datasets demonstrate that ImageScope outperforms competitive baselines. Comprehensive evaluations and ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of our design.

We present a novel methodology aimed at optimizing the application of frozen large language models (LLMs) for resource-intensive vision-language (VL) pre-training. The current paradigm uses visual features as prompts to guide language models, with a focus on determining the most relevant visual features for corresponding text. Our approach diverges by concentrating on the language component, specifically identifying the optimal prompts to align with visual features. We introduce the Prompt-Transformer (P-Former), a model that predicts these ideal prompts, which is trained exclusively on linguistic data, bypassing the need for image-text pairings. This strategy subtly bifurcates the end-to-end VL training process into an additional, separate stage. Our experiments reveal that our framework significantly enhances the performance of a robust image-to-text baseline (BLIP-2), and effectively narrows the performance gap between models trained with either 4M or 129M image-text pairs. Importantly, our framework is modality-agnostic and flexible in terms of architectural design, as validated by its successful application in a video learning task using varied base modules. The code is available at https://github.com/yiren-jian/BLIText

Visual preference alignment involves training Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to predict human preferences between visual inputs. This is typically achieved by using labeled datasets of chosen/rejected pairs and employing optimization algorithms like direct preference optimization (DPO). Existing visual alignment methods, primarily designed for single-image scenarios, struggle to effectively handle the complexity of multi-image tasks due to the scarcity of diverse training data and the high cost of annotating chosen/rejected pairs. We present Multi-Image Augmented Direct Preference Optimization (MIA-DPO), a visual preference alignment approach that effectively handles multi-image inputs. MIA-DPO mitigates the scarcity of diverse multi-image training data by extending single-image data with unrelated images arranged in grid collages or pic-in-pic formats, significantly reducing the costs associated with multi-image data annotations. Our observation reveals that attention values of LVLMs vary considerably across different images. We use attention values to identify and filter out rejected responses the model may have mistakenly focused on. Our attention-aware selection for constructing the chosen/rejected pairs without relying on (i) human annotation, (ii) extra data, and (iii) external models or APIs. MIA-DPO is compatible with various architectures and outperforms existing methods on five multi-image benchmarks, achieving an average performance boost of 3.0% on LLaVA-v1.5 and 4.3% on the recent InternLM-XC2.5. Moreover, MIA-DPO has a minimal effect on the model's ability to understand single images.

Contrastively-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have become the standard approach for learning discriminative vision-language representations. However, these models often exhibit shallow language understanding, manifesting bag-of-words behaviour. These limitations are reinforced by their dual-encoder design, which induces a modality gap. Additionally, the reliance on vast web-collected data corpora for training makes the process computationally expensive and introduces significant privacy concerns. To address these limitations, in this work, we challenge the necessity of vision encoders for retrieval tasks by introducing a vision-free, single-encoder retrieval pipeline. Departing from the traditional text-to-image retrieval paradigm, we migrate to a text-to-text paradigm with the assistance of VLLM-generated structured image descriptions. We demonstrate that this paradigm shift has significant advantages, including a substantial reduction of the modality gap, improved compositionality, and better performance on short and long caption queries, all attainable with only a few hours of calibration on two GPUs. Additionally, substituting raw images with textual descriptions introduces a more privacy-friendly alternative for retrieval. To further assess generalisation and address some of the shortcomings of prior compositionality benchmarks, we release two benchmarks derived from Flickr30k and COCO, containing diverse compositional queries made of short captions, which we coin subFlickr and subCOCO. Our vision-free retriever matches and often surpasses traditional multimodal models. Importantly, our approach achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on multiple retrieval and compositionality benchmarks, with models as small as 0.3B parameters. Code is available at: https://github.com/IoannaNti/LexiCLIP

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.

Recent vision-language models outperform vision-only models on many image classification tasks. However, because of the absence of paired text/image descriptions, it remains difficult to fine-tune these models for fine-grained image classification. In this work, we propose a method, GIST, for generating image-specific fine-grained text descriptions from image-only datasets, and show that these text descriptions can be used to improve classification. Key parts of our method include 1. prompting a pretrained large language model with domain-specific prompts to generate diverse fine-grained text descriptions for each class and 2. using a pretrained vision-language model to match each image to label-preserving text descriptions that capture relevant visual features in the image. We demonstrate the utility of GIST by fine-tuning vision-language models on the image-and-generated-text pairs to learn an aligned vision-language representation space for improved classification. We evaluate our learned representation space in full-shot and few-shot scenarios across four diverse fine-grained classification datasets, each from a different domain. Our method achieves an average improvement of 4.1% in accuracy over CLIP linear probes and an average of 1.1% improvement in accuracy over the previous state-of-the-art image-text classification method on the full-shot datasets. Our method achieves similar improvements across few-shot regimes. Code is available at https://github.com/emu1729/GIST.

Large-scale vision and language representation learning has shown promising improvements on various vision-language tasks. Most existing methods employ a transformer-based multimodal encoder to jointly model visual tokens (region-based image features) and word tokens. Because the visual tokens and word tokens are unaligned, it is challenging for the multimodal encoder to learn image-text interactions. In this paper, we introduce a contrastive loss to ALign the image and text representations BEfore Fusing (ALBEF) them through cross-modal attention, which enables more grounded vision and language representation learning. Unlike most existing methods, our method does not require bounding box annotations nor high-resolution images. In order to improve learning from noisy web data, we propose momentum distillation, a self-training method which learns from pseudo-targets produced by a momentum model. We provide a theoretical analysis of ALBEF from a mutual information maximization perspective, showing that different training tasks can be interpreted as different ways to generate views for an image-text pair. ALBEF achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple downstream vision-language tasks. On image-text retrieval, ALBEF outperforms methods that are pre-trained on orders of magnitude larger datasets. On VQA and NLVR^2, ALBEF achieves absolute improvements of 2.37% and 3.84% compared to the state-of-the-art, while enjoying faster inference speed. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/salesforce/ALBEF/.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in integrating visual and linguistic information, but their performance is often constrained by the need for extensive, high-quality image-text training data. Curation of these image-text pairs is both time-consuming and computationally expensive. To address this challenge, we introduce SVP (Sampling-based Visual Projection), a novel framework that enhances vision-language alignment without relying on manually curated text-image pairs or preference annotation. SVP leverages a small set of manually selected images, self-captioning and a pre-trained grounding model as a feedback mechanism to elicit latent information in VLMs. We evaluate our approach across six key areas: captioning, referring, visual question answering, multitasking, hallucination control, and object recall. Results demonstrate significant improvements, including a 14 % average improvement in captioning tasks, up to 12 % increase in object recall, and significantly reduced hallucinations, while maintaining question-answering capabilities. Using SVP, a small VLM achieves hallucination reductions similar to a model five times larger, while a VLM with initially poor referring capabilities more than doubles its performance, approaching parity with a model twice its size.

We propose a visual-linguistic representation learning approach within a self-supervised learning framework by introducing a new operation, loss, and data augmentation strategy. First, we generate diverse features for the image-text matching (ITM) task via soft-masking the regions in an image, which are most relevant to a certain word in the corresponding caption, instead of completely removing them. Since our framework relies only on image-caption pairs with no fine-grained annotations, we identify the relevant regions to each word by computing the word-conditional visual attention using multi-modal encoder. Second, we encourage the model to focus more on hard but diverse examples by proposing a focal loss for the image-text contrastive learning (ITC) objective, which alleviates the inherent limitations of overfitting and bias issues. Last, we perform multi-modal data augmentations for self-supervised learning via mining various examples by masking texts and rendering distortions on images. We show that the combination of these three innovations is effective for learning a pretrained model, leading to outstanding performance on multiple vision-language downstream tasks.

