# TextBind: Multi-turn Interleaved Multimodal Instruction-following in the Wild

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.08637 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08637/

## Key facts

- Cited by 22 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [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)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [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)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10560/) (2022)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06281/) (2023)
- [Learn to Explain: Multimodal Reasoning via Thought Chains for Science Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09513/) (2022)
- [Towards VQA Models That Can Read](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08920/) (2019)
- [MME: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13394/) (2023)
- [Multitask Prompted Training Enables Zero-Shot Task Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08207/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Server](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00325/) (2015)
- [MM-Vet: Evaluating Large Multimodal Models for Integrated Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02490/) (2023)
- [Conceptual 12M: Pushing Web-Scale Image-Text Pre-Training To Recognize Long-Tail Visual Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08981/) (2021)
- [HuggingGPT: Solving AI Tasks with ChatGPT and its Friends in Hugging Face](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17580/) (2023)
- [OK-VQA: A Visual Question Answering Benchmark Requiring External Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00067/) (2019)
- [mPLUG-Owl: Modularization Empowers Large Language Models with Multimodality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14178/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [The Revolution of Multimodal Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12451/) (2024)
- [Multimodal Alignment and Fusion: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17040/) (2024)
- [Igniting Language Intelligence: The Hitchhiker's Guide From Chain-of-Thought Reasoning to Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11797/) (2023)
- [MM-IFEngine: Towards Multimodal Instruction Following](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07957/) (2025)
- [GPT4Video: A Unified Multimodal Large Language Model for lnstruction-Followed Understanding and Safety-Aware Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16511/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning towards General-Purpose Multimodal Model: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16602/) (2023)
- [LLaMo: Large Language Model-based Molecular Graph Assistant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00871/) (2024)
- [M2-omni: Advancing Omni-MLLM for Comprehensive Modality Support with Competitive Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18778/) (2025)
- [Multi-turn Consistent Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04320/) (2025)
- [Vision-Language Instruction Tuning: A Review and Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08172/) (2023)
- [MMCR: Advancing Visual Language Model in Multimodal Multi-Turn Contextual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18533/) (2025)
- [SynthRL: Scaling Visual Reasoning with Verifiable Data Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02096/) (2025)
- [UniM: A Unified Any-to-Any Interleaved Multimodal Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05075/) (2026)
- [IDA-VLM: Towards Movie Understanding via ID-Aware Large Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07577/) (2024)
- [Modality-Specialized Synergizers for Interleaved Vision-Language Generalists](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03604/) (2024)
- [Multi-modal Retrieval Augmented Multi-modal Generation: Datasets, Evaluation Metrics and Strong Baselines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16365/) (2024)
- [MM-Instruct: Generated Visual Instructions for Large Multimodal Model Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19736/) (2024)
- [Unveiling Fine-Grained Visual Traces: Evaluating Multimodal Interleaved Reasoning Chains in Multimodal STEM Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19697/) (2026)
- [Memory Helps, but Confabulation Misleads: Understanding Streaming Events in Videos with MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15457/) (2025)
- [ViSTA: Visual Storytelling using Multi-modal Adapters for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12198/) (2025)
- [DeDPO: Debiased Direct Preference Optimization for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06195/) (2026)
- [Towards Scalable RLVR: Multimodal Instruction Following Data Synthesis and Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.16059/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models with instruction-following abilities have revolutionized the field of artificial intelligence. These models show exceptional generalizability to tackle various real-world tasks through their natural language interfaces. However, their performance heavily relies on high-quality exemplar data, which is often difficult to obtain. This challenge is further exacerbated when it comes to multimodal instruction following. We introduce TextBind, an almost annotation-free framework for empowering larger language models with the multi-turn interleaved multimodal instruction-following capabilities. Our approach requires only image-caption pairs and generates multi-turn multimodal instruction-response conversations from a language model. To accommodate interleaved image-text inputs and outputs, we devise MIM, a language model-centric architecture that seamlessly integrates image encoder and decoder models. We release our dataset, model, and demo to foster future research in the area of multimodal instruction following.