{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/what-makes-multimodal-in-context-learning","title":"What Makes Multimodal In-Context Learning Work?","arxiv_id":"2404.15736","date":"2024-04-24","proceeding":null,"authors":["Folco Bertini Baldassini","Mustafa Shukor","Matthieu Cord","Laure Soulier","Benjamin Piwowarski"],"abstract":"Large Language Models have demonstrated remarkable performance across various tasks, exhibiting the capacity to swiftly acquire new skills, such as through In-Context Learning (ICL) with minimal demonstration examples. In this work, we present a comprehensive framework for investigating Multimodal ICL (M-ICL) in the context of Large Multimodal Models. We consider the best open-source multimodal models (e.g., IDEFICS, OpenFlamingo) and a wide range of multimodal tasks. Our study unveils several noteworthy findings: (1) M-ICL primarily relies on text-driven mechanisms, showing little to no influence from the image modality. (2) When used with advanced-ICL strategy (like RICES), M-ICL is not better than a simple strategy based on majority voting over context examples. Moreover, we identify several biases and limitations of M-ICL that warrant consideration prior to deployment. Code available at https://gitlab.com/folbaeni/multimodal-icl","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.15736v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.15736v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"what-makes-multimodal-in-context-learning","repo_url":"https://gitlab.com/folbaeni/multimodal-icl","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"in-context-learning","task_name":"In-Context Learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2404.15736","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}