This paper presents ViewFormer, a simple yet effective model for multi-view 3d shape recognition and retrieval. We systematically investigate the existing methods for aggregating multi-view information and propose a novel ``view set" perspective, which minimizes the relation assumption about the views and releases the representation flexibility. We devise an adaptive attention model to capture pairwise and higher-order correlations of the elements in the view set. The learned multi-view correlations are aggregated into an expressive view set descriptor for recognition and retrieval. Experiments show the proposed method unleashes surprising capabilities across different tasks and datasets. For instance, with only 2 attention blocks and 4.8M learnable parameters, ViewFormer reaches 98.8% recognition accuracy on ModelNet40 for the first time, exceeding previous best method by 1.1% . On the challenging RGBD dataset, our method achieves 98.4% recognition accuracy, which is a 4.1% absolute improvement over the strongest baseline. ViewFormer also sets new records in several evaluation dimensions of 3D shape retrieval defined on the SHREC'17 benchmark.

The proliferation of multimodal Large Language Models has significantly advanced the ability to analyze and understand complex data inputs from different modalities. However, the processing of long documents remains under-explored, largely due to a lack of suitable benchmarks. To address this, we introduce Document Haystack, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the performance of Vision Language Models (VLMs) on long, visually complex documents. Document Haystack features documents ranging from 5 to 200 pages and strategically inserts pure text or multimodal text+image "needles" at various depths within the documents to challenge VLMs' retrieval capabilities. Comprising 400 document variants and a total of 8,250 questions, it is supported by an objective, automated evaluation framework. We detail the construction and characteristics of the Document Haystack dataset, present results from prominent VLMs and discuss potential research avenues in this area.

The pre-trained vision and language (V\&L) models have substantially improved the performance of cross-modal image-text retrieval. In general, however, V\&L models have limited retrieval performance for small objects because of the rough alignment between words and the small objects in the image. In contrast, it is known that human cognition is object-centric, and we pay more attention to important objects, even if they are small. To bridge this gap between the human cognition and the V\&L model's capability, we propose a cross-modal image-text retrieval framework based on ``object-aware query perturbation.'' The proposed method generates a key feature subspace of the detected objects and perturbs the corresponding queries using this subspace to improve the object awareness in the image. In our proposed method, object-aware cross-modal image-text retrieval is possible while keeping the rich expressive power and retrieval performance of existing V\&L models without additional fine-tuning. Comprehensive experiments on four public datasets show that our method outperforms conventional algorithms.

Recent studies have shown that Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) tend to neglect image content and over-rely on language-model priors, resulting in errors in visually grounded tasks and hallucinations. We hypothesize that this issue arises because existing VLMs are not explicitly trained to generate texts that are accurately grounded in fine-grained image details. To enhance visual feedback during VLM training, we propose S-VCO (Symmetrical Visual Contrastive Optimization), a novel finetuning objective that steers the model toward capturing important visual details and aligning them with corresponding text tokens. To further facilitate this detailed alignment, we introduce MVC, a paired image-text dataset built by automatically filtering and augmenting visual counterfactual data to challenge the model with hard contrastive cases involving Minimal Visual Contrasts. Experiments show that our method consistently improves VLM performance across diverse benchmarks covering various abilities and domains, achieving up to a 22% reduction in hallucinations, and significant gains in vision-centric and general tasks. Notably, these improvements become increasingly pronounced in benchmarks with higher visual dependency. In short, S-VCO offers a significant enhancement of VLM's visually-dependent task performance while retaining or even improving the model's general abilities. We opensource our code at https://s-vco.github.io/

Image description datasets play a crucial role in the advancement of various applications such as image understanding, text-to-image generation, and text-image retrieval. Currently, image description datasets primarily originate from two sources. One source is the scraping of image-text pairs from the web. Despite their abundance, these descriptions are often of low quality and noisy. Another is through human labeling. Datasets such as COCO are generally very short and lack details. Although detailed image descriptions can be annotated by humans, the high annotation cost limits the feasibility. These limitations underscore the need for more efficient and scalable methods to generate accurate and detailed image descriptions. In this paper, we propose an innovative framework termed Image Textualization (IT), which automatically produces high-quality image descriptions by leveraging existing multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) and multiple vision expert models in a collaborative manner, which maximally convert the visual information into text. To address the current lack of benchmarks for detailed descriptions, we propose several benchmarks for comprehensive evaluation, which verifies the quality of image descriptions created by our framework. Furthermore, we show that LLaVA-7B, benefiting from training on IT-curated descriptions, acquire improved capability to generate richer image descriptions, substantially increasing the length and detail of their output with less hallucination.

We introduce a novel sequential modeling approach which enables learning a Large Vision Model (LVM) without making use of any linguistic data. To do this, we define a common format, "visual sentences", in which we can represent raw images and videos as well as annotated data sources such as semantic segmentations and depth reconstructions without needing any meta-knowledge beyond the pixels. Once this wide variety of visual data (comprising 420 billion tokens) is represented as sequences, the model can be trained to minimize a cross-entropy loss for next token prediction. By training across various scales of model architecture and data diversity, we provide empirical evidence that our models scale effectively. Many different vision tasks can be solved by designing suitable visual prompts at test time.

CLIP has shown impressive results in aligning images and texts at scale. However, its ability to capture detailed visual features remains limited because CLIP matches images and texts at a global level. To address this issue, we propose FLAIR, Fine-grained Language-informed Image Representations, an approach that utilizes long and detailed image descriptions to learn localized image embeddings. By sampling diverse sub-captions that describe fine-grained details about an image, we train our vision-language model to produce not only global embeddings but also text-specific image representations. Our model introduces text-conditioned attention pooling on top of local image tokens to produce fine-grained image representations that excel at retrieving detailed image content. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on both, existing multimodal retrieval benchmarks, as well as, our newly introduced fine-grained retrieval task which evaluates vision-language models' ability to retrieve partial image content. Furthermore, our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of FLAIR trained on 30M image-text pairs in capturing fine-grained visual information, including zero-shot semantic segmentation, outperforming models trained on billions of pairs. Code is available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/flair .

This paper presents PaLI-3, a smaller, faster, and stronger vision language model (VLM) that compares favorably to similar models that are 10x larger. As part of arriving at this strong performance, we compare Vision Transformer (ViT) models pretrained using classification objectives to contrastively (SigLIP) pretrained ones. We find that, while slightly underperforming on standard image classification benchmarks, SigLIP-based PaLI shows superior performance across various multimodal benchmarks, especially on localization and visually-situated text understanding. We scale the SigLIP image encoder up to 2 billion parameters, and achieves a new state-of-the-art on multilingual cross-modal retrieval. We hope that PaLI-3, at only 5B parameters, rekindles research on fundamental pieces of complex VLMs, and could fuel a new generation of scaled-up models.

The recent advance in vision-language models is largely attributed to the abundance of image-text data. We aim to replicate this success for video-language models, but there simply is not enough human-curated video-text data available. We thus resort to fine-tuning a video-language model from a strong image-language baseline with synthesized instructional data. The resulting video-language model is then used to auto-label millions of videos to generate high-quality captions. We show the adapted video-language model performs well on a wide range of video-language benchmarks. For instance, it surpasses the best prior result on open-ended NExT-QA by 2.8%. Besides, our model generates detailed descriptions for previously unseen videos, which provide better textual supervision than existing methods. Experiments show that a video-language dual-encoder model contrastively trained on these auto-generated captions is 3.8% better than the strongest baseline that also leverages vision-language models. Our best model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on MSR-VTT zero-shot text-to-video retrieval by 6%.

