# Scalable Vision Language Model Training via High Quality Data Curation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.05952 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05952/

## Key facts

- Cited by 55 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 44 of its 78 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jan 2025.

## 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 44)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (2022)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16502/) (2023)
- [Towards VQA Models That Can Read](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08920/) (2019)
- [MME: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13394/) (2023)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [MathVista: Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning of Foundation Models in Visual Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02255/) (2023)
- [Expanding Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Multimodal Models with Model, Data, and Test-Time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05271/) (2024)
- [LAION-400M: Open Dataset of CLIP-Filtered 400 Million Image-Text Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02114/) (2021)
- [ChartQA: A Benchmark for Question Answering about Charts with Visual and Logical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10244/) (2022)
- [Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Server](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00325/) (2015)
- [DocVQA: A Dataset for VQA on Document Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00398/) (2020)
- [MM-Vet: Evaluating Large Multimodal Models for Integrated Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02490/) (2023)
- [Conceptual 12M: Pushing Web-Scale Image-Text Pre-Training To Recognize Long-Tail Visual Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08981/) (2021)
- [Reproducible scaling laws for contrastive language-image learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07143/) (2022)
- [MiniCPM-V: A GPT-4V Level MLLM on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01800/) (2024)
- [How Far Are We to GPT-4V? Closing the Gap to Commercial Multimodal Models with Open-Source Suites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16821/) (2024)
- [A Diagram Is Worth A Dozen Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.07396/) (2016)
- [DataComp: In search of the next generation of multimodal datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14108/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek-VL2: Mixture-of-Experts Vision-Language Models for Advanced Multimodal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10302/) (2024)
- [Image as a Foreign Language: BEiT Pretraining for All Vision and Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10442/) (2022)
- [VLMEvalKit: An Open-Source Toolkit for Evaluating Large Multi-Modality Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11691/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [MMSearch-R1: Incentivizing LMMs to Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20670/) (2025)
- [VGR: Visual Grounded Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11991/) (2025)
- [Ovis-U1 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23044/) (2025)
- [MindJourney: Test-Time Scaling with World Models for Spatial Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12508/) (2025)
- [Video-MMLU: A Massive Multi-Discipline Lecture Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14693/) (2025)
- [WildDoc: How Far Are We from Achieving Comprehensive and Robust Document Understanding in the Wild?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11015/) (2025)
- [Scaling Pre-training to One Hundred Billion Data for Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07617/) (2025)
- [Compositional Generative Model of Unbounded 4D Cities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08983/) (2025)
- [M2-Reasoning: Empowering MLLMs with Unified General and Spatial Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.08306/) (2025)
- [Co-Reinforcement Learning for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17534/) (2025)
- [MVI-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Robustness to Misleading Visual Inputs in LVLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14159/) (2025)
- [Circle-RoPE: Cone-like Decoupled Rotary Positional Embedding for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16416/) (2025)
- [SAIL-VL2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14033/) (2025)
- [Quality-Driven Curation of Remote Sensing Vision-Language Data via Learned Scoring Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00743/) (2025)
- [Open-Qwen2VL: Compute-Efficient Pre-Training of Fully-Open Multimodal LLMs on Academic Resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00595/) (2025)
- [SAIL-Embedding Technical Report: Omni-modal Embedding Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12709/) (2025)
- [Seeing is Understanding: Unlocking Causal Attention into Modality-Mutual Attention for Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02597/) (2025)
- [Affordance Benchmark for MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00893/) (2025)
- [Describe Anything Model for Visual Question Answering on Text-rich Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12441/) (2025)
- [CrossHOI-Bench: A Unified Benchmark for HOI Evaluation across Vision-Language Models and HOI-Specific Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18753/) (2025)
- [ELVA: Exploring Ranking-Driven Universal Multimodal Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.20280/) (2026)
- [Concept-as-Tree: A Controllable Synthetic Data Framework Makes Stronger Personalized VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12999/) (2025)
- [Flash-VL 2B: Optimizing Vision-Language Model Performance for Ultra-Low Latency and High Throughput](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09498/) (2025)
- [Guiding Cross-Modal Representations with MLLM Priors via Preference Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06970/) (2025)
- [SAILViT: Towards Robust and Generalizable Visual Backbones for MLLMs via Gradual Feature Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01643/) (2025)
- [AndesVL Technical Report: An Efficient Mobile-side Multimodal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11496/) (2025)
- [Diagnosing Corruption-Induced Reliability Failures in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19032/) (2025)
- [Seeing Before Reasoning: Decoupling Perception and Reasoning for Shortcut-Resilient Multimodal On-Policy Self-Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19120/) (2026)
- [GenieBlue: Integrating both Linguistic and Multimodal Capabilities for Large Language Models on Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06019/) (2025)
- [AdaLRS: Loss-Guided Adaptive Learning Rate Search for Efficient Foundation Model Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13274/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we introduce SAIL-VL (ScAlable Vision Language Model TraIning via High QuaLity Data Curation), an open-source vision language model (VLM) series achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in 2B and 8B parameters. The following three key improvements contribute to SAIL-VL's leading performance: (1) Scalable high-quality visual understanding data construction: We implement a data construction pipeline to enable hundred-million-scale high-quality recaption data annotation. The resulted dataset SAIL-Caption is validated to be of the highest data quality compared with opensource datasets. (2) Scalable Pretraining with High-Quality Visual Understanding Data: We scale SAIL-VL's pretraining budget up to 655B tokens and show that even a 2B VLM benefits from scaled up training data sizes, exhibiting logarithmic data size scaling laws in benchmark performance. (3) Scalable SFT via data quantity and complexity scaling: We curate a high-quality SFT dataset collection with leading data quantity scaling effectiveness and demonstrate that training with progressively higher-complexity data surpasses baseline one-stage training by a large margin. SAIL-VL series models achieve the highest average score in 18 widely used VLM benchmarks in our evaluation, with the 2B model takes the top position over VLMs of comparable sizes on OpenCompass 2024 (https://rank.opencompass.org.cn/leaderboard-multimodal), demonstrating robust visual comprehension abilities. SAIL-VL series models are released at HuggingFace (https://huggingface.co/BytedanceDouyinContent).