Papers › Multimodal C4: An Open, Billion-scale Corpus of Images Interleaved with Text

Multimodal C4: An Open, Billion-scale Corpus of Images Interleaved with Text

14 Apr 2023NeurIPS 2023 11arXiv:2304.06939archive 2025-07-28

Wanrong Zhu, Jack Hessel, Anas Awadalla, Samir Yitzhak Gadre, Jesse Dodge, Alex Fang, Youngjae Yu, Ludwig Schmidt, William Yang Wang, Yejin Choi

In-context vision and language models like Flamingo support arbitrarily interleaved sequences of images and text as input. This format not only enables few-shot learning via interleaving independent supervised (image, text) examples, but also, more complex prompts involving interaction between images, e.g., "What do image A and image B have in common?" To support this interface, pretraining occurs over web corpora that similarly contain interleaved images+text. To date, however, large-scale data of this form have not been publicly available. We release Multimodal C4, an augmentation of the popular text-only C4 corpus with images interleaved. We use a linear assignment algorithm to place images into longer bodies of text using CLIP features, a process that we show outperforms alternatives. Multimodal C4 spans everyday topics like cooking, travel, technology, etc. A manual inspection of a random sample of documents shows that a vast majority (88%) of images are topically relevant, and that linear assignment frequently selects individual sentences specifically well-aligned with each image (80%). After filtering NSFW images, ads, etc., the resulting corpus consists of 101.2M documents with 571M images interleaved in 43B English tokens.

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gather_image_info allenai/mmc4/scripts/download_images.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong MIT (permissive) · e3ccceb10dc29f04 · report
download_images_multiprocess allenai/mmc4/scripts/download_images.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 32a2a74b94730a19 · report

Tasks

Few-Shot Learning

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Methods

CLIP

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