# SynthVLM: Towards High-Quality and Efficient Synthesis of Image-Caption Datasets for Vision-Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.20756 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20756/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 34 of its 76 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jul 2024.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/vlm-benchmarks-and-visual-reasoning/)

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

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [Learn to Explain: Multimodal Reasoning via Thought Chains for Science Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09513/) (2022)
- [Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10355/) (2023)
- [MM-Vet: Evaluating Large Multimodal Models for Integrated Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02490/) (2023)
- [MVBench: A Comprehensive Multi-modal Video Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17005/) (2023)
- [ShareGPT4V: Improving Large Multi-Modal Models with Better Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12793/) (2023)
- [VizWiz Grand Challenge: Answering Visual Questions from Blind People](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08218/) (2018)
- [DataComp: In search of the next generation of multimodal datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14108/) (2023)
- [What Makes Good Data for Alignment? A Comprehensive Study of Automatic Data Selection in Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15685/) (2023)
- [MoDS: Model-oriented Data Selection for Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15653/) (2023)
- [Improving Multimodal Datasets with Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10350/) (2023)
- [Differentially Private Synthetic Data via Foundation Model APIs 2: Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01749/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Multimodal Large Language Model from A Data-centric Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16640/) (2024)
- [Differentially Private Synthetic Data via Foundation Model APIs 1: Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15560/) (2023)
- [From Pixels to Prose: A Large Dataset of Dense Image Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10328/) (2024)
- [FlexMoE: Scaling Large-scale Sparse Pre-trained Model Training via Dynamic Device Placement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03946/) (2023)
- [Rethinking the Instruction Quality: LIFT is What You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11508/) (2023)
- [MUFFIN: Curating Multi-Faceted Instructions for Improving Instruction-Following](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02436/) (2023)
- [Finetuned Multimodal Language Models Are High-Quality Image-Text Data Filters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02677/) (2024)
- [Do Generated Data Always Help Contrastive Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12448/) (2024)
- [Lyrics: Boosting Fine-grained Language-Vision Alignment and Comprehension via Semantic-aware Visual Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05278/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [MMFineReason: Closing the Multimodal Reasoning Gap via Open Data-Centric Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21821/) (2026)
- [AgenticRAGTracer: A Hop-Aware Benchmark for Diagnosing Multi-Step Retrieval Reasoning in Agentic RAG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19127/) (2026)
- [ID-Align: RoPE-Conscious Position Remapping for Dynamic High-Resolution Adaptation in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21465/) (2025)
- [Physics-Based Benchmarking Metrics for Multimodal Synthetic Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15204/) (2025)
- [Guided Verifier: Collaborative Multimodal Reasoning via Dynamic Process Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04290/) (2026)
- [VisionFoundry: Teaching VLMs Visual Perception with Synthetic Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.09531/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have recently emerged, demonstrating remarkable vision-understanding capabilities. However, training these models requires large-scale datasets, which brings challenges related to efficiency, effectiveness, and quality of web data. In this paper, we introduce SynthVLM, a new data synthesis and curation method for generating image-caption pairs. Unlike traditional methods, where captions are generated from images, SynthVLM utilizes advanced diffusion models and high-quality captions to synthesize and select images from text captions, thereby creating precisely aligned image-text pairs. We further introduce SynthVLM-100K, a high-quality dataset consisting of 100K curated and synthesized image-caption pairs. In both model and human evaluations, SynthVLM-100K outperforms traditional real-world datasets. Leveraging this dataset, we develop a new family of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), SynthVLM-7B and SynthVLM-13B, which achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on various vision question-answering (VQA) tasks. Notably, our models outperform LLaVA across most metrics with only 18% pretrain data. Furthermore, SynthVLM-7B and SynthVLM-13B attain SOTA performance on the MMLU benchmark, demonstrating that the high-quality SynthVLM-100K dataset preserves language abilities.