VCoder: Versatile Vision Encoders for Multimodal Large Language Models
On the map: Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models → MLLM training and visual instruction tuning
Abstract (arXiv)
Humans possess the remarkable skill of Visual Perception, the ability to see and understand the seen, helping them make sense of the visual world and, in turn, reason. Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLM) have recently achieved impressive performance on vision-language tasks ranging from visual question-answering and image captioning to visual reasoning and image generation. However, when prompted to identify or count (perceive) the entities in a given image, existing MLLM systems fail. Working towards developing an accurate MLLM system for perception and reasoning, we propose using Versatile vision enCoders (VCoder) as perception eyes for Multimodal LLMs. We feed the VCoder with perception modalities such as segmentation or depth maps, improving the MLLM's perception abilities. Secondly, we leverage the images from COCO and outputs from off-the-shelf vision perception models to create our COCO Segmentation Text (COST) dataset for training and evaluating MLLMs on the object perception task. Thirdly, we introduce metrics to assess the object perception abilities in MLLMs on our COST dataset. Lastly, we provide extensive experimental evidence proving the VCoder's improved object-level perception skills over existing Multimodal LLMs, including GPT-4V. We open-source our dataset, code, and models to promote research. We open-source our code at https://github.com/SHI-Labs/VCoder
Key facts. Cited by 42 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 56 of its 74 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 21 Dec 2023.
Builds on
56 of 74 references.
Closest ancestors · 5
Same direction, newest first
- 2023Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning5 Oct
- 2023MME: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models23 Jun
- 2023Generating Images with Multimodal Language Models26 May
- 2023InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning11 May
- 2023Otter: A Multi-Modal Model with In-Context Instruction Tuning5 May
Other references · 51
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- 2020An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scalecited by 30,186
- 2014Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Contextcited by 17,608
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- 2023Visual Instruction Tuningcited by 7,869
- 2020End-to-End Object Detection with Transformerscited by 7,414
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- 2022Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learningcited by 4,386
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- 2023T2I-Adapter: Learning Adapters to Dig out More Controllable Ability for Text-to-Image Diffusion Modelscited by 1,351
- 2014Depth Map Prediction from a Single Image using a Multi-Scale Deep Networkcited by 1,274
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- 2018Object Hallucination in Image Captioningcited by 669
- 2021Multimodal Few-Shot Learning with Frozen Language Modelscited by 661
- 2019Panoptic Feature Pyramid Networkscited by 645
- 2023OpenFlamingo: An Open-Source Framework for Training Large Autoregressive Vision-Language Modelscited by 565
- 2014Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets and Fully Connected CRFscited by 554
- 2023Language Is Not All You Need: Aligning Perception with Language Modelscited by 543
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- 2019Panoptic-DeepLabcited by 363
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- 2013DeepPose: Human Pose Estimation via Deep Neural Networkscited by 305
- 2023MIMIC-IT: Multi-Modal In-Context Instruction Tuningcited by 267
- 2022Neighborhood Attention Transformercited by 239
- 2022Omnivore: A Single Model for Many Visual Modalitiescited by 215
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- 2018Neural Baby Talkcited by 107
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- 2023What Matters in Training a GPT4-Style Language Model with Multimodal Inputs?cited by 64
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Citing papers per year: 2024: 18; 2025: 19; 2026: 5.
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