# Sieve: Multimodal Dataset Pruning Using Image Captioning Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.02110 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02110/

## Key facts

- Cited by 33 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Visual token pruning and efficiency, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 34 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Oct 2023.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Visual token pruning and efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/visual-token-pruning-and-efficiency/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [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)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [A large annotated corpus for learning natural language inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.05326/) (2015)
- [LAION-400M: Open Dataset of CLIP-Filtered 400 Million Image-Text Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02114/) (2021)
- [MiniLM: Deep Self-Attention Distillation for Task-Agnostic Compression of Pre-Trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10957/) (2020)
- [Conceptual 12M: Pushing Web-Scale Image-Text Pre-Training To Recognize Long-Tail Visual Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08981/) (2021)
- [ImageBind: One Embedding Space To Bind Them All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05665/) (2023)
- [Bag of Tricks for Efficient Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01759/) (2016)
- [Fine-Tuning can Distort Pretrained Features and Underperform Out-of-Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10054/) (2022)
- [DataComp: In search of the next generation of multimodal datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14108/) (2023)
- [GIT: A Generative Image-to-text Transformer for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14100/) (2022)
- [A Large-scale Study of Representation Learning with the Visual Task Adaptation Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04867/) (2019)
- [SemDeDup: Data-efficient learning at web-scale through semantic deduplication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09540/) (2023)
- [Data Filtering Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17425/) (2023)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Multimodal Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12561/) (2022)
- [REVEAL: Retrieval-Augmented Visual-Language Pre-Training with Multi-Source Multimodal Knowledge Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05221/) (2022)
- [Improving Multimodal Datasets with Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10350/) (2023)
- [Filtering, Distillation, and Hard Negatives for Vision-Language Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02280/) (2023)
- [Mitigating Spurious Correlations in Multi-modal Models during Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03916/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Scaling Laws for Data Filtering -- Data Curation cannot be Compute Agnostic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07177/) (2024)
- [No "Zero-Shot" Without Exponential Data: Pretraining Concept Frequency Determines Multimodal Model Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04125/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Multimodal Large Language Model from A Data-centric Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16640/) (2024)
- [SmallToLarge (S2L): Scalable Data Selection for Fine-tuning Large Language Models by Summarizing Training Trajectories of Small Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07384/) (2024)
- [ViTamin: Designing Scalable Vision Models in the Vision-Language Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02132/) (2024)
- [Data curation via joint example selection further accelerates multimodal learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17711/) (2024)
- [MMIE: Massive Multimodal Interleaved Comprehension Benchmark for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10139/) (2024)
- [Bad Students Make Great Teachers: Active Learning Accelerates Large-Scale Visual Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05328/) (2023)
- [CLIPLoss and Norm-Based Data Selection Methods for Multimodal Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19547/) (2024)
- [Active Data Curation Effectively Distills Large-Scale Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18674/) (2024)
- [The Synergy between Data and Multi-Modal Large Language Models: A Survey from Co-Development Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08583/) (2024)
- [Data Pruning by Information Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01701/) (2025)
- [ELIP: Enhanced Visual-Language Foundation Models for Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15682/) (2025)
- [ReME: A Data-Centric Framework for Training-Free Open-Vocabulary Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21233/) (2025)
- [CoIDO: Efficient Data Selection for Visual Instruction Tuning via Coupled Importance-Diversity Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17847/) (2025)
- [Variance Alignment Score: A Simple But Tough-to-Beat Data Selection Method for Multimodal Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02055/) (2024)
- [SCAN: Bootstrapping Contrastive Pre-training for Data Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09126/) (2024)
- [Position: AI Scaling: From Up to Down and Out](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01677/) (2025)
- [Image-to-Lidar Relational Distillation for Autonomous Driving Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00845/) (2024)
- [Filter Like You Test: Data-Driven Data Filtering for CLIP Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08805/) (2025)
- [Differential-informed Sample Selection Accelerates Multimodal Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12998/) (2025)
- [SynC: Synthetic Image Caption Dataset Refinement with One-to-many Mapping for Zero-shot Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18616/) (2025)
- [Paint Outside the Box: Synthesizing and Selecting Training Data for Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00684/) (2024)
- [ReSpec: Relevance and Specificity Grounded Online Filtering for Learning on Video-Text Data Streams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14875/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Multimodal Retrieval via Complementary Information Extraction and Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04571/) (2026)
- [MaD-Mix: Multi-Modal Data Mixtures via Latent Space Coupling for Vision-Language Model Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07790/) (2026)
- [DOSE: Data Selection for Multi-Modal LLMs via Off-the-Shelf Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.16979/) (2026)
- [(Almost) Free Modality Stitching of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10015/) (2025)
- [TADS: Task-Aware Data Selection for Multi-Task Multimodal Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05251/) (2026)
- [Multimodal Dataset Distillation Made Simple by Prototype-Guided Data Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19756/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are pretrained on large, diverse, and noisy web-crawled datasets. This underscores the critical need for dataset pruning, as the quality of these datasets is strongly correlated with the performance of VLMs on downstream tasks. Using CLIPScore from a pretrained model to only train models using highly-aligned samples is one of the most successful methods for pruning. We argue that this approach suffers from multiple limitations including: false positives and negatives due to CLIP's pretraining on noisy labels. We propose a pruning signal, Sieve, that employs synthetic captions generated by image-captioning models pretrained on small, diverse, and well-aligned image-text pairs to evaluate the alignment of noisy image-text pairs. To bridge the gap between the limited diversity of generated captions and the high diversity of alternative text (alt-text), we estimate the semantic textual similarity in the embedding space of a language model pretrained on unlabeled text corpus. Using DataComp, a multimodal dataset filtering benchmark, when evaluating on 38 downstream tasks, our pruning approach, surpasses CLIPScore by 2.6% and 1.7% on medium and large scale respectively. In addition, on retrieval tasks, Sieve leads to a significant improvement of 2.7% and 4.5% on medium and large scale respectively.