# Less is More: High-value Data Selection for Visual Instruction Tuning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.09559 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09559/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 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 21 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Mar 2024.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [MLLM training and visual instruction tuning](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/mllm-training-and-visual-instruction-tuning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [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)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18223/) (2023)
- [Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12966/) (2023)
- [MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06281/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10355/) (2023)
- [MME: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13394/) (2023)
- [SEED-Bench: Benchmarking Multimodal LLMs with Generative Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16125/) (2023)
- [Shikra: Unleashing Multimodal LLM's Referential Dialogue Magic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15195/) (2023)
- [An Empirical Study of Example Forgetting during Deep Neural Network Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05159/) (2018)
- [LESS: Selecting Influential Data for Targeted Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04333/) (2024)
- [What Makes Good Data for Alignment? A Comprehensive Study of Automatic Data Selection in Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15685/) (2023)
- [Vision-Flan: Scaling Human-Labeled Tasks in Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11690/) (2024)
- [MM-LIMA: Less Is More for Alignment in Multi-Modal Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12067/) (2023)
- [Your Vision-Language Model Itself Is a Strong Filter: Towards High-Quality Instruction Tuning with Data Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12501/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [INF-LLaVA: Dual-perspective Perception for High-Resolution Multimodal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16198/) (2024)
- [LimRank: Less is More for Reasoning-Intensive Information Reranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23544/) (2025)
- [Efficient Data Selection for Multimodal Models via Incremental Optimization Utility](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07488/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visual instruction tuning is the key to building large vision language models~(LVLMs), which can greatly improve the task generalization and solving capabilities by learning a mixture of instruction data from diverse visual tasks. Previous work mostly collects multiple existing visual instruction datasets via heuristic ways for training (even more than a million instructions), which may introduce data redundancy and enlarge the training cost. To investigate this issue, we conduct a series of empirical studies, which reveal a significant redundancy within the visual instruction datasets, and show that greatly reducing the amount of instructions from several tasks even do not affect the performance. Based on the findings, we propose a high-value data selection approach TIVE, to eliminate redundancy within the visual instruction data and reduce the training cost. In TIVE, we first estimate the instance influence score on its corresponding task, and the task difficulty score, based on the gradient-based influence functions. Then, we leverage the two kinds of scores to determine the task proportion within the selected visual instruction subset, and select high-value instances for each task, respectively. Experiments on various LVLMs show that our approach using only about 15% data can achieve comparable average performance to the full-data fine-tuned model across eight benchmarks, even surpassing it on four of the benchmarks. Our code and data will be publicly released.