VILA^2: VILA Augmented VILA
Authors: name: Yunhao Fang, name: Ligeng Zhu, name: Yao Lu, name: Yan Wang, name: Pavlo Molchanov, name: Jang Hyun Cho, name: Marco Pavone, name: Song Han, name: Hongxu Yin

Visual language models (VLMs) have rapidly progressed, driven by the success
of large language models (LLMs). While model architectures and training
infrastructures advance rapidly, data curation remains under-explored. When
data quantity and quality become a bottleneck, existing work either directly
crawls more raw data from the Internet that does not have a guarantee of data
quality or distills from black-box commercial models (e.g., GPT-4V / Gemini)
causing the performance upper bounded by that model. In this work, we introduce
a novel approach that includes a self-augment step and a specialist-augment
step to iteratively improve data quality and model performance. In the
self-augment step, a VLM recaptions its own pretraining data to enhance data
quality, and then retrains from scratch using this refined dataset to improve
model performance. This process can iterate for several rounds. Once
self-augmentation saturates, we employ several specialist VLMs finetuned from
the self-augmented VLM with domain-specific expertise, to further infuse
specialist knowledge into the generalist VLM through task-oriented recaptioning
and retraining. With the combined self-augmented and specialist-augmented
training, we introduce VILA^2 (VILA-augmented-VILA), a VLM family that
consistently improves the accuracy on a wide range of tasks over prior art, and
achieves new state-of-the-art results on MMMU leaderboard among open-sourced
models.