REVO-LION: Evaluating and Refining Vision-Language Instruction Tuning Datasets

There is an emerging line of research on multimodal instruction tuning, and a line of benchmarks have been proposed for evaluating these models recently. Instead of evaluating the models directly, in this paper we try to evaluate the Vision-Language Instruction-Tuning (VLIT) datasets themselves and further seek the way of building a dataset for developing an all-powerful VLIT model, which we believe could also be of utility for establishing a grounded protocol for benchmarking VLIT models. For effective analysis of VLIT datasets that remains an open question, we propose a tune-cross-evaluation paradigm: tuning on one dataset and evaluating on the others in turn. For each single tune-evaluation experiment set, we define the Meta Quality (MQ) as the mean score measured by a series of caption metrics including BLEU, METEOR, and ROUGE-L to quantify the quality of a certain dataset or a sample. On this basis, to evaluate the comprehensiveness of a dataset, we develop the Dataset Quality (DQ) covering all tune-evaluation sets. To lay the foundation for building a comprehensive dataset and developing an all-powerful model for practical applications, we further define the Sample Quality (SQ) to quantify the all-sided quality of each sample. Extensive experiments validate the rationality of the proposed evaluation paradigm. Based on the holistic evaluation, we build a new dataset, REVO-LION (REfining VisiOn-Language InstructiOn tuNing), by collecting samples with higher SQ from each dataset. With only half of the full data, the model trained on REVO-LION can achieve performance comparable to simply adding all VLIT datasets up. In addition to developing an all-powerful model, REVO-LION also includes an evaluation set, which is expected to serve as a convenient evaluation benchmark for future research.

StructChart: Perception, Structuring, Reasoning for Visual Chart Understanding

Charts are common in literature across different scientific fields, conveying rich information easily accessible to readers. Current chart-related tasks focus on either chart perception which refers to extracting information from the visual charts, or performing reasoning given the extracted data, e.g. in a tabular form. In this paper, we aim to establish a unified and label-efficient learning paradigm for joint perception and reasoning tasks, which can be generally applicable to different downstream tasks, beyond the question-answering task as specifically studied in peer works. Specifically, StructChart first reformulates the chart information from the popular tubular form (specifically linearized CSV) to the proposed Structured Triplet Representations (STR), which is more friendly for reducing the task gap between chart perception and reasoning due to the employed structured information extraction for charts. We then propose a Structuring Chart-oriented Representation Metric (SCRM) to quantitatively evaluate the performance for the chart perception task. To enrich the dataset for training, we further explore the possibility of leveraging the Large Language Model (LLM), enhancing the chart diversity in terms of both chart visual style and its statistical information. Extensive experiments are conducted on various chart-related tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness and promising potential for a unified chart perception-reasoning paradigm to push the frontier of chart understanding.

R-Tuning: Regularized Prompt Tuning in Open-Set Scenarios

In realistic open-set scenarios where labels of a part of testing data are totally unknown, current prompt methods on vision-language (VL) models always predict the unknown classes as the downstream training classes. The exhibited label bias causes difficulty in the open set recognition (OSR), by which an image should be correctly predicted as one of the known classes or the unknown one. To learn prompts in open-set scenarios, we propose the Regularized prompt Tuning (R-Tuning) to mitigate the label bias. It introduces open words from the WordNet to extend the range of words forming the prompt texts from only closed-set label words to more. Thus, prompts are tuned in a simulated open-set scenario. Besides, inspired by the observation that classifying directly on large datasets causes a much higher false positive rate than on small datasets, we propose the Combinatorial Tuning and Testing (CTT) strategy for improving performance. CTT decomposes R-Tuning on large datasets as multiple independent group-wise tuning on fewer classes, then makes comprehensive predictions by selecting the optimal sub-prompt. For fair comparisons, we construct new baselines for OSR based on VL models, especially for prompt methods. Our method achieves the best results on datasets with various scales. Extensive ablation studies validate the effectiveness of our method.

Rethinking Visual Prompt Learning as Masked Visual Token Modeling

Prompt learning has achieved great success in efficiently exploiting large-scale pre-trained models in natural language processing (NLP). It reformulates the downstream tasks as the generative pre-training ones, thus narrowing down the gap between them and improving the performance stably. However, when transferring it to the vision area, current visual prompt learning methods are all designed on discriminative pre-trained models, and there is also a lack of careful design to unify the forms of pre-training and downstream tasks. To explore prompt learning on the generative pre-trained visual model as well as keeping the task consistency, we propose Visual Prompt learning as masked visual Token Modeling (VPTM) to transform the downstream visual classification into the pre-trained masked visual token prediction. In addition, we develop the prototypical verbalizer for mapping the predicted visual token with implicit semantics to explicit downstream labels. To our best knowledge, VPTM is the first visual prompt method on the generative pre-trained visual model, and the first to achieve consistency between pre-training and downstream visual classification by task reformulation. Experiments show that VPTM outperforms other visual prompt methods and achieves excellent efficiency. Moreover, the task consistency of VPTM contributes to the robustness against prompt location, prompt length and prototype dimension, and could be deployed uniformly.