2.5 Years in Class: A Multimodal Textbook for Vision-Language
  Pretraining
Authors: name: Wenqi Zhang; name: Hang Zhang; name: Xin Li; name: Jiashuo Sun; name: Yongliang Shen; name: Weiming Lu; name: Deli Zhao; name: Yueting Zhuang; name: Lidong Bing
Published: 2025-01-01 21:29:37

Abstract: Compared to image-text pair data, interleaved corpora enable Vision-Language
Models (VLMs) to understand the world more naturally like humans. However, such
existing datasets are crawled from webpage, facing challenges like low
knowledge density, loose image-text relations, and poor logical coherence
between images. On the other hand, the internet hosts vast instructional videos
(e.g., online geometry courses) that are widely used by humans to learn
foundational subjects, yet these valuable resources remain underexplored in VLM
training. In this paper, we introduce a high-quality multimodal
textbook corpus with richer foundational knowledge for VLM pretraining. It
collects over 2.5 years of instructional videos, totaling 22,000 class hours.
We first use an LLM-proposed taxonomy to systematically gather instructional
videos. Then we progressively extract and refine visual (keyframes), audio
(ASR), and textual knowledge (OCR) from the videos, and organize as an
image-text interleaved corpus based on temporal order. Compared to its
counterparts, our video-centric textbook offers more coherent context, richer
knowledge, and better image-text alignment. Experiments demonstrate its superb
pretraining performance, particularly in knowledge- and reasoning-intensive
tasks like ScienceQA and MathVista. Moreover, VLMs pre-trained on our textbook
exhibit outstanding interleaved context awareness, leveraging visual and
textual cues in their few-shot context for task solving~Our code are
available at \url{https://github.com/DAMO-NLP-SG/multimodal_textbook}.