One of the key shortcomings in current text-to-image (T2I) models is their inability to consistently generate images which faithfully follow the spatial relationships specified in the text prompt. In this paper, we offer a comprehensive investigation of this limitation, while also developing datasets and methods that achieve state-of-the-art performance. First, we find that current vision-language datasets do not represent spatial relationships well enough; to alleviate this bottleneck, we create SPRIGHT, the first spatially-focused, large scale dataset, by re-captioning 6 million images from 4 widely used vision datasets. Through a 3-fold evaluation and analysis pipeline, we find that SPRIGHT largely improves upon existing datasets in capturing spatial relationships. To demonstrate its efficacy, we leverage only ~0.25% of SPRIGHT and achieve a 22% improvement in generating spatially accurate images while also improving the FID and CMMD scores. Secondly, we find that training on images containing a large number of objects results in substantial improvements in spatial consistency. Notably, we attain state-of-the-art on T2I-CompBench with a spatial score of 0.2133, by fine-tuning on <500 images. Finally, through a set of controlled experiments and ablations, we document multiple findings that we believe will enhance the understanding of factors that affect spatial consistency in text-to-image models. We publicly release our dataset and model to foster further research in this area.

Image captioning models tend to describe images in an object-centric way, emphasising visible objects. But image descriptions can also abstract away from objects and describe the type of scene depicted. In this paper, we explore the potential of a state-of-the-art Vision and Language model, VinVL, to caption images at the scene level using (1) a novel dataset which pairs images with both object-centric and scene descriptions. Through (2) an in-depth analysis of the effect of the fine-tuning, we show (3) that a small amount of curated data suffices to generate scene descriptions without losing the capability to identify object-level concepts in the scene; the model acquires a more holistic view of the image compared to when object-centric descriptions are generated. We discuss the parallels between these results and insights from computational and cognitive science research on scene perception.

Remote sensing image-text retrieval plays a crucial role in remote sensing interpretation, yet remains challenging under both closed-domain and open-domain scenarios due to semantic noise and domain shifts. To address these issues, we propose a visual prior-guided vision-language model, PriorCLIP, which leverages visual priors for unbiased representation learning and adaptive vision-language alignment. In the closed-domain setting, PriorCLIP introduces two Progressive Attention Encoder (PAE) structures: Spatial-PAE constructs a belief matrix with instruction embeddings to filter key features and mitigate semantic bias. At the same time, Temporal-PAE exploits cyclic activation across time steps to enhance text representation. For the open-domain setting, we design a two-stage prior representation learning strategy, consisting of large-scale pre-training on coarse-grained image-text pairs, followed by fine-tuning on fine-grained pairs using vision-instruction, which enables robust retrieval across long-tail concepts and vocabulary shifts. Furthermore, a cluster-based symmetric contrastive Attribution Loss is proposed to constrain inter-class relations and alleviate semantic confusion in the shared embedding space. Extensive experiments on RSICD and RSITMD benchmarks demonstrate that PriorCLIP achieves substantial improvements, outperforming existing methods by 4.9% and 4.0% in closed-domain retrieval, and by 7.3% and 9.4% in open-domain retrieval, respectively.

Vision and Language (VL) models have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot performance in a variety of tasks. However, some aspects of complex language understanding still remain a challenge. We introduce the collective notion of Structured Vision&Language Concepts (SVLC) which includes object attributes, relations, and states which are present in the text and visible in the image. Recent studies have shown that even the best VL models struggle with SVLC. A possible way of fixing this issue is by collecting dedicated datasets for teaching each SVLC type, yet this might be expensive and time-consuming. Instead, we propose a more elegant data-driven approach for enhancing VL models' understanding of SVLCs that makes more effective use of existing VL pre-training datasets and does not require any additional data. While automatic understanding of image structure still remains largely unsolved, language structure is much better modeled and understood, allowing for its effective utilization in teaching VL models. In this paper, we propose various techniques based on language structure understanding that can be used to manipulate the textual part of off-the-shelf paired VL datasets. VL models trained with the updated data exhibit a significant improvement of up to 15% in their SVLC understanding with only a mild degradation in their zero-shot capabilities both when training from scratch or fine-tuning a pre-trained model.

In recent times, we have seen a rapid development of large Vision-Language Models (VLMs). They have shown impressive results on academic benchmarks, primarily in widely spoken languages but lack performance on low-resource languages and varied cultural contexts. To address these limitations, we introduce Maya, an open-source Multilingual VLM. Our contributions are: 1) a multilingual image-text pretraining dataset in eight languages, based on the LLaVA pretraining dataset; and 2) a multilingual image-text model supporting these languages, enhancing cultural and linguistic comprehension in vision-language tasks. Code available at https://github.com/nahidalam/maya.

Text-to-Image Retrieval (T2IR) is a highly valuable task that aims to match a given textual query to images in a gallery. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on textual queries describing overall image semantics or foreground salient objects, possibly overlooking inconspicuous small objects, especially in complex environments. Such small object retrieval is crucial, as in real-world applications, the targets of interest are not always prominent in the image. Thus, we introduce SORCE (Small Object Retrieval in Complex Environments), a new subfield of T2IR, focusing on retrieving small objects in complex images with textual queries. We propose a new benchmark, SORCE-1K, consisting of images with complex environments and textual queries describing less conspicuous small objects with minimal contextual cues from other salient objects. Preliminary analysis on SORCE-1K finds that existing T2IR methods struggle to capture small objects and encode all the semantics into a single embedding, leading to poor retrieval performance on SORCE-1K. Therefore, we propose to represent each image with multiple distinctive embeddings. We leverage Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to extract multiple embeddings for each image instructed by a set of Regional Prompts (ReP). Experimental results show that our multi-embedding approach through MLLM and ReP significantly outperforms existing T2IR methods on SORCE-1K. Our experiments validate the effectiveness of SORCE-1K for benchmarking SORCE performances, highlighting the potential of multi-embedding representation and text-customized MLLM features for addressing this task.

Composed image retrieval (CIR) enables users to search images using a reference image combined with textual modifications. Recent advances in vision-language models have improved CIR, but dataset limitations remain a barrier. Existing datasets often rely on simplistic, ambiguous, or insufficient manual annotations, hindering fine-grained retrieval. We introduce good4cir, a structured pipeline leveraging vision-language models to generate high-quality synthetic annotations. Our method involves: (1) extracting fine-grained object descriptions from query images, (2) generating comparable descriptions for target images, and (3) synthesizing textual instructions capturing meaningful transformations between images. This reduces hallucination, enhances modification diversity, and ensures object-level consistency. Applying our method improves existing datasets and enables creating new datasets across diverse domains. Results demonstrate improved retrieval accuracy for CIR models trained on our pipeline-generated datasets. We release our dataset construction framework to support further research in CIR and multi-modal retrieval.

