# IWISDM: Assessing instruction following in multimodal models at scale

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.14343 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14343/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [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)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06281/) (2023)
- [PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03378/) (2023)
- [MME: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13394/) (2023)
- [World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10122/) (2018)
- [CLEVR: A Diagnostic Dataset for Compositional Language and Elementary Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06890/) (2016)
- [MM-Vet: Evaluating Large Multimodal Models for Integrated Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02490/) (2023)
- [Oscar: Object-Semantics Aligned Pre-training for Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06165/) (2020)
- [mPLUG-Owl: Modularization Empowers Large Language Models with Multimodality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14178/) (2023)
- [ShareGPT4V: Improving Large Multi-Modal Models with Better Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12793/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Few-Shot Learning with Frozen Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13884/) (2021)
- [Towards Automatic Learning of Procedures from Web Instructional Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09788/) (2017)
- [LiT: Zero-Shot Transfer with Locked-image text Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07991/) (2021)
- [FLEURS: Few-shot Learning Evaluation of Universal Representations of Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12446/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Caption This, Reason That: VLMs Caught in the Middle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21538/) (2025)
- [Geometry of naturalistic object representations in recurrent neural network models of working memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02685/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The ability to perform complex tasks from detailed instructions is a key to many remarkable achievements of our species. As humans, we are not only capable of performing a wide variety of tasks but also very complex ones that may entail hundreds or thousands of steps to complete. Large language models and their more recent multimodal counterparts that integrate textual and visual inputs have achieved unprecedented success in performing complex tasks. Yet, most existing benchmarks are largely confined to single-modality inputs (either text or vision), narrowing the scope of multimodal assessments, particularly for instruction-following in multimodal contexts. To bridge this gap, we introduce the instructed-Virtual VISual Decision Making (iWISDM) environment engineered to generate a limitless array of vision-language tasks of varying complexity. Using iWISDM, we compiled three distinct benchmarks of instruction following visual tasks across varying complexity levels and evaluated several newly developed multimodal models on these benchmarks. Our findings establish iWISDM as a robust benchmark for assessing the instructional adherence of both existing and emergent multimodal models and highlight a large gap between these models' ability to precisely follow instructions with that of humans.The code of iWISDM is available on GitHub at https://github.com/BashivanLab/iWISDM.