# ChatSpot: Bootstrapping Multimodal LLMs via Precise Referring Instruction Tuning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.09474 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09474/

## Key facts

- Cited by 65 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in MLLM training and visual instruction tuning, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 38 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jul 2023.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [MLLM training and visual instruction tuning](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/mllm-training-and-visual-instruction-tuning/)
- Synthetic data and self-improvement for LLMs / [Self-improving MLLMs and synthetic data](https://mlsanity.com/synth/self-improving-mllms-and-synthetic-data/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03741/) (2017)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12712/) (2023)
- [Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07682/) (2022)
- [Towards VQA Models That Can Read](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08920/) (2019)
- [DINO: DETR with Improved DeNoising Anchor Boxes for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03605/) (2022)
- [DocVQA: A Dataset for VQA on Document Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00398/) (2020)
- [HuggingGPT: Solving AI Tasks with ChatGPT and its Friends in Hugging Face](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17580/) (2023)
- [Shikra: Unleashing Multimodal LLM's Referential Dialogue Magic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15195/) (2023)
- [VizWiz Grand Challenge: Answering Visual Questions from Blind People](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08218/) (2018)
- [GLM-130B: An Open Bilingual Pre-trained Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02414/) (2022)
- [Visual ChatGPT: Talking, Drawing and Editing with Visual Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04671/) (2023)
- [Language Is Not All You Need: Aligning Perception with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14045/) (2023)
- [MM-REACT: Prompting ChatGPT for Multimodal Reasoning and Action](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11381/) (2023)
- [VisionLLM: Large Language Model is also an Open-Ended Decoder for Vision-Centric Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11175/) (2023)
- [Large-Scale Adversarial Training for Vision-and-Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06195/) (2020)
- [TransVG: End-to-End Visual Grounding with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08541/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 65)

- [NExT-GPT: Any-to-Any Multimodal LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05519/) (2023)
- [DreamLLM: Synergistic Multimodal Comprehension and Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11499/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Knowledge Distillation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13116/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14093/) (2024)
- [MM-LLMs: Recent Advances in MultiModal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13601/) (2024)
- [ViP-LLaVA: Making Large Multimodal Models Understand Arbitrary Visual Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00784/) (2023)
- [The Revolution of Multimodal Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12451/) (2024)
- [ShapeLLM: Universal 3D Object Understanding for Embodied Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17766/) (2024)
- [DreamBench++: A Human-Aligned Benchmark for Personalized Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16855/) (2024)
- [Perception-R1: Pioneering Perception Policy with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07954/) (2025)
- [The All-Seeing Project: Towards Panoptic Visual Recognition and Understanding of the Open World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01907/) (2023)
- [Draw-and-Understand: Leveraging Visual Prompts to Enable MLLMs to Comprehend What You Want](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20271/) (2024)
- [KOSMOS-2.5: A Multimodal Literate Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11419/) (2023)
- [Vary: Scaling up the Vision Vocabulary for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06109/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Multimodal Large Language Model from A Data-centric Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16640/) (2024)
- [VideoRefer Suite: Advancing Spatial-Temporal Object Understanding with Video LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00599/) (2024)
- [Exploring the Frontier of Vision-Language Models: A Survey of Current Methodologies and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07214/) (2024)
- [Focus Anywhere for Fine-grained Multi-page Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14295/) (2024)
- [Position-Enhanced Visual Instruction Tuning for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13437/) (2023)
- [Perceive Anything: Recognize, Explain, Caption, and Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05302/) (2025)
- [Pink: Unveiling the Power of Referential Comprehension for Multi-modal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00582/) (2023)
- [Merlin:Empowering Multimodal LLMs with Foresight Minds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00589/) (2023)
- [SoFar: Language-Grounded Orientation Bridges Spatial Reasoning and Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13143/) (2025)
- [Small Language Model Meets with Reinforced Vision Vocabulary](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12503/) (2024)
- [OneChart: Purify the Chart Structural Extraction via One Auxiliary Token](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09987/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08748/) (2025)
- [Visual Large Language Models for Generalized and Specialized Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02765/) (2025)
- [Open Vision Reasoner: Transferring Linguistic Cognitive Behavior for Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05255/) (2025)
- [ControlMLLM: Training-Free Visual Prompt Learning for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21534/) (2024)
- [Unhackable Temporal Rewarding for Scalable Video MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12081/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Human-AI interactivity is a critical aspect that reflects the usability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, existing end-to-end MLLMs only allow users to interact with them through language instructions, leading to the limitation of the interactive accuracy and efficiency. In this study, we present precise referring instructions that utilize diverse reference representations such as points and boxes as referring prompts to refer to the special region. This enables MLLMs to focus on the region of interest and achieve finer-grained interaction. Based on precise referring instruction, we propose ChatSpot, a unified end-to-end multimodal large language model that supports diverse forms of interactivity including mouse clicks, drag-and-drop, and drawing boxes, which provides a more flexible and seamless interactive experience. We also construct a multi-grained vision-language instruction-following dataset based on existing datasets and GPT-4 generating. Furthermore, we design a series of evaluation tasks to assess the effectiveness of region recognition and interaction. Experimental results showcase ChatSpot's promising performance.