We introduce a method to train vision-language models for remote-sensing images without using any textual annotations. Our key insight is to use co-located internet imagery taken on the ground as an intermediary for connecting remote-sensing images and language. Specifically, we train an image encoder for remote sensing images to align with the image encoder of CLIP using a large amount of paired internet and satellite images. Our unsupervised approach enables the training of a first-of-its-kind large-scale vision language model (VLM) for remote sensing images at two different resolutions. We show that these VLMs enable zero-shot, open-vocabulary image classification, retrieval, segmentation and visual question answering for satellite images. On each of these tasks, our VLM trained without textual annotations outperforms existing VLMs trained with supervision, with gains of up to 20% for classification and 80% for segmentation.

We present SPHINX, a versatile multi-modal large language model (MLLM) with a joint mixing of model weights, tuning tasks, and visual embeddings. First, for stronger vision-language alignment, we unfreeze the large language model (LLM) during pre-training, and introduce a weight mix strategy between LLMs trained by real-world and synthetic data. By directly integrating the weights from two domains, the mixed LLM can efficiently incorporate diverse semantics with favorable robustness. Then, to enable multi-purpose capabilities, we mix a variety of tasks for joint visual instruction tuning, and design task-specific instructions to avoid inter-task conflict. In addition to the basic visual question answering, we include more challenging tasks such as region-level understanding, caption grounding, document layout detection, and human pose estimation, contributing to mutual enhancement over different scenarios. Additionally, we propose to extract comprehensive visual embeddings from various network architectures, pre-training paradigms, and information granularity, providing language models with more robust image representations. Based on our proposed joint mixing, SPHINX exhibits superior multi-modal understanding capabilities on a wide range of applications. On top of this, we further propose an efficient strategy aiming to better capture fine-grained appearances of high-resolution images. With a mixing of different scales and high-resolution sub-images, SPHINX attains exceptional visual parsing and reasoning performance on existing evaluation benchmarks. We hope our work may cast a light on the exploration of joint mixing in future MLLM research. Code is released at https://github.com/Alpha-VLLM/LLaMA2-Accessory.

We propose LENS, a modular approach for tackling computer vision problems by leveraging the power of large language models (LLMs). Our system uses a language model to reason over outputs from a set of independent and highly descriptive vision modules that provide exhaustive information about an image. We evaluate the approach on pure computer vision settings such as zero- and few-shot object recognition, as well as on vision and language problems. LENS can be applied to any off-the-shelf LLM and we find that the LLMs with LENS perform highly competitively with much bigger and much more sophisticated systems, without any multimodal training whatsoever. We open-source our code at https://github.com/ContextualAI/lens and provide an interactive demo.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) leverage aligned visual encoders to transform images into visual tokens, allowing them to be processed similarly to text by the backbone large language model (LLM). This unified input paradigm enables VLMs to excel in vision-language tasks such as visual question answering (VQA). To improve fine-grained visual reasoning, recent advancements in vision-language modeling introduce image cropping techniques that feed all encoded sub-images into the model. However, this approach significantly increases the number of visual tokens, leading to inefficiency and potential distractions for the LLM. To address the generalization challenges of image representation in VLMs, we propose a lightweight, universal framework that seamlessly integrates with existing VLMs to enhance their ability to process finegrained details. Our method leverages textual semantics to identify key visual areas, improving VQA performance without requiring any retraining of the VLM. Additionally, it incorporates textual signals into the visual encoding process, enhancing both efficiency and effectiveness. The proposed method, SEMCLIP, strengthens the visual understanding of a 7B VLM, LLaVA-1.5 by 3.3% on average across 7 benchmarks, and particularly by 5.3% on the challenging detailed understanding benchmark V*.

Modular vision-language models (Vision-LLMs) align pretrained image encoders with (pretrained) large language models (LLMs), representing a computationally much more efficient alternative to end-to-end training of large vision-language models from scratch, which is prohibitively expensive for most. Vision-LLMs instead post-hoc condition LLMs to `understand' the output of an image encoder. With the abundance of readily available high-quality English image-text data as well as monolingual English LLMs, the research focus has been on English-only Vision-LLMs. Multilingual vision-language models are still predominantly obtained via expensive end-to-end pretraining, resulting in comparatively smaller models, trained on limited multilingual image data supplemented with text-only multilingual corpora. In this work, we present mBLIP, the first multilingual Vision-LLM, which we obtain in a computationally efficient manner -- on consumer hardware using only a few million training examples -- by leveraging a pretrained multilingual LLM. To this end, we re-align an image encoder previously tuned to an English LLM to a new, multilingual LLM -- for this, we leverage multilingual data from a mix of vision-and-language tasks, which we obtain by machine-translating high-quality English data to 95 languages. On the IGLUE benchmark, mBLIP yields results competitive with state-of-the-art models. Moreover, in image captioning on XM3600, mBLIP (zero-shot) even outperforms PaLI-X (a model with 55B parameters). Compared to these very large multilingual vision-language models trained from scratch, we obtain mBLIP by training orders of magnitude fewer parameters on magnitudes less data. We release our model and code at https://github.com/gregor-ge/mBLIP.

Vision-language representation learning largely benefits from image-text alignment through contrastive losses (e.g., InfoNCE loss). The success of this alignment strategy is attributed to its capability in maximizing the mutual information (MI) between an image and its matched text. However, simply performing cross-modal alignment (CMA) ignores data potential within each modality, which may result in degraded representations. For instance, although CMA-based models are able to map image-text pairs close together in the embedding space, they fail to ensure that similar inputs from the same modality stay close by. This problem can get even worse when the pre-training data is noisy. In this paper, we propose triple contrastive learning (TCL) for vision-language pre-training by leveraging both cross-modal and intra-modal self-supervision. Besides CMA, TCL introduces an intra-modal contrastive objective to provide complementary benefits in representation learning. To take advantage of localized and structural information from image and text input, TCL further maximizes the average MI between local regions of image/text and their global summary. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first work that takes into account local structure information for multi-modality representation learning. Experimental evaluations show that our approach is competitive and achieves the new state of the art on various common down-stream vision-language tasks such as image-text retrieval and visual question answering.

The crux of learning vision-language models is to extract semantically aligned information from visual and linguistic data. Existing attempts usually face the problem of coarse alignment, e.g., the vision encoder struggles in localizing an attribute-specified object. In this work, we propose an embarrassingly simple approach to better align image and text features with no need of additional data formats other than image-text pairs. Concretely, given an image and its paired text, we manage to parse objects (e.g., cat) and attributes (e.g., black) from the description, which are highly likely to exist in the image. It is noteworthy that the parsing pipeline is fully automatic and thus enjoys good scalability. With these parsed semantics as supervision signals, we can complement the commonly used image-text contrastive loss with the multi-tag classification loss. Extensive experimental results on a broad suite of semantic segmentation datasets substantiate the average 3.65\% improvement of our framework over existing alternatives. Furthermore, the visualization results indicate that attribute supervision makes vision-language models accurately localize attribute-specified objects. Project page and code can be found at https://qinying-liu.github.io/Tag-Align.

Image-text retrieval has developed rapidly in recent years. However, it is still a challenge in remote sensing due to visual-semantic imbalance, which leads to incorrect matching of non-semantic visual and textual features. To solve this problem, we propose a novel Direction-Oriented Visual-semantic Embedding Model (DOVE) to mine the relationship between vision and language. Our highlight is to conduct visual and textual representations in latent space, directing them as close as possible to a redundancy-free regional visual representation. Concretely, a Regional-Oriented Attention Module (ROAM) adaptively adjusts the distance between the final visual and textual embeddings in the latent semantic space, oriented by regional visual features. Meanwhile, a lightweight Digging Text Genome Assistant (DTGA) is designed to expand the range of tractable textual representation and enhance global word-level semantic connections using less attention operations. Ultimately, we exploit a global visual-semantic constraint to reduce single visual dependency and serve as an external constraint for the final visual and textual representations. The effectiveness and superiority of our method are verified by extensive experiments including parameter evaluation, quantitative comparison, ablation studies and visual analysis, on two benchmark datasets, RSICD and RSITMD.

