CoCoT: Contrastive Chain-of-Thought Prompting for Large Multimodal Models with Multiple Image Inputs

When exploring the development of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a critical task for these models involves interpreting and processing information from multiple image inputs. However, Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) encounter two issues in such scenarios: (1) a lack of fine-grained perception, and (2) a tendency to blend information across multiple images. We first extensively investigate the capability of LMMs to perceive fine-grained visual details when dealing with multiple input images. The research focuses on two aspects: first, image-to-image matching (to evaluate whether LMMs can effectively reason and pair relevant images), and second, multi-image-to-text matching (to assess whether LMMs can accurately capture and summarize detailed image information). We conduct evaluations on a range of both open-source and closed-source large models, including GPT-4V, Gemini, OpenFlamingo, and MMICL. To enhance model performance, we further develop a Contrastive Chain-of-Thought (CoCoT) prompting approach based on multi-input multimodal models. This method requires LMMs to compare the similarities and differences among multiple image inputs, and then guide the models to answer detailed questions about multi-image inputs based on the identified similarities and differences. Our experimental results showcase CoCoT's proficiency in enhancing the multi-image comprehension capabilities of large multimodal models.

Aggregation of Disentanglement: Reconsidering Domain Variations in Domain Generalization

Domain Generalization (DG) is a fundamental challenge for machine learning models, which aims to improve model generalization on various domains. Previous methods focus on generating domain invariant features from various source domains. However, we argue that the domain variantions also contain useful information, ie, classification-aware information, for downstream tasks, which has been largely ignored. Different from learning domain invariant features from source domains, we decouple the input images into Domain Expert Features and noise. The proposed domain expert features lie in a learned latent space where the images in each domain can be classified independently, enabling the implicit use of classification-aware domain variations. Based on the analysis, we proposed a novel paradigm called Domain Disentanglement Network (DDN) to disentangle the domain expert features from the source domain images and aggregate the source domain expert features for representing the target test domain. We also propound a new contrastive learning method to guide the domain expert features to form a more balanced and separable feature space. Experiments on the widely-used benchmarks of PACS, VLCS, OfficeHome, DomainNet, and TerraIncognita demonstrate the competitive performance of our method compared to the recently proposed alternatives.