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Enhancing Visual-Language Modality Alignment in Large Vision Language Models via Self-Improvement

24 May 2024arXiv:2405.15973archive 2025-07-28

Xiyao Wang, Jiuhai Chen, Zhaoyang Wang, YuHang Zhou, Yiyang Zhou, Huaxiu Yao, Tianyi Zhou, Tom Goldstein, Parminder Bhatia, Furong Huang, Cao Xiao

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have achieved impressive results in various visual question-answering and reasoning tasks through vision instruction tuning on specific datasets. However, there is still significant room for improvement in the alignment between visual and language modalities. Previous methods to enhance this alignment typically require external models or data, heavily depending on their capabilities and quality, which inevitably sets an upper bound on performance. In this paper, we propose SIMA, a framework that enhances visual and language modality alignment through self-improvement, eliminating the needs for external models or data. SIMA leverages prompts from existing vision instruction tuning datasets to self-generate responses and employs an in-context self-critic mechanism to select response pairs for preference tuning. The key innovation is the introduction of three vision metrics during the in-context self-critic process, which can guide the LVLM in selecting responses that enhance image comprehension. Through experiments across 14 hallucination and comprehensive benchmarks, we demonstrate that SIMA not only improves model performance across all benchmarks but also achieves superior modality alignment, outperforming previous approaches.

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umd-huang-lab/sima officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchApache-2.0 report
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collate_fn umd-huang-lab/sima/llava/eval/model_vqa_loader.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 20e4f665698a3d18 · report
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Tasks

HallucinationImage ComprehensionQuestion AnsweringVisual Question Answering

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Visual Question Answering MM-Vet LLaVA-1.5-7B (+ SIMA) GPT-4 score 31.6 #193 of 231 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Question Answering MM-Vet LLaVA-1.5-7B (+ SIMA) Params 7B #193 of 231 Archive leaderboard report

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