Vision Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in various downstream tasks, including Image/Video Generation, Visual Question Answering, Multimodal Chatbots, and Video Understanding. However, these models often struggle with basic image transformations. This paper investigates the image-level understanding of VLMs, specifically CLIP by OpenAI and SigLIP by Google. Our findings reveal that these models lack comprehension of multiple image-level augmentations. To facilitate this study, we created an augmented version of the Flickr8k dataset, pairing each image with a detailed description of the applied transformation. We further explore how this deficiency impacts downstream tasks, particularly in image editing, and evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art Image2Image models on simple transformations.

Enabling Visual Semantic Models to effectively handle multi-view description matching has been a longstanding challenge. Existing methods typically learn a set of embeddings to find the optimal match for each view's text and compute similarity. However, the visual and text embeddings learned through these approaches have limited information capacity and are prone to interference from locally similar negative samples. To address this issue, we argue that the information capacity of embeddings is crucial and propose Dense-to-Sparse Feature Distilled Visual Semantic Embedding (D2S-VSE), which enhances the information capacity of sparse text by leveraging dense text distillation. Specifically, D2S-VSE is a two-stage framework. In the pre-training stage, we align images with dense text to enhance the information capacity of visual semantic embeddings. In the fine-tuning stage, we optimize two tasks simultaneously, distilling dense text embeddings to sparse text embeddings while aligning images and sparse texts, enhancing the information capacity of sparse text embeddings. Our proposed D2S-VSE model is extensively evaluated on the large-scale MS-COCO and Flickr30K datasets, demonstrating its superiority over recent state-of-the-art methods.

Recent advances in large vision-language models have revolutionized the image classification paradigm. Despite showing impressive zero-shot capabilities, a pre-defined set of categories, a.k.a. the vocabulary, is assumed at test time for composing the textual prompts. However, such assumption can be impractical when the semantic context is unknown and evolving. We thus formalize a novel task, termed as Vocabulary-free Image Classification (VIC), where we aim to assign to an input image a class that resides in an unconstrained language-induced semantic space, without the prerequisite of a known vocabulary. VIC is a challenging task as the semantic space is extremely large, containing millions of concepts, with hard-to-discriminate fine-grained categories. In this work, we first empirically verify that representing this semantic space by means of an external vision-language database is the most effective way to obtain semantically relevant content for classifying the image. We then propose Category Search from External Databases (CaSED), a method that exploits a pre-trained vision-language model and an external vision-language database to address VIC in a training-free manner. CaSED first extracts a set of candidate categories from captions retrieved from the database based on their semantic similarity to the image, and then assigns to the image the best matching candidate category according to the same vision-language model. Experiments on benchmark datasets validate that CaSED outperforms other complex vision-language frameworks, while being efficient with much fewer parameters, paving the way for future research in this direction.

The exponential growth of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) has driven advancements in cross-modal reasoning but at significant computational costs. In this work, we focus on visual language models. We highlight the redundancy and inefficiency in current vision encoders, and seek to construct an adaptive compression method for multimodal data. In this work, we characterize a panoply of visual token selection and merging approaches through both benchmarking and qualitative analysis. In particular, we demonstrate that simple cluster-level token aggregation outperforms prior state-of-the-art works in token selection and merging, including merging at the vision encoder level and attention-based approaches. We underline the redundancy in current vision encoders, and shed light on several puzzling trends regarding principles of visual token selection through cross-modal attention visualizations. This work is a first effort towards more effective encoding and processing of high-dimensional data, and paves the way for more scalable and sustainable multimodal systems.

Search engines enable the retrieval of unknown information with texts. However, traditional methods fall short when it comes to understanding unfamiliar visual content, such as identifying an object that the model has never seen before. This challenge is particularly pronounced for large vision-language models (VLMs): if the model has not been exposed to the object depicted in an image, it struggles to generate reliable answers to the user's question regarding that image. Moreover, as new objects and events continuously emerge, frequently updating VLMs is impractical due to heavy computational burdens. To address this limitation, we propose Vision Search Assistant, a novel framework that facilitates collaboration between VLMs and web agents. This approach leverages VLMs' visual understanding capabilities and web agents' real-time information access to perform open-world Retrieval-Augmented Generation via the web. By integrating visual and textual representations through this collaboration, the model can provide informed responses even when the image is novel to the system. Extensive experiments conducted on both open-set and closed-set QA benchmarks demonstrate that the Vision Search Assistant significantly outperforms the other models and can be widely applied to existing VLMs.

Web-crawled image-text pairs are inherently noisy. Prior studies demonstrate that semantically aligning and enriching textual descriptions of these pairs can significantly enhance model training across various vision-language tasks, particularly text-to-image generation. However, large-scale investigations in this area remain predominantly closed-source. Our paper aims to bridge this community effort, leveraging the powerful and open-sourced LLaMA-3, a GPT-4 level LLM. Our recaptioning pipeline is simple: first, we fine-tune a LLaMA-3-8B powered LLaVA-1.5 and then employ it to recaption 1.3 billion images from the DataComp-1B dataset. Our empirical results confirm that this enhanced dataset, Recap-DataComp-1B, offers substantial benefits in training advanced vision-language models. For discriminative models like CLIP, we observe enhanced zero-shot performance in cross-modal retrieval tasks. For generative models like text-to-image Diffusion Transformers, the generated images exhibit a significant improvement in alignment with users' text instructions, especially in following complex queries. Our project page is https://www.haqtu.me/Recap-Datacomp-1B/

Aligning visual features with language embeddings is a key challenge in vision-language models (VLMs). The performance of such models hinges on having a good connector that maps visual features generated by a vision encoder to a shared embedding space with the LLM while preserving semantic similarity. Existing connectors, such as multilayer perceptrons (MLPs), often produce out-of-distribution or noisy inputs, leading to misalignment between the modalities. In this work, we propose a novel vision-text alignment method, AlignVLM, that maps visual features to a weighted average of LLM text embeddings. Our approach leverages the linguistic priors encoded by the LLM to ensure that visual features are mapped to regions of the space that the LLM can effectively interpret. AlignVLM is particularly effective for document understanding tasks, where scanned document images must be accurately mapped to their textual content. Our extensive experiments show that AlignVLM achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to prior alignment methods. We provide further analysis demonstrating improved vision-text feature alignment and robustness to noise.

Vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP have been cherished for their ability to perform zero-shot visual recognition on open-vocabulary concepts. This is achieved by selecting the object category whose textual representation bears the highest similarity with the query image. While successful in some domains, this method struggles with identifying fine-grained entities as well as generalizing to unseen concepts that are not captured by the training distribution. Recent works attempt to mitigate these challenges by integrating category descriptions at test time, albeit yielding modest improvements. We attribute these limited gains to a fundamental misalignment between image and description representations, which is rooted in the pretraining structure of CLIP. In this paper, we propose GRAIN, a new pretraining strategy aimed at aligning representations at both fine and coarse levels simultaneously. Our approach learns to jointly ground textual descriptions in image regions along with aligning overarching captions with global image representations. To drive this pre-training, we leverage frozen Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to derive large-scale synthetic annotations. We demonstrate the enhanced zero-shot performance of our model compared to current state-of-the art methods across 11 diverse image classification datasets. Additionally, we introduce Products-2023, a newly curated, manually labeled dataset featuring novel concepts, and showcase our model's ability to recognize these concepts by benchmarking on it. Significant improvements achieved by our model on other downstream tasks like retrieval further highlight the superior quality of representations learned by our approach. Code available at https://github.com/shaunak27/grain-clip .

