Bootstrapping Vision-Language Learning with Decoupled Language Pre-training
On the map: Synthetic data and self-improvement for LLMs → Self-improving MLLMs and synthetic data
Abstract (arXiv)
We present a novel methodology aimed at optimizing the application of frozen large language models (LLMs) for resource-intensive vision-language (VL) pre-training. The current paradigm uses visual features as prompts to guide language models, with a focus on determining the most relevant visual features for corresponding text. Our approach diverges by concentrating on the language component, specifically identifying the optimal prompts to align with visual features. We introduce the Prompt-Transformer (P-Former), a model that predicts these ideal prompts, which is trained exclusively on linguistic data, bypassing the need for image-text pairings. This strategy subtly bifurcates the end-to-end VL training process into an additional, separate stage. Our experiments reveal that our framework significantly enhances the performance of a robust image-to-text baseline (BLIP-2), and effectively narrows the performance gap between models trained with either 4M or 129M image-text pairs. Importantly, our framework is modality-agnostic and flexible in terms of architectural design, as validated by its successful application in a video learning task using varied base modules. The code will be made available at https://github.com/yiren-jian/BLIText.
Key facts. Cited by 28 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Self-improving MLLMs and synthetic data, one of 13 directions in Synthetic data and self-improvement for LLMs. Builds on 66 of its 75 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 13 Jul 2023.
Builds on
66 of 75 references.
Closest ancestors · 2
Same direction, newest first
- 2023X-LLM: Bootstrapping Advanced Large Language Models by Treating Multi-Modalities as Foreign Languages7 May
- 2023BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models30 Jan
Other references · 64
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