# Large Language Models can Share Images, Too!

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.14804 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14804/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 64 of its 93 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 64)

- [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)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07682/) (2022)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [Large Language Models Encode Clinical Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13138/) (2022)
- [A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.03055/) (2015)
- [STaR: Bootstrapping Reasoning With Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14465/) (2022)
- [Automatic Chain of Thought Prompting in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03493/) (2022)
- [Visual ChatGPT: Talking, Drawing and Editing with Visual Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04671/) (2023)
- [Capabilities of GPT-4 on Medical Challenge Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13375/) (2023)
- [MedCLIP: Contrastive Learning from Unpaired Medical Images and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10163/) (2022)
- [Language Is Not All You Need: Aligning Perception with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14045/) (2023)
- [ToxiGen: A Large-Scale Machine-Generated Dataset for Adversarial and Implicit Hate Speech Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09509/) (2022)
- [How Far Can Camels Go? Exploring the State of Instruction Tuning on Open Resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04751/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [RefineBench: Evaluating Refinement Capability of Language Models via Checklists](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22173/) (2025)
- [Stark: Social Long-Term Multi-Modal Conversation with Persona Commonsense Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03958/) (2024)
- [Evolution Fine-Tuning: Learning to Discover Across 371 Optimization Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.29082/) (2026)
- [Intriguing Properties of Large Language and Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04751/) (2024)
- [F2RVLM: Boosting Fine-grained Fragment Retrieval for Multi-Modal Long-form Dialogue with Vision Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17714/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper explores the image-sharing capability of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GPT-4 and LLaMA 2, in a zero-shot setting. To facilitate a comprehensive evaluation of LLMs, we introduce the PhotoChat++ dataset, which includes enriched annotations (i.e., intent, triggering sentence, image description, and salient information). Furthermore, we present the gradient-free and extensible Decide, Describe, and Retrieve (DribeR) framework. With extensive experiments, we unlock the image-sharing capability of DribeR equipped with LLMs in zero-shot prompting, with ChatGPT achieving the best performance. Our findings also reveal the emergent image-sharing ability in LLMs under zero-shot conditions, validating the effectiveness of DribeR. We use this framework to demonstrate its practicality and effectiveness in two real-world scenarios: (1) human-bot interaction and (2) dataset augmentation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to assess the image-sharing ability of various LLMs in a zero-shot setting. We make our source code and dataset publicly available at https://github.com/passing2961/DribeR.