We introduce a new dataset for joint reasoning about natural language and images, with a focus on semantic diversity, compositionality, and visual reasoning challenges. The data contains 107,292 examples of English sentences paired with web photographs. The task is to determine whether a natural language caption is true about a pair of photographs. We crowdsource the data using sets of visually rich images and a compare-and-contrast task to elicit linguistically diverse language. Qualitative analysis shows the data requires compositional joint reasoning, including about quantities, comparisons, and relations. Evaluation using state-of-the-art visual reasoning methods shows the data presents a strong challenge.

While existing image-text alignment models reach high quality binary assessments, they fall short of pinpointing the exact source of misalignment. In this paper, we present a method to provide detailed textual and visual explanation of detected misalignments between text-image pairs. We leverage large language models and visual grounding models to automatically construct a training set that holds plausible misaligned captions for a given image and corresponding textual explanations and visual indicators. We also publish a new human curated test set comprising ground-truth textual and visual misalignment annotations. Empirical results show that fine-tuning vision language models on our training set enables them to articulate misalignments and visually indicate them within images, outperforming strong baselines both on the binary alignment classification and the explanation generation tasks. Our method code and human curated test set are available at: https://mismatch-quest.github.io/

The advancement of 3D vision-language (3D VL) learning is hindered by several limitations in existing 3D VL datasets: they rarely necessitate reasoning beyond a close range of objects in single viewpoint, and annotations often link instructions to single objects, missing richer contextual alignments between multiple objects. This significantly curtails the development of models capable of deep, multi-view 3D scene understanding over distant objects. To address these challenges, we introduce MV-ScanQA, a novel 3D question answering dataset where 68% of questions explicitly require integrating information from multiple views (compared to less than 7% in existing datasets), thereby rigorously testing multi-view compositional reasoning. To facilitate the training of models for such demanding scenarios, we present TripAlign dataset, a large-scale and low-cost 2D-3D-language pre-training corpus containing 1M <2D view, set of 3D objects, text> triplets that explicitly aligns groups of contextually related objects with text, providing richer, view-grounded multi-object multimodal alignment signals than previous single-object annotations. We further develop LEGO, a baseline method for the multi-view reasoning challenge in MV-ScanQA, transferring knowledge from pre-trained 2D LVLMs to 3D domain with TripAlign. Empirically, LEGO pre-trained on TripAlign achieves state-of-the-art performance not only on the proposed MV-ScanQA, but also on existing benchmarks for 3D dense captioning and question answering. Datasets and code are available at https://matthewdm0816.github.io/tripalign-mvscanqa.

Large language models have demonstrated impressive universal capabilities across a wide range of open-ended tasks and have extended their utility to encompass multimodal conversations. However, existing methods encounter challenges in effectively handling both image and video understanding, particularly with limited visual tokens. In this work, we introduce Chat-UniVi, a unified vision-language model capable of comprehending and engaging in conversations involving images and videos through a unified visual representation. Specifically, we employ a set of dynamic visual tokens to uniformly represent images and videos. This representation framework empowers the model to efficiently utilize a limited number of visual tokens to simultaneously capture the spatial details necessary for images and the comprehensive temporal relationship required for videos. Moreover, we leverage a multi-scale representation, enabling the model to perceive both high-level semantic concepts and low-level visual details. Notably, Chat-UniVi is trained on a mixed dataset containing both images and videos, allowing direct application to tasks involving both mediums without requiring any modifications. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that Chat-UniVi, as a unified model, consistently outperforms even existing methods exclusively designed for either images or videos.

Vision-language tasks, such as VQA, SNLI-VE, and VCR are challenging because they require the model's reasoning ability to understand the semantics of the visual world and natural language. Supervised methods working for vision-language tasks have been well-studied. However, solving these tasks in a zero-shot setting is less explored. Since Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has shown remarkable zero-shot performance on image-text matching, previous works utilized its strong zero-shot ability by converting vision-language tasks into an image-text matching problem, and they mainly consider global-level matching (e.g., the whole image or sentence). However, we find visual and textual fine-grained information, e.g., keywords in the sentence and objects in the image, can be fairly informative for semantics understanding. Inspired by this, we propose a unified framework to take advantage of the fine-grained information for zero-shot vision-language learning, covering multiple tasks such as VQA, SNLI-VE, and VCR. Our experiments show that our framework outperforms former zero-shot methods on VQA and achieves substantial improvement on SNLI-VE and VCR. Furthermore, our ablation studies confirm the effectiveness and generalizability of our proposed method. Code will be available at https://github.com/ThreeSR/UniFine

Effective scaling and a flexible task interface enable large language models to excel at many tasks. We present PaLI (Pathways Language and Image model), a model that extends this approach to the joint modeling of language and vision. PaLI generates text based on visual and textual inputs, and with this interface performs many vision, language, and multimodal tasks, in many languages. To train PaLI, we make use of large pre-trained encoder-decoder language models and Vision Transformers (ViTs). This allows us to capitalize on their existing capabilities and leverage the substantial cost of training them. We find that joint scaling of the vision and language components is important. Since existing Transformers for language are much larger than their vision counterparts, we train a large, 4-billion parameter ViT (ViT-e) to quantify the benefits from even larger-capacity vision models. To train PaLI, we create a large multilingual mix of pretraining tasks, based on a new image-text training set containing 10B images and texts in over 100 languages. PaLI achieves state-of-the-art in multiple vision and language tasks (such as captioning, visual question-answering, scene-text understanding), while retaining a simple, modular, and scalable design.

Visual understanding is inherently contextual -- what we focus on in an image depends on the task at hand. For instance, given an image of a person holding a bouquet of flowers, we may focus on either the person such as their clothing, or the type of flowers, depending on the context of interest. Yet, most existing image encoding paradigms represent an image as a fixed, generic feature vector, overlooking the potential needs of prioritizing varying visual information for different downstream use cases. In this work, we introduce FocalLens, a conditional visual encoding method that produces different representations for the same image based on the context of interest, expressed flexibly through natural language. We leverage vision instruction tuning data and contrastively finetune a pretrained vision encoder to take natural language instructions as additional inputs for producing conditional image representations. Extensive experiments validate that conditional image representation from FocalLens better pronounce the visual features of interest compared to generic features produced by standard vision encoders like CLIP. In addition, we show FocalLens further leads to performance improvements on a range of downstream tasks including image-image retrieval, image classification, and image-text retrieval, with an average gain of 5 and 10 points on the challenging SugarCrepe and MMVP-VLM benchmarks, respectively.

Large-scale vision-language models (VLM) have shown impressive results for language-guided search applications. While these models allow category-level queries, they currently struggle with personalized searches for moments in a video where a specific object instance such as ``My dog Biscuit'' appears. We present the following three contributions to address this problem. First, we describe a method to meta-personalize a pre-trained VLM, i.e., learning how to learn to personalize a VLM at test time to search in video. Our method extends the VLM's token vocabulary by learning novel word embeddings specific to each instance. To capture only instance-specific features, we represent each instance embedding as a combination of shared and learned global category features. Second, we propose to learn such personalization without explicit human supervision. Our approach automatically identifies moments of named visual instances in video using transcripts and vision-language similarity in the VLM's embedding space. Finally, we introduce This-Is-My, a personal video instance retrieval benchmark. We evaluate our approach on This-Is-My and DeepFashion2 and show that we obtain a 15% relative improvement over the state of the art on the latter dataset.

