Taking Notes Brings Focus? Towards Multi-Turn Multimodal Dialogue
  Learning
Authors: name: Jiazheng Liu; name: Sipeng Zheng; name: Börje F. Karlsson; name: Zongqing Lu
Published: 2025-03-10 07:32:53

Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs), built on large-scale pre-trained
vision towers and language models, have shown great capabilities in multimodal
understanding. However, most existing MLLMs are trained on single-turn vision
question-answering tasks, which do not accurately reflect real-world human
conversations. In this paper, we introduce MMDiag, a multi-turn multimodal
dialogue dataset. This dataset is collaboratively generated through
deliberately designed rules and GPT assistance, featuring strong correlations
between questions, between questions and images, and among different image
regions; thus aligning more closely with real-world scenarios. MMDiag serves as
a strong benchmark for multi-turn multimodal dialogue learning and brings more
challenges to the grounding and reasoning capabilities of MLLMs. Further,
inspired by human vision processing, we present DiagNote, an MLLM equipped with
multimodal grounding and reasoning capabilities. DiagNote consists of two
modules (Deliberate and Gaze) interacting with each other to perform
Chain-of-Thought and annotations respectively, throughout multi-turn dialogues.
We empirically demonstrate the advantages of DiagNote in both grounding and
jointly processing and reasoning with vision and language information over
existing MLLMs.