CoTBal: Comprehensive Task Balancing for Multi-Task Visual Instruction Tuning

Visual instruction tuning is a key training stage of large multimodal models (LMMs). Nevertheless, the common practice of indiscriminately mixing instruction-following data from various tasks may result in suboptimal overall performance due to different instruction formats and knowledge domains across tasks. To mitigate this issue, we propose a novel Comprehensive Task Balancing (CoTBal) algorithm for multi-task visual instruction tuning of LMMs. To our knowledge, this is the first work that explores multi-task optimization in visual instruction tuning. Specifically, we consider two key dimensions for task balancing: (1) Inter-Task Contribution, the phenomenon where learning one task potentially enhances the performance in other tasks, attributable to the overlapping knowledge domains, and (2) Intra-Task Difficulty, which refers to the learning difficulty within a single task. By quantifying these two dimensions with performance-based metrics, task balancing is thus enabled by assigning more weights to tasks that offer substantial contributions to others, receive minimal contributions from others, and also have great intra-task difficulties. Experiments show that our CoTBal leads to superior overall performance in multi-task visual instruction tuning.

Light Field Raindrop Removal via 4D Re-sampling

The Light Field Raindrop Removal (LFRR) aims to restore the background areas obscured by raindrops in the Light Field (LF). Compared with single image, the LF provides more abundant information by regularly and densely sampling the scene. Since raindrops have larger disparities than the background in the LF, the majority of texture details occluded by raindrops are visible in other views. In this paper, we propose a novel LFRR network by directly utilizing the complementary pixel information of raindrop-free areas in the input raindrop LF, which consists of the re-sampling module and the refinement module. Specifically, the re-sampling module generates a new LF which is less polluted by raindrops through re-sampling position predictions and the proposed 4D interpolation. The refinement module improves the restoration of the completely occluded background areas and corrects the pixel error caused by 4D interpolation. Furthermore, we carefully build the first real scene LFRR dataset for model training and validation. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively remove raindrops and achieves state-of-the-art performance in both background restoration and view consistency maintenance.