The task of composed image retrieval (CIR) aims to retrieve images based on the query image and the text describing the users' intent. Existing methods have made great progress with the advanced large vision-language (VL) model in CIR task, however, they generally suffer from two main issues: lack of labeled triplets for model training and difficulty of deployment on resource-restricted environments when deploying the large vision-language model. To tackle the above problems, we propose Image2Sentence based Asymmetric zero-shot composed image retrieval (ISA), which takes advantage of the VL model and only relies on unlabeled images for composition learning. In the framework, we propose a new adaptive token learner that maps an image to a sentence in the word embedding space of VL model. The sentence adaptively captures discriminative visual information and is further integrated with the text modifier. An asymmetric structure is devised for flexible deployment, in which the lightweight model is adopted for the query side while the large VL model is deployed on the gallery side. The global contrastive distillation and the local alignment regularization are adopted for the alignment between the light model and the VL model for CIR task. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed ISA could better cope with the real retrieval scenarios and further improve retrieval accuracy and efficiency.

Multimodal representation learning has advanced rapidly with contrastive models such as CLIP, which align image-text pairs in a shared embedding space. However, these models face limitations: (1) they typically focus on image-text pairs, underutilizing the semantic relations across different pairs. (2) they directly match global embeddings without contextualization, overlooking the need for semantic alignment along specific subspaces or relational dimensions; and (3) they emphasize cross-modal contrast, with limited support for intra-modal consistency. To address these issues, we propose Relation-Conditioned Multimodal Learning RCML, a framework that learns multimodal representations under natural-language relation descriptions to guide both feature extraction and alignment. Our approach constructs many-to-many training pairs linked by semantic relations and introduces a relation-guided cross-attention mechanism that modulates multimodal representations under each relation context. The training objective combines inter-modal and intra-modal contrastive losses, encouraging consistency across both modalities and semantically related samples. Experiments on different datasets show that RCML consistently outperforms strong baselines on both retrieval and classification tasks, highlighting the effectiveness of leveraging semantic relations to guide multimodal representation learning.

We propose a method to fuse frozen text-only large language models (LLMs) with pre-trained image encoder and decoder models, by mapping between their embedding spaces. Our model demonstrates a wide suite of multimodal capabilities: image retrieval, novel image generation, and multimodal dialogue. Ours is the first approach capable of conditioning on arbitrarily interleaved image and text inputs to generate coherent image (and text) outputs. To achieve strong performance on image generation, we propose an efficient mapping network to ground the LLM to an off-the-shelf text-to-image generation model. This mapping network translates hidden representations of text into the embedding space of the visual models, enabling us to leverage the strong text representations of the LLM for visual outputs. Our approach outperforms baseline generation models on tasks with longer and more complex language. In addition to novel image generation, our model is also capable of image retrieval from a prespecified dataset, and decides whether to retrieve or generate at inference time. This is done with a learnt decision module which conditions on the hidden representations of the LLM. Our model exhibits a wider range of capabilities compared to prior multimodal language models. It can process image-and-text inputs, and produce retrieved images, generated images, and generated text -- outperforming non-LLM based generation models across several text-to-image tasks that measure context dependence.

Recently, the remarkable advance of the Large Language Model (LLM) has inspired researchers to transfer its extraordinary reasoning capability to both vision and language data. However, the prevailing approaches primarily regard the visual input as a prompt and focus exclusively on optimizing the text generation process conditioned upon vision content by a frozen LLM. Such an inequitable treatment of vision and language heavily constrains the model's potential. In this paper, we break through this limitation by representing both vision and language in a unified form. Specifically, we introduce a well-designed visual tokenizer to translate the non-linguistic image into a sequence of discrete tokens like a foreign language that LLM can read. The resulting visual tokens encompass high-level semantics worthy of a word and also support dynamic sequence length varying from the image. Coped with this tokenizer, the presented foundation model called LaVIT can handle both image and text indiscriminately under the same generative learning paradigm. This unification empowers LaVIT to serve as an impressive generalist interface to understand and generate multi-modal content simultaneously. Extensive experiments further showcase that it outperforms the existing models by a large margin on massive vision-language tasks. Our code and models will be available at https://github.com/jy0205/LaVIT.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made significant progress in vision-language understanding, yet effectively aligning different modalities remains a fundamental challenge. We present a framework that unifies multimodal understanding by applying byte-pair encoding to visual tokens. Unlike conventional approaches that rely on modality-specific encoders, our method directly incorporates structural information into visual tokens, mirroring successful tokenization strategies in text-only language models. We introduce a priority-guided encoding scheme that considers both frequency and spatial consistency, coupled with a multi-stage training procedure based on curriculum-driven data composition. These enhancements enable the transformer model to better capture cross-modal relationships and reason with visual information. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate improved performance across diverse vision-language tasks. By bridging the gap between visual and textual representations, our approach contributes to the advancement of more capable and efficient multimodal foundation models.

Human-scene vision-language tasks are increasingly prevalent in diverse social applications, yet recent advancements predominantly rely on models specifically tailored to individual tasks. Emerging research indicates that large vision-language models (VLMs) can enhance performance across various downstream vision-language understanding tasks. However, general-domain models often underperform in specialized fields. This study introduces a domain-specific Large Vision-Language Model, Human-Scene Vision-Language Model (HumanVLM), designed to provide a foundation for human-scene Vision-Language tasks. Specifically, (1) we create a large-scale human-scene multimodal image-text dataset (HumanCaption-10M) sourced from the Internet to facilitate domain-specific alignment; (2) develop a captioning approach for human-centered images, capturing human faces, bodies, and backgrounds, and construct a high-quality Human-Scene image-text dataset (HumanCaptionHQ, about 311k pairs) that contain as much detailed information as possible about human; (3) Using HumanCaption-10M and HumanCaptionHQ, we train a HumanVLM. In the experiments, we then evaluate our HumanVLM across varous downstream tasks, where it demonstrates superior overall performance among multimodal models of comparable scale, particularly excelling in human-related tasks and significantly outperforming similar models, including Qwen2VL and ChatGPT-4o. HumanVLM, alongside the data introduced, will stimulate the research in human-around fields.

Recently, Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in multi-modal context comprehension. However, they still suffer from hallucination problems referring to generating inconsistent outputs with the image content. To mitigate hallucinations, previous studies mainly focus on retraining LVLMs with custom datasets. Although effective, they inherently come with additional computational costs. In this paper, we propose a training-free framework, MVP, that aims to reduce hallucinations by making the most of the innate capabilities of the LVLMs via Multi-View Multi-Path Reasoning. Specifically, we first devise a multi-view information-seeking strategy to thoroughly perceive the comprehensive information in the image, which enriches the general global information captured by the original vision encoder in LVLMs. Furthermore, during the answer decoding, we observe that the occurrence of hallucinations has a strong correlation with the certainty of the answer tokens. Thus, we propose multi-path reasoning for each information view to quantify and aggregate the certainty scores for each potential answer among multiple decoding paths and finally decide the output answer. By fully grasping the information in the image and carefully considering the certainty of the potential answers when decoding, our MVP can effectively reduce hallucinations in LVLMs.The extensive experiments verify that our proposed MVP significantly mitigates the hallucination problem across four well-known LVLMs. The source code is available at: https://github.com/GasolSun36/MVP.

In this work, we investigate a more realistic unsupervised multimodal machine translation (UMMT) setup, inference-time image-free UMMT, where the model is trained with source-text image pairs, and tested with only source-text inputs. First, we represent the input images and texts with the visual and language scene graphs (SG), where such fine-grained vision-language features ensure a holistic understanding of the semantics. To enable pure-text input during inference, we devise a visual scene hallucination mechanism that dynamically generates pseudo visual SG from the given textual SG. Several SG-pivoting based learning objectives are introduced for unsupervised translation training. On the benchmark Multi30K data, our SG-based method outperforms the best-performing baseline by significant BLEU scores on the task and setup, helping yield translations with better completeness, relevance and fluency without relying on paired images. Further in-depth analyses reveal how our model advances in the task setting.

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), such as CLIP and ALIGN, are generally trained on datasets consisting of image-caption pairs obtained from the web. However, real-world multimodal datasets, such as healthcare data, are significantly more complex: each image (e.g. X-ray) is often paired with text (e.g. physician report) that describes many distinct attributes occurring in fine-grained regions of the image. We refer to these samples as exhibiting high pairwise complexity, since each image-text pair can be decomposed into a large number of region-attribute pairings. The extent to which VLMs can capture fine-grained relationships between image regions and textual attributes when trained on such data has not been previously evaluated. The first key contribution of this work is to demonstrate through systematic evaluations that as the pairwise complexity of the training dataset increases, standard VLMs struggle to learn region-attribute relationships, exhibiting performance degradations of up to 37% on retrieval tasks. In order to address this issue, we introduce ViLLA as our second key contribution. ViLLA, which is trained to capture fine-grained region-attribute relationships from complex datasets, involves two components: (a) a lightweight, self-supervised mapping model to decompose image-text samples into region-attribute pairs, and (b) a contrastive VLM to learn representations from generated region-attribute pairs. We demonstrate with experiments across four domains (synthetic, product, medical, and natural images) that ViLLA outperforms comparable VLMs on fine-grained reasoning tasks, such as zero-shot object detection (up to 3.6 AP50 points on COCO and 0.6 mAP points on LVIS) and retrieval (up to 14.2 R-Precision points).

Starting from the resurgence of deep learning, vision-language models (VLMs) benefiting from large language models (LLMs) have never been so popular. However, while LLMs can utilize extensive background knowledge and task information with in-context learning, most VLMs still struggle with understanding complex multi-modal prompts with multiple images. The issue can traced back to the architectural design of VLMs or pre-training data. Specifically, the current VLMs primarily emphasize utilizing multi-modal data with a single image some, rather than multi-modal prompts with interleaved multiple images and text. Even though some newly proposed VLMs could handle user prompts with multiple images, pre-training data does not provide more sophisticated multi-modal prompts than interleaved image and text crawled from the web. We propose MMICL to address the issue by considering both the model and data perspectives. We introduce a well-designed architecture capable of seamlessly integrating visual and textual context in an interleaved manner and MIC dataset to reduce the gap between the training data and the complex user prompts in real-world applications, including: 1) multi-modal context with interleaved images and text, 2) textual references for each image, and 3) multi-image data with spatial, logical, or temporal relationships. Our experiments confirm that MMICL achieves new stat-of-the-art zero-shot and few-shot performance on a wide range of general vision-language tasks, especially for complex reasoning benchmarks including MME and MMBench. Our analysis demonstrates that MMICL effectively deals with the challenge of complex multi-modal prompt understanding. The experiments on ScienceQA-IMG also show that MMICL successfully alleviates the issue of language bias in VLMs, which we believe is the reason behind the advanced performance of MMICL.

A big convergence of language, vision, and multimodal pretraining is emerging. In this work, we introduce a general-purpose multimodal foundation model BEiT-3, which achieves state-of-the-art transfer performance on both vision and vision-language tasks. Specifically, we advance the big convergence from three aspects: backbone architecture, pretraining task, and model scaling up. We introduce Multiway Transformers for general-purpose modeling, where the modular architecture enables both deep fusion and modality-specific encoding. Based on the shared backbone, we perform masked "language" modeling on images (Imglish), texts (English), and image-text pairs ("parallel sentences") in a unified manner. Experimental results show that BEiT-3 obtains state-of-the-art performance on object detection (COCO), semantic segmentation (ADE20K), image classification (ImageNet), visual reasoning (NLVR2), visual question answering (VQAv2), image captioning (COCO), and cross-modal retrieval (Flickr30K, COCO).

With Transformers achieving outstanding performance on individual remote sensing (RS) tasks, we are now approaching the realization of a unified model that excels across multiple tasks through multi-task learning (MTL). Compared to single-task approaches, MTL methods offer improved generalization, enhanced scalability, and greater practical applicability. Recently, vision language models (VLMs) have achieved promising results in RS image understanding, grounding, and ultra-high-resolution (UHR) image reasoning, respectively. Moreover, the unified text-based interface demonstrates significant potential for MTL. Hence, in this work, we present RSCoVLM, a simple yet flexible VLM baseline for RS MTL. Firstly, we create the data curation engine, including data acquisition, offline processing and integrating, as well as online loading and weighting. This data engine effectively addresses complex RS data enviroment and generates flexible vision-language conversations. Furthermore, we propose a unified dynamic-resolution strategy to address the diverse image scales inherent in RS imagery. For UHR images, we introduce the Zoom-in Chain mechanism together with its corresponding dataset, LRS-VQA-Zoom. The strategies are flexible and effectively mitigate the computational burdens. Additionally, we significantly enhance the model's object detection capability and propose a novel evaluation protocol that ensures fair comparison between VLMs and conventional detection models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RSCoVLM achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse tasks, outperforming existing RS VLMs and even rivaling specialized expert models. All the training and evaluating tools, model weights, and datasets have been fully open-sourced to support reproducibility. We expect that this baseline will promote further progress toward general-purpose RS models.

We present M3P, a Multitask Multilingual Multimodal Pre-trained model that combines multilingual pre-training and multimodal pre-training into a unified framework via multitask pre-training. Our goal is to learn universal representations that can map objects occurred in different modalities or texts expressed in different languages into a common semantic space. In addition, to explicitly encourage fine-grained alignment between images and non-English languages, we also propose Multimodal Code-switched Training (MCT) to combine monolingual pre-training and multimodal pre-training via a code-switch strategy. Experiments are performed on the multilingual image retrieval task across two benchmark datasets, including MSCOCO and Multi30K. M3P can achieve comparable results for English and new state-of-the-art results for non-English languages.

We present VIXEN - a technique that succinctly summarizes in text the visual differences between a pair of images in order to highlight any content manipulation present. Our proposed network linearly maps image features in a pairwise manner, constructing a soft prompt for a pretrained large language model. We address the challenge of low volume of training data and lack of manipulation variety in existing image difference captioning (IDC) datasets by training on synthetically manipulated images from the recent InstructPix2Pix dataset generated via prompt-to-prompt editing framework. We augment this dataset with change summaries produced via GPT-3. We show that VIXEN produces state-of-the-art, comprehensible difference captions for diverse image contents and edit types, offering a potential mitigation against misinformation disseminated via manipulated image content. Code and data are available at http://github.com/alexblck/vixen